Contacting Rusty
From Digital Alterity Wiki
I'll start off this section with a fair warning. I'm the Internet equivalent of the grumpy old man who yells at the neighborhood kids. I'm a pretty nice easy-going guy normally. It just so happens that a great number of my personal pet peeves relate to Internet communication.
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Via Email
Even among people who know me, email is really the only way to get in touch with me. My email address is fuzzcat@bactroid.net. I enjoy getting email from folks who visit my site—unless they are complete idiots. People who ask me questions that could easily be answered by searching Google rarely get a nice response. Everyone else finds that I'm a rather nice guy who responds to email in a somewhat timely fashion.
Don't ever send me email formatted in HTML. I will hate you immediately. Yes, I can read it just fine. I just don't like email with unreadable typefaces with distracting backgrounds. Use plain text with line breaks when you send me email. This is the de facto standard on the Internet. If you aren't doing this, then you're using email incorrectly.
There's also very little point in sending me Microsoft Word documents. While I can generally open up Word documents just fine using some combination of Mac OS X's TextEdit application and OpenOffice, I generally don't deem it worth my time to do so—especially for people who I wouldn't know from Adam. Pretty much any attachment you send will just be deleted if I don't know you and am not expecting something to be emailed to me.
Via Instant Message (IM)
I admit openly right here that I have a love/hate relationship with instant messenging programs. On one hand, I consider the format to be far more efficient than either talking in person or over a phone. I became good friends with Allyson and Jen over AOL Instant Messenger, and I've met a ton of people I otherwise would never have spoken to. On the other hand, however, sometimes I'm just plain antisocial. There are times when the phone ringing makes me stress so much that if I were a cat I would be shedding large clumps of fur off into the air while I tried to groom myself to retain some sense of dignity.
I downloaded Adium recently because I decided to have more of an online presence again and some of my friends [looks meaningfully over at Ayse] primarily use MSN Messenger. Adium rocks because it ties together AOL IM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, and Google Talk/Jabber all in one convenient open-source client. Given that I can be signed on to all of my accounts simultaneously, here is an exhaustive list of how to reach me in something approaching real time:
- AOL IM: Bactroid
- AOL IM: FuzzcatX
- ICQ: 2937491...Because of the insane amount of ICQ spam chats that come across the wire I have ICQ set to allow only users on my contact list to reach me. If you want to be on my contact list, just email me.
- Google Talk: fuzzcat@gmail.com
- Yahoo: fuzzcat
- MSN: fuzzcat@bactroid.net
Feel free to IM me if you see me online. I'll try to answer, but don't be at all offended if I've got an away message up that simply says that I don't feel like talking right now.
On Xbox Live
My Gamertag is Bactroid. Feel free to look me up to play a game or two. Sending me a message is better than sending a chat request. If I don't know you, I'll think it's just chat spam and am likely to ignore you.
On the Web
I post regularly on my ChangeLog, a blog/online journal that I setup as part of the Bactroid.net content management system. My recommendation is that you follow my ChangeLog through the RSS feed using the RSS news reader of your choice. This allows you to see when I update without sitting there polling for new entries every periodic interval.
I sporadically post articles on the main page of Bactroid.net. I'm the chief contributer, developer, and bill payer for the site, so this only makes sense. I write on a wide spectrum of topics ranging from theology/religion to politics to vegan recipes.
I used to post somewhere between regularly and sporadically on Kuro5hin, Slashdot, Fark, and AppleAddict, but I'm in an antisocial place right now.
Via Phone
If you know my mobile phone number, then I almost certainly don't have a problem with you calling. Otherwise I wouldn't have given you the digits. Feel free to call any time. If you're calling from a strange number, my caller ID won't display your name, and I'm very likely to let your call ring through to voicemail. I get a lot of wrong number calls from people trying to reach a dentist office in Ocala, and I'm not about to waste 1-2 minutes of air time every time that happens. Just leave me a voicemail. I'll probably check it within thirty seconds of you leaving it, so don't worry about not reaching me. I almost always have my mobile phone with me. It's how I tell what time it is.
I must warn you though that I will essentially stop answering the telephone if I'm not in a social mood because, when I'm in introvert mode, I hate being on the phone and consider it to be an inefficient form of communication. On some days, I let everything ring through to voicemail and respond accordingly—even if I love you and consider you to be my best friend in the whole world. Only my wife Allyson gets 100% certainty that I will pick up the phone every time she calls. I'm sorry if it bothers you that I screen my calls, but I also have no real intention of stopping.
I'm a very polite cell phone user. If I'm in a situation where a ringing phone would be appropriate, I'm more likely to silence my phone than set it to vibrate. If I forget to turn the ringer back up, then it might be several days before I remember. I promise I'll eventually get back to you. If your contact is critical, no matter how contrary it may be to how you work, you'll get a much more immediate response from email.
