You have mail?

Recently, when opening new Terminal sessions in Mac OS X, I've started seeing a familiar old message before the first shell prompt.

Last login: Wed Apr 28 06:27:11 on ttys006
You have mail.
mymac:~ my_username$ 

I assumed some system utility had delivered a notification via /usr/bin/mail. What did the message say?

$ mail
mail: /var/mail/my_username: Is a directory

Indeed, /bin/ls showed an empty my_username directory in /var/mail.

Weird.

In any case I deleted /var/mail/my_username/, and the notifications no longer appear in new Terminal sessions.

A life well lived

Tomi Pierce must have been an amazing person.

via Tim O'Reilly.

Eric Margolis

Via Tim O'Reilly, a tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Eric Margolis:

"Gorbachev did not plan to destroy the Soviet Union but to reform and revitalize it. But by refusing to hold it together by force, he brought about its doom.

Gorbachev did the world a huge favor."