[conspire] Request for the late 2015 season

[Rick Moen]

I've just performed a painful if necessary task.  ~/.mutt.aliases is
source'd in ~/.muttrc, and serves as my e-mail address book.  In the
way of such things, as happens when you live a long life and mostly
grew up socialising with your parents' generation, it contained a number
of dead people.  People who have, so to speak timed out, figuratively
become SMTP 551 on a very personal and permanent level.[1]

I couldn't quite bear to 'dd' line-erase these gone-but-not-at-all-
forgotten people in vi.  I mean, I wouldn't be erasing _them_ -- death
did that -- but removing their names and mutt aliases completely seems
too much like erasure of the persons.  So, I chickened out and copied
those entries to a different source'd file, ~/.mutt.aliases-dead-people, 
so that I have not committed erasure, an odd little ASCII gravestone.

Seems to me, much of telecommunications culture has that weird youth
mindset where death is ever-astonishing and not planned for.  Almost all
of those dead people's e-mail addresses are still deliverable (something
that's come with effectively unlimited storage and webmail).  It's just
the recipient who's not there.  My cellular still knows all about how to
call a dozen or more people who're now ring-no-answer permanently.  The
people die; their electronic shadow lives on.

My request:  Stop dying for a while -- at least through the end of the
year.  You'll still have the option of popping off come January,
promise.  The offer doesn't expire.  It's among the rare things that don't.

[1] Perhaps we should have SMTP error code '555 - Remote recipient has
insufficient metabolism'.

-- 
Cheers,                        "NOLI TIMERE MESSOREM"
Rick Moen                      -- motto on Sir Terry Pratchett's coat of arms
rick at linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)