A few things that I’ve been up to lately.
planning
A move from my current hosting provider to Blue Host, and a conversion from MT 2.661 to Wordpress. I’ve been at Pair forever and I have no complaints other than the price. Recently Sibylle was researching hosting providers for the new MAMTA site and through her I discovered that I am paying quite a bit more for my site on a monthly basis than I need. I also discovered that the latest release of Wordpress has a vastly improved MT import facility, so now I just need to take the plunge and convert already.
wanting
A new hard drive for my ThinkPad laptop. The current drive, the original equipment 80 GB drive is nearly full, so there’s no easy way to add a new partition for Ubuntu on it. A new drive (perhaps bigger) not only creates the space for a Linux install, it keeps the XP setup untouched just in case.
seriously considering
Making chili this weekend. The weather has been cold for a couple of weeks now, and I haven’t had a pot of spicy hot chili in too long.
researching
Eye exams. While my laser adjusted eyes are okay for 90 percent of the things I do, there are times and situations where I strain to be able to see. My frustration level is almost to the point of obsession, so it’s time to get some professional advice. I’ll be scheduling a complete exam as soon as possible so I’ll know for certain what my vision is or isn’t.
NB: I got the idea for this catch-all category, “up to,” from a posting over at notmyself.com.
Is there anything is the world as wonderful as a new pad of graph paper? Fresh smooth pages of quarter inch squares? Think of the possibilities. Floor plans, or furniture drawings, geometric doodles, and precision drawings.
Yesterday, while at Wal-Mart, Sibylle remembered that I wanted some graph paper and grabbed a three-pack for us. With mechanical pencils at the ready we each spent time capturing ideas for spaces in house. Piano studio, office, kitchen, and dining areas soon graced the opening pages of my tablet.
When I started high school I wanted to be an architect. It wasn’t until my junior year that I discovered computers and switched goals. A part of me, however, still likes the process of drawing things to scale, capturing ideas with pencil and paper.
Thank you, Sibylle, for the dreams and possibilities contained in the paper, and beyond.
We ventured into a couple of furniture stores yesterday afternoon, just looking for ideas. One of our favorite past times is designing a house for ourselves, and we like looking at open houses, model homes, and furniture stores to collect ideas.
The stores in this case were Ethan Allen and a Lazy Boy showroom. At Lazy Boy we found a couch we both liked. Ethan Allen had a bookcase that we both liked; enough so that we took a picture or two with Sibylle’s camera phone so we’d have something to remember later. Most of the other furnishings in the store just weren’t quite our style. The working-on-commission sales lady wasn’t my style either.
I find the mildly aggressive approach that sales people working on commission develop to be off-putting. Car salesmen are a particular breed, often hounding you across the parking lot when all you want to do is look. The same seems to hold true for furniture store employees. No sooner do you break the plane of their doorway than the next sales person in the rotation is charging across the floor with a loud greeting. They want to know you name, and to tell you theirs. They want to “help.” All I want is to be left alone until such time as I feel I need help.
Yesterday’s sales people weren’t awful, but my naturally introverted nature finds it difficult to fend these people off. Some portion of my energy is spent worrying about the next encounter with someone who is only trying to do their job, but (probably through no fault of their own) has developed an approach guaranteed to make me want to turn on my heel and leave. I guess I need to develop some spiel like, “Hey, thanks for offering to help. Tell you what, you let us browse with out interrupting and we’ll work with you when we are ready to buy. Pester us and we’ll buy elsewhere.” But that feels passive-aggressive or perhaps just sulky. so I don’t say it.
It can’t be an easy way to make a living, pestering people who probably want to be left alone; it certainly isn’t a way I could work.
We all have debt of one kind or another. Some good, some not so good. The funny thing about debt is that one seems to acquire it faster or more frequently that one gets rid of it. When was the last time you ended a loan?
For me that was this week. Three years ago, after losing my job in Illinois, we were forced to sell our house there. Unfortunately the market valuation for our house was somewhat smaller than the second mortgage lenders valuation. In other words, after selling the house and no longer having possession of it, I still owed a considerable sum of money.
This week saw the last payment made against that loan. The monkey of paying for a house I no longer owned was finally off my back. I’m not sure the full meaning of this even has sunk in yet. Perhaps it won’t until next month when I don’t have to send a check to Illinois.
Some lessons are learned the hard way. This lesson was not only hard, it was expensive too. It’s done and paid for now; one less piece of my past anchoring me there.
The Japanese Space Agency currently has a satellite orbiting the Moon. Included is a HDTV camera, which recently took these videos. Well worth a look.
Many years ago my father pointed out to me that increasingly people don’t say, “you’re welcome” anymore. Since then I have become aware that by and large he’s right. At the end of most transactions, be they in the grocery store, at the bank counter, or in a restaurant, both parties say, “thank you” to each other, but neither says, “you’re welcome.”
