Humble Apology

[sme]

Dear Colleagues,

I am so sorry I lost the plot last night.  Even if my response had
been sent to the poster in person rather than the whole group I cannot
excuse its tone.  When I realised that I hadn't deleted the
CC:swarm-support I was mortified with embarrassment. I have committed
sufficient a breach of netiquette that I will practice self-censorship
and unsubscribe ... although since I've been too crestfallen to check
my mail today I may already have been kicked off. That would be just.

I apologise to the guy I flamed. I'm afraid I was at a low ebb having
put in several consecutive all-nighters installing Swarm on a machine
at Warwick in a final desperate attempt to get sufficient results to
qualify my thesis. I had given up hope convincing the system
administration to do the job. They argue that they do not install
software they can't support. By the time I got everything up and
running - never particularly straightforward down a 28.8baud line - I
had insufficient quota to store my data. Two weeks of begging and I
was given more space but still needed to write bash, csh and awk
scripts to handle parameter sweeps, post-process data through Matlab
(on another machine due to licence restrictions) and gnuplot, archive
the data on a third machine where I have space and prepare an HTML
page so I could view the results. All the time knowing that perl would
do the job much better but not having the time to learn it. I even got
round to hacking a new feature into my model. 

I over-did it. Strung out completely. I had just spent an unhealthy
length of time with using the tools and languages that have been
learnt (certainly not mastered!) through 3 years of bloody-minded
persistence. When I read that post I just cracked. I think my response
was barely coherent, certainly abusive and pretty stupid. I would
have thought better and deleted it from my local spool the next
morning. Unfortunately, by that time a cron job had dispatched it.

I wish I'd taken Ken more literally and cast an eye at my
horoscope. With Pluto creeping up on my big-mouth Sagittarean
ascendant I should have been for-warned of the dangers particularly
with my natal T-square now a Grand Square and challenged by outer
planet squares and oppositions. Hmm! No excuse for being an arse
though!

Kindest Regards  
-- 
  Steve Emsley                    Ecology & Epidemiology Group
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  address@hidden                   University of Warwick

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