This is the archive for a small humour mailing list called Friday Humour. There are only 300 or so recipients on this list, but with several of them regularly submitting humorous material for the mailout and with Davo and myself moderating, the content nevertheless tends to be of a reasonably high standard. (Mind you - that does not mean that it's always clean - simply that it's usually funny or interesting, as opposed to crass gutter humour!)

I don't have time (and probably never will) to index the stuff into categories - it is archived simply according to the original mailout transmission dates. So if you are browsing around, I'm afraid you'll just have to take pot luck, just as the list recipients do.

The early mailouts (from 1996 until November 1997) were all fairly short - typically only one joke or humourous story. But by the end of 1997, the steadily increasing number of contributions had pushed it up to several hundred lines per mailout, and this is where it's stayed until now.

Apart from that short introductory caveat, I don't mean to sound too serious - please feel welcome to click away and just enjoy. (BTW - there's more detail on the history of the list further below, if you are interested.)

So, anyway - why should humour be related to Friday's?

Well, no particular reason - it just happened to be archived off a small mailing list (of 200 or so recipients) who called themselves the "Humourites", and a collection of humour (or philosophy, or whatever) is more or less regularly posted out (by myself and Davo) to this group on Friday of each week. So I guess it's a sort of moderated humour group, somewhat styled after the rec.humour USENET news group which many of us followed through the late 1980's and early 1990's (pre-Netscape).

"Friday humour" (as a regular weekly event) started around 1997 (at which time I was the Computer Systems Manager for a site of 120 scientists and other assorted bods at one of the many divisions of an Australian scientific research organisation called CSIRO). The particular division where I worked then was located in an old Melbourne suburb called Port Melbourne. (And - yep, it was within walking distance of the sea - quite nice!)

Occasional humour mailouts had actually started back in Feb 1996 as part of a quick method of testing the site's email system after having made any sort of significant change. It eventually became obvious that most site personnel were actually finding these "tests" a pleasant addition to their day (!), so in May 1997 I finally decided to make it a regular weekly posting in its own right.

Some people also began sending in their own contributions - and so the whole thing became a regular event. I can't really remember why we settled on Friday as the "humour day". Perhaps it had something to do with our habit of going "off site" to various pubs for lunch on Fridays ... but either way - after a few months, it became known as "Friday Humour".

In the early days, the mailout was quite small - typically just one joke. Towards the end of 1997, with many people now regularly sending in contributions, the jokes respository was growing faster than I could send them out. One or two people asked me why I didn't just "make it bigger" to clear the backlog - so I started making it bigger ... and bigger. For most of its life, the Friday mailout has typically been around the 400-500 line mark.

In the early days, list members would occasionally post a funny cartoon or photograph too, but for quite a while, I just couldn't figure out a good way to cleanly include such stuff in the mailout. I certainly didn't want to send them off as mail attachments; this would just make the size of the posting too large for some of our recipients' mailboxes.

As mailers gradually became more "URL" aware through the late '90s, the idea occurred to me of just placing the pictorial stuff on a web server somewhere and providing people with links to them via the mailout. At that time though, the only server I knew of which had sufficient room for hundreds or thousands of megabytes of such material was the one at my work - and I certainly couldn't risk putting the stuff on there because some were X-rated!

To cut a boring long story short, that's where the idea for this server (bluehaze) was born. There were other reasons for it, of course, such as (eg) a scientific colleague Lachlan Cranswick wanting a facility which we could fully control ourselves. Just having a 'net-connected server where we could both store anything that suited us had been on our minds since 1995.

Anyway, I organised a machine and put Linux on it, found an ISP, and starting from Friday Sep 10th, 1999, made a tentative beginning toward the inclusion of pictures. And to cap this off, in November of that year an ex-work colleague by the name of Steve Harding also made his server available for some of the larger ones (he having more bandwidth than bluehaze), and that of course helped too!

I tried to kill the list on December 22nd, 2000 because compiling it on a regular weekly basis is no longer feasible. But Davo (our HR manager, Footy Tips organiser, and Stereo AM fanatic of many years standing) has kindly offered to assist in keeping it on the air (and at present, he's doing alternate weeks).

And have I ever done any of this on CSIRO time? Nup! I'm not the Systems Mgr at our new, merged "super division" at Claytown, so I rarely have reason to test the mail system. So I've almost invariably done the joke mailout in my own time - after work on a Thursday. (I only mention that in case someone wrongly assumes that CSIRO employees waste precious Govt resources on weekly humour mailouts :)

BTW - the HTML-ised humour files (and this page) are created automagically by a unix shell script I wrote on Saturday Mar 4th, 2000, called convert. This takes my (Pine) mail 'folder' called frihumour (which is where I save the friday humour mailouts each week) and context-splits it into a set of automagically-named output files - these are then filtered and formatted into crude HTML with a cyclic collection of background colours and header graphics. Dates and so on are sniffed out from the mail header info on the way through. And as you could probably guess - this index page (including what you're reading now) is also re-built by this process.

So why write a program (script) to do this? Well, I just couldn't face hand-splitting and hand-formatting the whole lot to begin with, and I also knew damn well that if I had to face formatting up yet another new file each week on top of compiling the original mailout, it'd just be the final straw. This way, keeping these web pages in sync with the weekly mailout has been a breeze.

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