Thoughts, Interrupted

How arbitrary time limits on messages ruin creativity

This one's short, by sole virtue of my muse being stomped upon by Securus' JP6s tablet (may the newer EVOTAB arrive before July 2028).

I was in the pipe on a blog post about the ratio of officers to inmates across the Florida Department of Corrections, particularly about why I would choose decarceration and reallocation of prison-bound funds to drug and alcohol treatment, tradeskill training programs, and educational access. Tired, I saved a two part draft, and slept pretty deeply. Because I was pretty off-kilter this morning, I neglected to move the messages to new drafts when I woke up; the 24 hour timer on drafts starts from first save... so I lost the post for want of a word processor.

To add insult to injury, I had found a secondary method to save notes and drafts to myself; I was also using this method as a backup so I could keep things like a list of my quarterly food package order items in an easy to copy and paste place. Our recent update to AOSP 8.20.0 introduced a bug to the method I used, corrupting its database in one swell foop. Sigh, there goes my backups.

While we here are looking forward to the newer EVOTAB hardware as compared to these hinky JP6s tablet units, we also hope that some respect for the users is baked into the ROM. People want to be able to write, whether it's a long message to the family, or a digital journal, or maybe it's that story in their head that they always wanted to let out. I would love to have the character count raised from 6,000 to 10,000 or more -- frequently, I curb myself to stay inside the one message and would love to not need that so often.

Maybe someday when I'm less encumbered by prison itself, I'll tell a story of how three officers are expected to watch 396 inmates at a time. That's 132:1, by the way, if you were wanting the average resident:officer ratio at any given time in a larger dorm. No idea how this is supposed to keep working.