Trivial Matters

People! Yeah, you! Come over here. Let me show you something…

See this? This is a Meetup group. Yeah, I know Meetup is a great place to meet new people. But did you read the terms and conditions when you joined? No. Well, let me clue you in to something. When you join a group, you sign up automatically for an email list for that group. Anyone who is in the group can send a mass email to everyone else in the group.

What’s that you say? You don’t want to get emails from everyone in the group? I can understand that. So how do you think you should go about handling this?

As a matter of fact, I don’t think telling people to stop using the email service because your tiny mailbox is full is an appropriate response. What’s that? Yes, I do think complaining about it to everyone only serves to compounnd the problem.

What would I do? Thank you for asking. I’d scroll down to the bottom of the emails you are so hell bent on not receiving and click that link that says, “To unsubscribe or to update your mailing list settings, click here.” And then I would either unsubscribe from the email list entirely, or elect to only recieve emails from the group’s coordinator.

Yes, that was easy to do (and maybe even fun). Yes, you can adjust these email settings for every one of your Meetup groups all on the same page. Yes, I do think the people who designed the Meetup site knew what they were doing after all.

No, I won’t help you sort through your email to see what is important. Get a GMail account.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a trilogy consisting of five books and a short story. It was written by the late Douglas Adams, and is one of my favorite books of all time.

I didn’t discover the books until I was into my late teens. A guy I worked for started quoting it and when I looked puzzled, he exclaimed that he couldn’t believe I hadn’t read it yet. So I picked up a copy and literally absorbed the entire work in about two days. I’ve tried to make it a habit to re-read it every year, but both of my copies have been in storage for 2008.

I was reminded of it today when we were asked to write down our favorite book in my first class. I wrote it down, not knowing that the professor would pick the same book. Now I’m determined to either buy a third copy to read again, or make it a priority once I get my stuff out of storage. We’ll see how the rest of my classes go and how much reading there is for next week.

Once I’ve gone over it again, I’ll post a more complete review. So much of the plots are jumbled up in my head (especially after watching the movie, which combined the first three books… and not very well either).