Once upon a time, an ancient fish crawled out of the water and into the mud. That was an important moment in the grand journey of life. Its children learned to live on the land and eventually became us. On December 21, I watched the a young company called SpaceX successfully land a rocket booster stage, opening the door to affordable space flight. Perhaps some of our descendents will remember this moment similarly, wherever and however they might be living.
When I was a little boy, there was a book with a timeline in it with predictions for all sorts of space related accomplishments. There was a projected date for the Hubble Telescope and for a permanent space station, and for people visiting Mars and the Jovian moons, and well beyond. I'd sit there calculating how long I might live, and therefore what wonders I would see. It doesn't work that way. Things happen because people do them. Because we do them. And often we don't. We put people on the moon in 1969 with half our current world population. The atom was split in earnest in 1945. But these and so many other fields including my personal field of study, optical holography, have stagnated and declined for decades. By the time I had the opportunity to listen to Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin speak at MIT in 1995, I asked Mr. Armstrong if he thought people would walk on the moon during my lifetime. And then, a group of very hard working people basically said, "Screw that, we're going to do something great." And landed that rocket. Which brings us now, finally, to The Mail Archive. When I started it 18 years ago, it was not an ambition in any way; it was a set of personal email filtering rules that were fun to play with. It was safe and easy to grow into a low key small business, and we did some good stuff at the usual slow but steady pace. In 2015 we donated some of our earnings to aid for Syrian refugees, a search and rescue team in the Sierra mountains, and to an animal shelter. We tweaked the search interface to allow full thread reading and introduced easier hotkeys (try clicking the subject line of any email then hitting 'e' for expand.) We switched to 100% encryption and upgraded to a fancier digital certificate. Backups are even more serious now and we even keep on set on SSD. Message-ids are at the bottom of every single message page for all three users who like that. Plus an obscure bugfix here and there usually related to search. I'm proud of that. I'm proud that we're still alive. I'm proud that we've held up as a small business, through thick and thin. 2015 was relatively thin due to less visitors than years past. And I'm proud that in some very small way we've helped some people do their own things. https://www.mail-archive.com/discuss-gnuradio%40gnu.org/msg52584.html As you think about the year ahead, please enjoy The Mail Archive, put it to good use, and don't be afraid to reach for the stars. The Mail Archive hasn't accomplished anything bold and fundamental. But maybe you can. And should. Happy 2016. Jeff
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