On the subtle art of getting in touch

Email. The best way to contact me is to drop an email to: oscar@randomwalk.eu (click to copy to clipboard).

While I like receiving thoughtful and interesting emails, I am only (one) human. Hence response time, however annoyingly, «tends to be an exponential function of message length».¹ Writing properly helps make the curve less steep.

Before emailing me, please read the rest of this page. Especially if I don’t know you! I may silently ignore your message if you don’t—and I will be able to tell from your message if you didn’t!

Rule number 1. Here is the first rule of the now defunct Email Charter,² the very first principle:

Respect Recipients’ Time. This is the fundamental rule. As the message sender, the onus is on YOU to minimize the time your email will take to process. Even if it means taking more time at your end before sending.

I expect all my correspondents to honour it.

Two other things to keep in mind:

• I strongly dislike HTML email and attachments in proprietary formats (especially Microsoft’s Word and PowerPoint!!).³ Sending me such things is guaranteed to make me less willing to write a reply!

• Email encryption is one royal pain in the arse. There is no doubt about it. But in this 2.0 world of ours, where everyone, including myself, uses and abuses of “the cloud”, encryption is more necessary than ever. If for no other reason, then at least because in the end, «there is no cloud, only somebody else’s computer».⁴
  But PGP being a nightmare to use, I’m afraid I no longer use it regularly. Maybe this is an interesting project in the loom…