I’ve been meaning to write here for a while, but between a crazed toddler and a new job and very, very occasional sleep, I haven’t gotten around to it. However, this post suggests that that might be changing :-) We will have to see.

I am taking a leave from work starting today, but for the last month I have been dumping everything I know into other people so that they can approximate my job while I’m off. The problem is that much of my job is about fighting fires and doing tiny, technical things, and I have no idea how efficiently I have dumped my brain, or how much I have totally failed to relate.

There is no good way to know what you know – there is no feasible method to list your mind’s contents, and, knowing even obliquely the nature of the mind, it could easily spool off infinitely. The best you can do is to hope that others are able to figure out the easy drudgery of your job and be hopelessly in your debt for the interesting things that you do, so you are appreciated without having to be buried in minutia when you return.

One of the lists to which I subscribe has chosen to put the list as the secondary element and the individual posters as the primary. That’s fine, but the side effect of this is that when I reply to a message, it goes to the poster, and not to the list. I don’t like the behaviour, but the list admins are plainly happy with it. I resigned myself to replying-to-all for the purposes of that list, until I saw this procmail recipe:

:0:
* ^(From|To|Cc).*\@listdomain.eg
  {
    :0hf
    | /usr/bin/formail -A "Reply-To: listaddress@listdomain.eg"
    :0
    folderforlistmail
  }

I much prefer to hack the client-side then try to change policy on the server-side. I am almost universally less resistant to change than any organization.