It's okay; the person you sent it to will forward it to everyone else. Snark squared.
I thought the advantage of having tenure was not having to worry about things like that.
I have a slightly different issue. I sent an e-mail out to a whole group explicitly saying that I wanted everyone to have the same information so that we could all be on the same page. (Complicated family drama omitted here.)
I got a reply that was sent to me and two other people titled "Your e-mail about X". I am debating whether I should reply and cc the people I included in the original e-mail I first sent.
I sometimes worry that the conference call can "hear" me on Skype even though I have not only muted myself but *unplugged my microphone.*
It's a good signal (for me) that I'm being uncharitable. Which is galling to admit, since in general I try to have the guts to say my offending opinions directly to people's faces.
Oog, there's a conference call I listen to every week, large audience but kind of private and matey in feel, so they rely on participants to mute their phones. Maybe only one person in a hundred is assholish/inattentive enough to ignore the reminders to mute, but every week, like clockwork, there they are.
6: A lot of people have bet their jobs from time to time on the little red light on the speaker phone accurately representing the state of its internal circuitry.
5: That depends on what is in the email.
9: "I'm including everyone on this e-mail, because, as I said before, I want to make sure that there are no side conversations and miscommunication. I appreciate your taking the time to respond. I am sorry that you do not feel capable of doing more under the circumstances" (Not the exact words, with the full text of the original.
8: My phone has a light that flashes whenever I don't need to check my voice mail and is otherwise dark. That might be a problem if 95% of my phone calls weren't the school's robot telling me of another bomb threat.
I sometimes worry that the conference call can "hear" me on Skype even though I have not only muted myself but *unplugged my microphone.*
Once I was really bored during a Skype call and started listening to music, not realizing the sound from that was transmitted to the others on the call. Which seems like kind of a puzzling design choice to me.
10: That would be taken as strong pressure in my family. I don't know your family.
I took 9 to mean it depends primarily on what's in the side-email you're quoting to everyone.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first give a conscience. Or something like that.
Best advice I ever got on this (after a slew of reply all mistakes) was to always forward without comment. The snarkiness can be completely implied. Follow up by phone if additional snark is required.
14: Just says something like. I think it would be more efficient for you to do everything. I plan to be a supportive presence by talking to your parents on the phone.
11: She's not really going to do anything even if her sister were nearly homeless. But that is sort of the idea.
I mean, I should be better, and I doubt that she's capable of shame, but I'd like her to feel it. I also want everyone to be aware of what help people have offered or declined to offer.
If the ongoing conversation is about things people are doing to help, it seems like it would be obvious when people drop out of the mass emails that they are not involved. Or if you do want to include her on the messages to keep her in the loop, again, it will be obvious to everyone that she isn't mentioned in any who's-doing-what updates. Since it sounds like she's almost certainly not going to change her mind, nothing material is lost by taking the high road.
12: we were doing a skype thing (well, google plus hangout, I guess) the other day and one participant couldn't do that so we had her on speakerphone on somebody's cell and I don't know if she was in a pit full of giant monsters that were thrashing and chewing and making horrible machine noises and somehow... horribly... digesting, but that's definitely what it sounded like. Maybe she was at a cafe?
19: Huh. I'm generally a high-road taker where practical, but this seems like a situation where letting people drop off the email chain lets them assume that someone else is solving the problem frictionlessly. If the situation is that BG has a choice between seeing her mother on the street or quitting her job to go to Maine to care for her, with no source of income to fund this (I don't know the details but this doesn't seem out of the ballpark worse than what BG is talking about) and the aunt could keep her sister indoors and cared for with a reasonable expenditure on getting her signed up for benefits, I'd think keeping the whole family in the loop on what the aunt knows and has agreed to do or not do is useful pressure. Might work or not work, but it's a lousy enough situation that a little emotional blackmail seems warranted.
Keeping everybody on the loop seems reasonable. I was thinking that you wouldn't want to forward an email where she called other peeople assholes or something.
Oh, she's going to get the e-mails.
I'll probably write her one saying that I'm sad and disappointed, and I hope that she'll make sure to include everyone in future e-mails.
I will then write something being more explicit and will call her to continue to talk about it.
My other aunt (my uncle's wife) has tried to be supportive, but they just got a huge bill for their septic system and are trying to collect a big note from when she sold a Curves franchise.
The primary effect of my initial e-mail on them was to make them realize that they needed to have better plans in place for themselves. She's 66 and about to start a job in a kind of old folks' home, hopefully upgrading to the marketing one.
My uncle didn't get a job in the same town that would have paid about $30K more than the one that's 2 hours away and requires him to have a cheap apartment.
Writing this out did clarify for me what might be useful. We are sort of in blood out of a turnip territory, and I think I have to accept that M is unwilling to acknowledge the complexity and risk. Phrases like "danger to herself" and "incredibly complicated" as well as a description of the situation.
OTish but related to my own neurotic obsessions, I need some sudoku help. I'm doing a quilt based on sudoku and I'm stupid and didn't realize that the center of each block won't be a different number each time (so, say, the fabric that is 7 will be in the center multiple times) and I'd wanted each of the nine to have a chance in the center. So I have one block made that's 123/456/789 and want to find a program or something that will let me figure out a configuration that works with each of the numbers in the middle of a block. Does this make any sense as something I could do? I don't want to pay for an app unless I know it's going to help me.
