20131227.0600

Another of my small problems presented itself yesterday.  As I was checking one of the several email accounts I maintain (far better than my websites, admittedly), I found that a number of emails I had sent out I had, in fact, only thought I sent out; they were still sitting in my outbox.  Some of them were months old.  In a flurry, I sent them out again, hoping that they would either not be too late or, if they were, that their recipients would take some small pity upon me, seeing the divergence between the dates of the documents attached to them and the date my emails reached their intended inboxes.

The wonders of modern technology at work.

I confess to being thoroughly annoyed at the problem.  Among the emails that did not go out when I had meant them to were several containing information that really ought to have gone out when I sent it.  I have the distinct impression that the failure of the technology and of my vigilance over the technology (I really ought to have checked on it to make sure that it did what I wanted it to instead of simply assuming that it would do what I wanted it to do) has cost me opportunities that I would have otherwise enjoyed.  It would not be the first time that I have missed out on things because I did not pay enough attention, and it will likely not be the last, either; I have been a poor student for that particular lesson, however many times it has been presented to me.

One I recall, and one I regard now as being a small problem despite the panic I experienced when it actually happened, is another technological issue.  As an undergraduate, I had a high opinion of myself (surprising, I know), and because of that high opinion, I had enrolled in a number of classes I regarded at the time as being advanced (I know better now, but I was not the man then that I am now--if I can be considered to be a man even now, which I know is questionable).  In those classes, as is typical of upper-division major coursework, I had large projects due--presentations, actually, in which I was not so practiced then as I am now.  I had saved the texts of those presentations to physical media, which I had taken with me to school to print out and submit as appropriate.  Only they did not make it to the medium, or they did and vanished from it--and I had not been intelligent enough to keep a backup copy or email myself one (this is in the long-ago days before cloud storage was a thing).  Having the good fortune to have come from witty people, and having been a diligent student (I was less entertaining then than I am now, and I am hardly the life of the party, as I have noted), I was able to cobble together something in a hurry that managed to squeak by.  But I was not content with it; I knew I could have done better because I had done better.  And now, I seem to have repeated the kind of error I made then.

I may have to give back my degrees.