This one's a first for me: an eBay phishing email in Spanish, purporting to be from service@escrow-ebay.es, with accompanying fake Spanish website. (For the love of God, if you click on that link, do not attempt to sign in with actual eBay credentials. You probably shouldn't click on it anyway, though it doesn't appear to attempt to do anything evil other than phishing.)

COSIC has quite a few Spaniards; if I run into any of them before I head back to the States next week, I'll run the email by them and see if there are any amusing grammatical mistakes. (I will laugh my ass off if it turns out they're using, say, Mexican Spanish as opposed to Castilian Spanish.)

Advice to people at concerts who think it's a good idea to chatter away over the music: when the people behind you counsel you to kindly shut up or continue your conversation elsewhere, consider the fact that since they are behind you, they have a perfect shot at the tendon in the back of your knee, and if you have any interest in walking back to your car after the show, you should probably follow their suggestion and shut your fucking cakehole.

I'm just sayin', is all.

For the curious: no, I didn't actually cripple anyone tonight, much as I wanted to. I did, however, wait for the song to end, then lean over the jackass's shoulder and cheer at the top of my lungs directly into his ear. That got the point across.

Dear pretty much everyone,

If you try to contact me on (insert IM service of your choice here) and do not receive an immediate response, DO NOT FUCKING KEEP PINGING ME.

My status indicator does not read my mind and I typically do not bother to set it. The fact that I am set "Available" should therefore not be taken as gospel truth, either of my presence or of my availability to talk. I might have left the house. I might be in the shower. I might be fixing a meal, or eating one. I might be having hot monkey sex on the bathroom counter. I might have fallen asleep and left the laptop on.

I might be in the middle of a code binge, and if so, that has doubly unpleasant meaning for you: if I take the time to reply, it knocks me out of my groove, and if you keep pestering me, it knocks me out of my groove, so either way I want nothing more than to blow your head off with my 12-gauge. Your petulant whines of "but you weren't saying anything!" don't matter. If I do not answer after one contact attempt, assume I am not there. Maybe I'm simply not there. Maybe I'm there, but I just don't feel like talking. Or, horror of horrors, maybe I'm there but I just don't feel like talking to you. Moods change; I am generally pretty antisocial, but as long as you don't continually give me reason to be antisocial in your direction, I'll feel chatty at some point.

Again: if I don't answer after one try, assume I'm not there. For all intents and purposes, it will be true.

A proto-FAQ, for questions I expect may come up:

But what if there's something I really, really need to tell you ASAP?
Email me. The address connected to this livejournal is checked frequently -- more often than I check my cellphone's voicemail -- and you can flag it "return receipt requested" so that my ISP will let you know I've read it. If "tell you" is "get your opinion on" or "have you solve for me", well, that might take longer.

I am also not particularly bothered by one-line pieces of information (useful information -- articles you think I'd find interesting fall into this category) which do not demand an immediate reply; see But, Meredith, why do you stay connected while you're working if you hate being bothered so much? for more.

But I'm lonely!
Then go out and do something with your friends. Find a new hobby, or new people who enjoy a hobby you already have. Paint your walls. Paint somebody else's walls. Volunteer for a homeless shelter, a nursing home, a hospital, or your local parks department. If all else fails, go to the animal shelter and adopt a dog.

But Meredith, why do you stay connected while you're working if you hate being bothered so much?
Because I am a deeply antisocial person with a family and a social life. IM is one of the fastest ways for my sister to get in touch with me if one of my parents is in the hospital, or for a friend to say "hey, a bunch of us are going to the movies later, give me a call before 7 if you want to meet up".

IM is also a great source of work assistance for me. I'm deeply grateful that I can reach out to allonymist, yoctohedron, cipherpunk, ti94 et al when I need someone else's perspective on a code problem, and I happily return the favour when it's within my means to do so -- and by the same token, I leave them the hell alone when they say "can't think about that right now, too busy".

That, and sometimes I just want the person-who-works-at-home version of a water-cooler break. But that happens on my schedule, not yours.

How long should I wait to ping you again, if I've tried once and you haven't answered?
Wait about an hour and try again. If I don't answer, all the above continue to apply. Note that passive-aggressive remarks, of the "why arent u there?" or "*sigh*" variety, will decrease my likelihood of responding.

But you never want to talk to me.
Then you've probably annoyed me with your constant pestering and should leave me alone for at least a couple of days. Note that if you can see me online at all, it means I haven't blocked you and am still up for talking with you at some point, but on my schedule, not yours. See But I'm lonely!, and get a dog.

cristalia has a call to arms regarding the incident at this year's Hugos wherein Harlan Ellison groped Connie Willis's breast onstage.

I'm not especially involved in the SF community anymore, mainly due to lack of time and effort on my part, but I've also heard reports from thewronghands and other tech women about inappropriate groping/wrist-grabbing/whatever from people in the tech field. Now, I have a standard response to things like this: if someone gropes me, I punch the offending party in the face. I don't care if it's a friend, an acquaintance, or a total stranger. A friend might get the courtesy of me saying "Hey, cut that shit out," but if they keep it up, they're going to get punched. Someone at #s decided it would be funny to tickle me, and ended up getting clocked in the throat. Someone at elegantelbow's New Year's Eve party decided it was okay to fondle the scarification piece on my right shoulder, and got an elbow in the ribs for his trouble. This kind of thing doesn't happen to me often -- perhaps I'm just not the most gropeable person in the world -- but the response by now is just instinct.

However, I know there are a lot of people out there who, for some reason or another, don't feel comfortable punching an assaulter in the face. Maybe you've never hit anybody before and think it wouldn't work. Maybe you're worried about getting hit back. Maybe you were brought up to believe that Nice Girls don't do that sort of thing and haven't trained yourself out of it yet.

Well, I am not a Nice Girl, so here is my offer: if I am in your immediate vicinity and someone gropes you, I will punch them in the face for you. All you have to do is alert me -- quickly -- to the problem and the offending party. A nice loud "$name, get your hands off my $bodypart!" should suffice. This serves two purposes: one, it lets me know who to let have it, and two, it draws attention to the asshat in question and directs the condemnation of the rest of the room straight to the offending party. Shame -- particularly shame in the heat of the moment -- is a powerful disincentive toward sexually offensive behaviour. People grope other people because they think can get away with it. Okay, yes, Harlan has drawn the ire of a large part of the SF community after the fact, but unless some form of lasting censure arises from this groundswell, he has gotten away with it. Had someone raised a ruckus at the time, he would have had to deal with a rather more acute form of embarrassment than what he's being subjected to now; the condemnation of peers who are in front of you is a lot more cutting than the condemnation of peers who are far away.

So, SF folks, do what you can after the fact; I applaud that.

But next time, someone punch the asshat in the face, okay?

Tonight's steaming double shot of hatred gets flung into the twin gaping maws of the American National Standards Institute and the International Standards Organization. Pull up a chair, all of you -- I may be about to rant about a programming language, but it'll make sense even to the non-geeks in the house, I promise.
( So, you were saying, Ms. Furious... )