Boss: “How was your weekend?”
Me: “Honestly, pretty shitty. I spent all weekend tangling with my Web server and got three hours’ sleep.”
Boss: “I’m not really sure that it’s worth the time that you put into it.”
Me: “Trust me, on days like today, I wonder about that myself.”
I was going to be a part of the Blogathon this year, but I’m dropping out. Been sick this week, and I need to do work-type things this weekend to catch up. That, and well, I had done zero prep or marketing. My one sponsor will probably give money anyway. 
So the other night, I’m watching Bill Engvall’s 15° Off Cool. [Happy 50th birthday a few days early, fella.] In it, he mentions the AMC Gremlin. I realized that I knew nothing about it, so I fired up Wikipedia. I sorta vaguely knew about American Motor Company’s history, but I learned a lot more of it. And no, I’m not going to say that I followed the rabbit trail of George W. Romney, father of Mitt. No, I went through Georges Besse straight on through to him being assassinated by Action Directe.
Yep, from Bill Engvall to Maoist rebels in six leaps. Man, I love the Internet.
Well, now I guess I’ll begin a run of listening to Decemberists bootlegs. I’m sure that Adam, Amy, and Stephen will just let me pre-filter the good ones for them. 
The Elliott Smith tribute album, To: Elliott, From: Portland.Last week was, sadly, generally disappointing:
The Cardigans’ First Band on the Moon. Other than “Lovefool”, the song that everyone knows, I just didn’t get much out of this album. The second half was better than the first, but … meh. Two-and-a-half stars.
Snow Patrol’s Final Straw. A decent album. Three stars. My parents had been married for 44 days when we first went to the moon. They’ll have been married for more than 44 years when we next go back.
My brother was born two days after Apollo 17 lifted off on its way to the moon. Two days later, Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt landed on the moon for the last time.
My generation’s space memory is Challenger. America had never lost a crew trying to reach space. My generation grew up with the idea that losing people on the way to space just wasn’t something that happened … until that dark day in January 1986. I was seven years old that day and in first grade. That day, something clicked in my head—people were willing to die to do this. It was Important.
It still is Important, at least to me.
We do not do these things because they are easy. We do them because they are hard. Ad astra.
Amy, at lunch: “Quit with the Twitter already!”
Me: “You’re just jealous. I’m Twittering that we’re playing with the JesusPhone.”
Twice now, I’ve gone into my iPhone expecting to show people music and seeing … nothing. When I get back home that night to synchronize, the sync goofs up, and all the disk space being used on the iPhone shows as “Other”. A new sync fails, of course, because I’m syncing a music library set larger than the spare space.
Restoring the iPhone and re-synchronizing it after the restore worked last time, and I expect that’s what I’ll do tonight. But man … this is frustrating. As Jeff said at lunch, “Ahh, the joys of a 1.0 product.”
A few minutes later: Now the amount of “Other” disk space is far smaller, on the order of the size of calendars and contacts, and the music can be re-sync’d. Perhaps my “let me not sync music twice, then pray” trick worked.
As the writer of a sarcastic five-paragraph essay on five-sentence emails, you might think that I saw Mike Davidson’s announcement of sentenc.es and had a response to the idea. Davidson’s argument is that “the time commitment difference between sender and receiver is huge … the sender will ask two or three open-ended one sentence questions which elicit multi-paragraph answers.” I have a simple, two-fold response. First: if the sender deserves a response, ask questions in return that refine the open-ended initial inquiry—force this to be a conversation and not an opportunity for you to spend a half-hour answering what is, likely, a half-formed question anyway. Second: not every email deserves a response.
Q: Why is this entry exactly five sentences?
A: http://geof.is.a.sarcastic.asshole.gfmorris.net/
The sad thing about doing this on Tuesday is that I’ve listened to the new studio releases at home and at work, so I already have opinions and can’t fake any excitement about the new week of material. I would’ve been ready, but last week was crazy and I’m just now listening to the last of last week’s bootlegs. You may say, “Back off on the bootlegs,” but you haven’t seen my backlog.
[I think I need an intervention.]