And BG, I'm so sorry you're dealing with all of this. Because I no longer which thread had talk about long-term care insurance, I'll say that my grandparents had good luck with my grandfather's while he dealt with Parkinson's and maybe Alzheimer's (I want to say through John Hancock) but when Lee went to apply, she was turned down for not doing well enough on the memory test.
I'd just get some graph paper and try to do it manually -- do a nine by nine grid, fill in the one 123456789 block you already did, fill in the other eight centers with 1234 6789, and fill in numbers in accordance with the rules until you've got a valid sudoku solution. Given that you can move anything but that one block and the centers, coming up with a valid solution shouldn't take too long.
John Hancock may be leaving the field.
27: I did try that, but it certainly took long and I haven't yet found a setup that works. This is probably my fault, though. It always looks like it's going to come together and then I end up with a last block I can't fill. I don't normally do sudoku, so I don't know if I'm missing something obvious or if it's a hard setup or something. I could just give up the sudoku aspect and roll dice for placement of the non-center colors or something, but I'd rather not if I don't have to.
Could you copy the sudoku from the newspaper?
31: It wouldn't get me what I want. I mean, I do understand how to do sudoku. I don't understand how to make sudoku do what I want it to do.
I don't understand what you're trying to make sudoku do. Is each piece of the quilt a sudoku puzzle? Or a number in a sudoku puzzle? How many puzzles do you plan there to be on the quilt? Why does it matter what number is in the centre?
Despite looking at sudoku from both sides.
32: it sounds like you need a giant supply of sudoku solutions, like in the back of a puzzle book, enough to just pick out nine with different centre numbers.
There are some here
http://www.irishtimes.com/games/sudoku/
and it looks like you could go back by modifying the URL, if there aren't 9 different ones among those solutions.
I was assuming that each block is one of the squares of nine. Rather than numbers, the individual squares within the blocks are differently patterned fabrics. Having a different pattern in the middle of each one is just for variety.
34-38: Yes, each block is a set of nine pieces of fabric in a given configuration. There will be nine such blocks set up like a normal sudoku puzzle. Having a different one of the nine pieces of fabric in the middle of each piece is absolutely just me putting OCD restrictions where none need to be, which is why the original pattern didn't do that.
This is a completed version of the pattern I'm using, but I don't want to do blocks made of squares and am instead making my blocks look like this, which is why having the centers duplicated will be more obvious than it would be in the block setup.
30: I'm not sure this would work, but what I'd do is get yourself to that last point where you have a conflict, fill in one of the possible numbers, and then change the one that conflicts. And then change the one that conflicts with that. And keep on following the chain until you find one that you can change without creating a new conflict. I'd think that doing that for ten minutes or so would either work or convince you that it wasn't going to work, at which point I'd do what emir suggests and get a huge book of solutions, and troll through them for one that fits your needs.
39: How do you make a grid of those eight-pointed stars? Frame each one in a square, or is there some way I can't visualize to tessellate them in a grid?
41: Frame each one in a square and there will be sashing of some sort (vertical and horizontal lines, basically, white) between the squares. This is probably a stupid project, especially since I only started sewing/quilting two months ago, but the colors go well with the stained glass in our bedroom and so I want to make a quilt for our bed.
So you're going to end up with eightyone eight-pointed stars? Man, if it were me I'd be planning to finish that for Mara's high-school graduation. But I'm slow.
43: No, no, nine stars total. I've already gotten one made, which only took a week or so. Each star is made of nine different fabrics.
Each star is made of nine different fabrics.
We're made of star-swatches.
283195647
517426839
496378152
621834975
748259361
935617284
854962713
372581496
169743528
But I don't want to kidnap the Queen of Denmark.
44: Huh. I can't picture how to split that star into nine in a grid-analogous way.
46: Kudos!
Oh, I'm an idiot. The empty corner space is the first block, the two points sticking up are the second, the empty corner is the third, and so on. I was stuck on the empty corners all being a matching background color.
I didn't do it your way, LB, because it seemed harder to start with a full box in the corner and work out from there. If there's only one quilt block done already, the patterns in that one can just determine what patterns correspond to all the numbers, right?
I started by filling in the centers 123456789, and then filled out full vertical lines through the centers. After that I worked from the top down, going back and forth between horizontal lines and the boxes of 9 squares.
I love Blume! The answer is definitely to just put new numbers on the square I have done and not thinking of that is what was stopping me before.
The star square has a central color (made of eight triangles) and then eight "swallows" made of three diamonds (shown in white on the diagram) each radiating around it and brown triangles to separate the shapes. I've sort of arbitrarily decided where the sudoku square would start and it won't visibly look like sudoku to anyone who happens to be in my bedroom, but doing that will make me happier.
And I love being at work with my supervisor on vacation!
Divorced from context, 46 is a slightly worrying comment to see in a thread called "Neurotic obsessions".
52: That is on my top ten work advice list: Stagger your vacation with your boss's.
I misread 52 and asked myself, "if Blume's supervisor is on vacation, why is she at work with Blume? Or, if Blume is vacationing, why is she doing so with her supervisor, and why are they both working on vacation?"
54 has enlightened me.
53: I assumed Eupompus Blume was giving splendour to art by numbers.
Divorced from context, 46 is a slightly worrying comment to see in a thread called "Neurotic obsessions".
In context, making a quilt based on sudoku patterns is slightly worrying.
What would be really worrying would be if Thorn were making a quilt based on an unsolved sudoku puzzle, by first piecing the original squares, and then attempting to solve the puzzle by piecing in the blanks consistently. That'd be obsessive. This, comparatively, is nothing.
I wasn't sure if maybe it wasn't too subtle.
