Examples of bad email subject lines:

• News
• Hey
• Hey! <- not just bad, exclamatorily awful
• Today
•         <- See how little sense that one makes?
• Computer

Examples of good email subject lines:

• Grandma Injured in Fall
• Puppy Shipment Notice
• Utopian.net Invoice: PHP Programming example.com
• Utopian.net Invoice: Hosting Subscription <- notice the clever use of a series!
• Summary Notice to Cease and Desist Libelous Publication

You get the idea. It’s not like this hasn’t been covered at length. It’s in the RFC, from 1983:

The Subject line … should be suggestive enough of the contents of the article to enable a reader to make a decision whether to read the article based on the subject alone. - RFC 850, Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages

Another Russ entirely, MIT and Plan 9 guy Russ Cox, has a blog new since January. His latest sees Plan 9 services supporting legacy systems with great backups on SHA1 hashes in the form of venti(8), an archival storage server with which Cox is intimately familiar.

I’ve never actually called my father that - growing up where and as I did, you either try to be a redneck or try not to be, and I tended toward the latter - but I liked the contrapuntal with my last title.

From the vaults of YouTube and some ESPN archive, my father, Russ Wood, drives the #57 Oldsmobile on the 36º banks of Bristol Motor Speedway in 1995, in the NASCAR All Pro Series PowerAde 250:

He started 16th of 33 and finished 22nd, but with an intact race car and holding ground in the points championship. 1995 was Russ’s second complete season with this national tour — something like double-A baseball in the racing world. 1996 would be the last one, as he returned to regional competition and driver development with my younger brother and the next generation of drivers in my family.

I wasn’t on top of the cart for this race. In fact, it’s the only one of about 75 All Pro Series starts my father made that I watched from the stands. I was discovering the idiotic pleasures of wasting time like a teenager, and this was the first race where I shirked pit duties for a reason other than school.

Dr. Jerry Punch has the call from the booth, a familiar voice you can hear on ESPN race coverage still. Punch always chatted with Russ or someone else in our small-time team back then, every TV race I can remember. Of course, maybe it had something to do with Dad telling him I was the adopted illegitimate son of his main rival in the tight ‘94 rookie-of-the-year battle, Ron Barfield. Trying to take a page from the book of politics and beat him with a scandal. Or something.