The Cardigans’ First Band on the Moon. Snow Patrol’s Final Straw.Last week made me a fanboy of The Decemberists, I think:
Patty Griffin’s Children Running Through. I held off too long in getting this album. It’s not my favorite Patty record, but it’s very good. Three-and-a-half stars.
The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife. Does Monday’s bootleg activity tell you what I think of The Decemberists? I thought so. Four-and-a-half stars.I meant to take the receipt home so I could snap a photo of it, but printed in all caps on the receipt:
YOU HAVE BEEN SERVED
Mind you, below that it said “BY: $cashier”, but … too funny. I turned it around and showed Stephen, and he got a laugh out of it as well…
When I saw that Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders had linked on over to Guy Kawasaki’s Ten Things to Learn This School Year to point at Guy’s assertion that business emails should be briefly written—specifically, in five sentences—I knew that I needed to write about it. One may argue that I’m influenced by my friend Stephen, who recently mocked five-paragraph essays, and I won’t deny the influence. Kawasaki is right that much in the way of business communication could well be done in the fewest number of words possible, but I do fear that there is a danger in being formulaic.
Here’s the relevant quotation from Kawasaki:
9. How to write a five-sentence email. Young people have an advantage over older people in this area because older people (like me) were taught to write letters that were printed on paper, signed, stuck in an envelope, and mailed. Writing a short email was a new experience for them. Young people, by contrast are used to IMing and chatting. If anything, they’re too skilled on brevity, but it’s easier to teach someone how to write a long message than a short one. Whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.
I find it interesting that Kawasaki himself can’t be brief—I read through several dozen words to get to the meat of his argument. Thankfully, he didn’t bury the lede, because his final sentence gets at his essentials: who, what, why, and when. I find a couple of flaws with Kawasaki’s list here: not every business email will be sent to someone unfamiliar with your who and why. At this point in my career as a middle manager, I find that I know the who quite often, and the who tells me the why they need it. [For an example: when my vice-president emails me, I know who he is, and the why he needs it matters not to me---he's the boss, so he gets it.] Externally-focused notes do indeed have a need for his information, however.
A second flaw is the emphasis on brevity. Too often, I find that a lot of business correspondence is ill-considered—a request for some Government Furnished Equipment, for example, doesn’t come with any context of what it’s needed for. Folks go on fishing expeditions for things, and when people are fishing, others are going to eye those requests very warily. There’s often a lot of context missing in requests made—one reason, I think, that top-posting is so prevalent, as Charles Miller notes:
Top-posting over entire messages actually makes sense in this context. Having the entire previous conversation available “bottom-up†at the end of the message allows anyone to read the full history of the discussion, regardless of how badly their mail-client sucks, even if they have played no part in the prior conversation. Everyone who already knows what is being discussed can just stop reading after the signature of the most recent poster.
Lastly, I think that there’s a danger in being formulaic. As previously stated, context isn’t always required. In some cases, being formulaic will actually do battle with brevity, as trying to fit an argument or assertion within the bounds of the formula will distract from the point by overly belaboring it. As my European History teacher from high school, Donald “Sonny” Renfroe, was famous for saying, “Have it be long enough to cover the subject and short enough to keep it interesting.” In fact, I myself have fallen prey to this very peril in the writing of this entry, which could certainly have been done in one paragraph rather than five.
Guy Kawasaki argues that business emails should be as brief as possible: five sentences, explaining who you are, what you want, why you need it, and when you need it by. Kawasaki makes this assertion in a larger article about ten things to learn in school—a list that actually has twelve items—and does so by belaboring the point mightily and almost boring the reader before they get to the crux of the advice. Brevity is not always the best course of advice in business correspondence—sometimes, more context is needed. This often drives us a series of back-and-forth discussion points that lengthen the conversation and bounce from user-to-user, a process that’s driven most business email to use top-posting [a practice I find personally abhorrent but regularly use in business communication]. Finally, I argue that being formulaic can often drive the writer to add in unnecessary commentary merely in the guise of fitting the formula: five paragraphs, or 1000 words, or what have you. Having written this, I have successfully gotten to the formulaic point, and I will now remove my tongue from my cheek.
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