My E-Mail Addresses

Long, long ago, there was a line at the end of my .signature which looked something like:

What I really wanted people to say was, "Cloyce, what's that big hairy line at the bottom of your .sig? The one with all those curly braces, I mean." Well, I wanted them to say that. Nobody did. So I'll tell you about it anyway.

The Meaning

I probably don't need to explain this to a lot of the people who're reading this (cover your eyes while reading this part). All of that stuff, when echoed by anything other than a strictly Bourneish shell (the Korn shell counts here. And I'll do no explaining about this part! Go buy some O'Reilly books!), expands out to almost all of the email addresses that I was even sort of willing to receive mail at.

Actually, strictly speaking, that's not true. I used to have several others, and I NEVER checked them, and advertising them would have been like inviting people to send me mail there. I didn't want that to happen, and it didn't. So thank you for not using my old yucky addresses when I had them.

So anyway, to see the magic (assuming you're not running the Bourne or Korn shells), just type "echo " followed by all that junk. Don't put in any extra spaces or anything. That would break the spell.

Too Lazy to Expand?

I don't blame you! I'm lazy, too, which is one of the reasons I came up with it in the first place. Incidentally, laziness is one of the three principle virtues of a programmer. Actually, there are some other reasons, too.

• It lets me fit all of my email addresses in one line of my .sig. I like that.
• To the novice, it looks fairly complex. That means that they (or maybe even you) are much more likely to just hit 'R' (for reply) when sending me mail. This is what I want them to do.
• I'm lazy. Doing it this way makes for much less typing on my part. That's also a happy thing.

What (and Where) They Are

• cloyce at sedl dot org
  This one is at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. I used to help them, and they used to let me hang out. All mail to here was forwarded to headgear, so don't bother trying it.

• cloyce at headgear dot org
  This is my machine at home.

• cloyce at cs dot utexas dot edu
  This was my CS account. It no longer exists, because as an American non-graduate student, it was cut off just a short while after I graduated. Thank you, CS department. (I was only a little bitter about this; I really didn't use the account for much.)

• cloyce at ccwf dot cc dot utexas dot edu
  One of the Computation Center's general-use machines. Mail here was just forwarded away, and was also treated as spam by default, so I didn't recommend using it for anything.

• cloyce at uts dot cc dot utexas dot edu
  Another one of the Computation Center's general-use machines. Again, mail to here was forwarded away. The only difference between UTS and CCWF, in fact (as far as my mail is concerned), was that I didn't automatically junk mail from UTS.

• cloyce at mail dot utexas dot edu
  My University MailBox Service mail box. This was generally guaranteed to be a good pointer.