koalie

Last week’s scribing performance

One of the things I did a lot last week was minuting meetings, that is capturing a record of what people talk about. At W3C we typically do that via IRC and then a handful of bots and scripts generate HTML minutes.

So I scribed. Friday was particularly intense, being the second day of the Advisory Boad face-to-face meeting, the agenda for the day still being pretty full, and people’s heads being quite full of long talking points on what I consider complex topics.

I cleaned up the minutes the same evening, as I usually do, while things were still fresh in my memory. And what surprised my was the small amount of typos and spelling mistakes I had to fix.

Thanks to grep and wc, I found that of the 949 lines in the IRC log of the Friday meeting, 687 were my scribings (amounting to 8835 words). And the number of typos and spelling mistakes I find so low is: 32. That is all. I performed significantly better on that day than I usually do.

Of course, the worst part is now; I need to synthesize 2350 lines (15K words) of minutes into a summary. And “again, the Advisory Board saved the Consortium” isn’t enough (nor is it true just yet!).

Quick, a computer exorcist!

The fact that I find this irrationally funny is worrisome. Don’t worry; I already do.
Someone’s computer (Rigo’s) goes berserk and gives darobin concerns. So, this made me laugh out loud:

[...]
2012-09-25T10:59:04Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:06Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:10Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:11Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:15Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:17Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:19Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:21Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:24Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:25Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:27Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:29Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:31Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:33Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:35Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:37Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:40Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:41Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:43Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:45Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:47Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:49Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:52Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:53Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:55Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:57Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:59Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:01Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:03Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:05Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:07Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:08Z <darobin> mmmmm WTF?
2012-09-25T11:00:09Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:11Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:13Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:15Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:17Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:19Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:20Z <darobin> rigo?
2012-09-25T11:00:21Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:23Z <rigo>
[...]
2012-09-25T11:58:24Z -!- rigo [rigo@128.30.52.169] has quit [Excess Flood]

The sound of things

Sound that things make and their levels, as analysed on my smart phone with Decibel Ultra:

Light rain under the porch: 60 – 70 dB
Heavy rain under the porch: 90 dB
Thunder striking a couple kilometers away: 100 dB
Downpour under the porch: 100 dB

This is usually when I give up staying out under the porch, because it means ricocheting water will soak me soon. And my computer too. [User relocates] Here, let me wipe a few drops from my screen and trackpad. Done. You should see the cat –having migrated indoor against her will, she sits under the table in front of the French window and looks dismally at the curtains of rain.

I like to measure the sound of things. Not all things, only things which sound level I find notable. Here are a few additional examples:

Loud snoring: 86 dB (peak)
MIT machine room: 83 dB? I haven’t committed that one to memory, I was too busy being impressed.
Meadhall nearby Stata Center: 103 dB! I lasted throughout dinner once, kept only by the fine company of two people I like.

Chatting with a bot

We use several IRC bots at work, and this is what happens when sometimes they interrupt a conversation, out of the blue (we, humans, usually invoke them with triggers, none of which I knew I typed). This bit has only my side of the conversation, and I chose to leave out all context as it entertains me better this way:

2012-07-27T15:02:23Z <koalie> so I'll do it by hand
2012-07-27T15:02:23Z  * Zakim koalie, you typed too many words without
commas; I suspect you forgot to start with 'to ...'
2012-07-27T15:02:40Z <koalie> ok, Zakim
2012-07-27T15:02:57Z <koalie> to ... have it with both, so I'll do it by hand
2012-07-27T15:02:57Z  * Zakim sees koalie on the speaker queue
2012-07-27T15:03:05Z <koalie> silly bot
2012-07-27T15:03:10Z <koalie> ack me
2012-07-27T15:03:10Z <Zakim> koalie, you wanted to ... have it with both,
so I'll do it by