The cynical side of me says that this is an awesome way to avoid the problem of people signing up for your service, then not staying actively engaged.  Sure, you don’t have to check in too often, but you do need to check in…  Also, what will the fallout be if a server hiccups, clocks go wacky, junk filters hide the reminder messages, or whatever and e-mails that should only be sent when you’re dead go out while you’re still around?  It might be amusing to find out.

Those things being said, it’s made me ponder where I could use a technological dead man’s switch in my personal or professional life. Maybe I could rig something to auto-login and delete accounts on various websites/web services if I don’t use them within some period of time.  I’d probably lose my Facebook account, but it appears like that wouldn’t e too much of a loss.  Any other ideas?

Blog Design

Hard to say what I’ll get done.  I really need to put some ideas for what I want down on paper, so I can start knocking them off one by one.  As it is, the simplistic look isn’t really bothering me (I kind of like a simple clean look), so I’m not as motivated as I really should be.  Simply ending the weekend with a punch list will be a nice result.

Haskell

I started learning a new programming language earlier this week: Haskell.  This began a month or so ago, when I started using XMonad as the window manager on both my work machine with dual 1920×1200 displays and my 1024×600 netbook.  It’s a fantastic tiling WM that works great in both situations, but the program–and its configuration file–are written in Haskell.  I managed to hack together a decent configuration from plenty of examples and sample code, but it bothered (and still bothers) me that I didn’t understand the syntax.

Making Haskell more interesting (and difficult) to learn is the fact that it’s a functional language, rather than an imperative language as I’m used to from C/C++, Java, Python, and others.  While this should work well with my math background, it’s still a different way of thinking from what I’ve been used to for the past 10 years of programming…  I’ve been working through some material here and here and I’m looking forward to gaining some more understanding over the next few days.