Shouts out to pobox.com...

...for Getting It Right, with regards to mail forwarding.

Here's how it normally happens: Somebody subscribes to the list I run under their UNSW student address, which they have forwarding all mail to their Hotmail account. They run over quota, and then I start getting bounces with no identification except a Hotmail address that isn't on the list in the first place. Then I apply my psychic powers to guessing which of five hundred addresses might be forwarding to that Hotmail address.

Instead, pobox.com actually include the original address, as well as the final one, making life a whole lot easier. This should be standard practice, but isn't.

Yay them

It's not as bad as I thought.

One of the most depressing things on my desk is another student's (completed, accepted) PhD thesis. It's depressing, because it's two and three-quarter inches thick - I just measured it - and comes to a little five hundred 500 A4 pages.

My thesis will come to nine chapters, plus miscellaneous bitties, appendices, etc etc. I've written the first three (give or take revisions), and altogether they come to about twenty pages. That's without diagrams, and I need to fill in references, and no doubt the people checking 'em will think of things to add (although so far, their comments have only resulted in shortening it...) But still, it feels like very little - I've been resisting the urge to pad shamelessly.

Then I looked at Helen's thesis again, and remembered something important: I get to double-space it :-)

Still going to be a lot shorter than hers was. Must try to market this as 'highly concentrated value'