Letters. I get letters. Well, not real letters, of course. The last real letter I got had a 29-cent stamp on it. What I get these days are eletters. Enotes, ecards, ebills, ejunk mail, eChristmas letters. Email. Lots of email.
The writing of letters, presumed by many to be a lost art, done in by Alexander Graham Bell, turns out not to have been dead but merely sleeping. Today, it's alive, healthy, and immediate and totally e.
You get a lot of email, too, I suppose. In some cases, I don't have to suppose, because I have ereceived emessages from you, to which I have esent eresponses.
The hundreds of email messages that epoured in, in response to my recent emoticontest, were appropriate and welcome. They overwhelmed the eWorld message system, or more likely, my clumsy use of the eWorld message system, halfway through my attempt to ereply to all of them. So I'm sorry to report that some of you won't ereceive a personal ereply. The correct answer, again, was that the smileys represented movie critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, although "Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates" was an unanticipated and morally superior answer that many of you eentered.
"What is a cool guy like me doing eliving at an eWorld eaddress anyway," one email-related emessage einquired. I didn't have a satisfactory eanswer until December 10, when a lovely, color ebirthday card earrived from the folks who run eWorld, or maybe from the efolks who run eWorld. (Of course, my eWorld eaddress is not my only ehome. I ereside at several other elocations.)
The health and vigor of email hasn't made any of it great eart yet. The econtent sometimes still leaves something to be desired. I notice that I eget a lot of email about email. Being an old LISP programmer and a fan of the writings of John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, and Raymond Smullyan, I appreciate the self-referentiality of this, but I'm not sure whether I'm ereceiving such eposts because the fin-de-si`ecle Zeitgeist is media obsessed or because DDJ readers, dealing daily with programs that write programs, slide easily into self-reference, or because I so often write about email.
One ecorrespondent quite correctly pointed out that broadcasting my email address is really asking for it. "It" being, as I have learned, mostly complaints about subscriptions. I don't know anything about subscriptions. For subscription problems, you have to talk to Big Ed, the warehouse manager in Eldon, Iowa. Ed handles subscription queries for all magazines in the world. There's a theory that Ed doesn't actually exist, but he does have a very nice answering-machine-message menu system, whose topology is non-Euclidean. You could be the first person to emerge from it with your sanity.
Please note that I'm not the only editor whose email address appears in the magazine. You can, in fact, send email to any of us care of editors@ddj.com.
And keep those ecards and eletters ecoming.
editor-at-large
MichaelSwaine@eworld.com
Copyright © 1995, Dr. Dobb's Journal