Watch for yourself the next time you are at the fast food counter, the employee will had you your food, and when you say, “thank you” they’ll respond with “thank you” as well. Or at the grocery store check out, or the bank, or restaurant. I find that I am conditioned to say “thank you” myself, even when I know that proper response is to say, “you’re welcome.” Just last night as Sibylle and I were leaving the new Longhorn Steakhouse we were thanked by several people and I said “thank you” to each of them in return.
It’s time to become welcoming again. When someone thanks you, say, “you’re welcome.” Or, if you want to thank them too, “you’re welcome, and thank you!”
Thanks for reading, and, you’re welcome, I enjoy the writing.
Recently I joined a very active mailing list for the Ubuntu operating system. In doing so I discovered a “feature” of Gmail. By default (and a setting that you can’t change), any mail you post to a mailing list isn’t reflected in your inbox. Instead the mail is shown only in Sent Mail and All Mail on your account. If you search the Gmail help pages you will find that this is done “to save you time and prevent clutter.”
Normally when you post a message to a mailing list, you see your message and (hopefully) some responses to it. If you thread your messages the responses are all neatly tied back to the original message, allowing you to read entire topics of discussion easily. The problem with Google’s approach to mailing list is that you can’t find your thread in the conversation, even if it is the originating post.
Apple Mail Smart Mailboxes To The Rescue Apple Mail provides a feature called “smart mailboxes.” These are folders that have a filter or set of rules that determine their contents. To see your postings in a mailing list create a new smart mailbox with these rules:
Make sure you select the “meets any” condition and not the “meets all” condition, and tick the “Include messages from Sent” for good measure.
The new folder will now contain the messages you sent as well as the messages you received; and they will be properly threaded.
NB: In my case I have a separate email address for the mail list, so the only messages in sent are ones I’ve posted to the list. I’m not sure how this would work if your primary sent folder was included in the rules for the smart mailbox.
There are always two or three or four books currently being read. Here is the current crop:
The Pillars of the Earth Originally published almost 20 years ago, this Ken Follet masterpiece takes place in 12th century England and centers around the building of a cathedral. Somehow I missed this when it first came out. Oddly enough, since purchasing this copy in Germany, he has published a sequel to the story.
Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager I’ve been a huge fan of the author’s weblog for years. The book takes the stories and “messy thinking” there to new levels. Highly recommended.
The Hacker Crackdown While this book is now somewhat dated (it describes events and technologies in the early 1990s) it is still am interesting and compelling look at the Internet underground.
The Fellowship of The Ring It has been several years since I read the Lord of The Rings in its entirety. Having the excellent movies by Peter Jackson is wonderful, but they aren’t the same as reading Tolkien’s word on paper. Thanks to Sibylle, I’m able to read a beautifully illustrated hard bound copy.
Nearly five years after first purchasing a couple of Macintosh computers (largely due to OS X) I find myself “switching” again. As a software architect I spend considerable amounts of my work day developing models and diagrams using proprietary tools that only work on the Windows operating system. Two years ago, when I had saved enough money, I purchased a ThinkPad laptop expressly to be able to work with the Rational tool set on my own machine.
Windows XP is a good, relatively stable platform; it serves its target demographic fairly well. However, it lacks some of the ease-of-use features that OS X contains. It feels like there are more applications that work the way I wish to work available for the Mac.
I use both Windows XP and Mac OS X on a daily basis. I am very comfortable with either operating system; both have their strengths and weaknesses. But I find myself drawn to OS X over XP more and more. Both of my Macintosh computers are aged now. With G4 processors they are each two generations behind the leading edge curve. Even so, they are both responsive enough to allow me to accomplish the things I want to do with a computer; whether that is email, web surfing, developing new code, or reading electronic books.
For the past of couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with Ubuntu 7.10, and I am finding it very easy to use and configure. I like tinkering around with the various configuration files and settings. Since Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD, exploring the Debian-based Ubuntu distribution is like coming home again. I know where to look for things, I know how to perform basic system administration already. I am planning on getting a second hard drive for the ThinkPad and installing Ubuntu on it so that I can have pure Linux machine to play with and learn from. But I suspect that I will still return to the Macintosh for the majority of my computing.
Like many people I was excited when I learned that Google was adding the IMAP protocol to GMail, and I have been playing with it in various desktop email clients ever since my accounts were all enabled.
By far, Apple Mail handles the fusion of Google Mail and desktop client the best. The directions Google provides are great as far as they go, but there are some additional steps one can take to tighten the integration between the two platforms. Once you’ve added a GMail account to Mail, you will see a [Gmail] folder, and nested inside that will be folders for All Mail, Sent, Drafts, Trash, and Spam. Unless you take an additional step, these folders on your Mac won’t be synchronized with their counterparts on GMail. (You will also see folders for each label you created on GMail.)
Select [Gmail]/Drafts and then click on the Mailbox|Use This Mailbox For menu option. In the popup dialog select Drafts. This will link Mail’s drafts folder with Gmails. Drafts created on your computer will be synchronized with the folder on Googles server.
Repeat these steps for Sent, mating [Gmail]/Sent with Sent, and for Spam, mating [Gmail]/Spam with Junk. Do not mate [Gmail]/Trash with Trash. Linking your local trash with Google’s trash will cause any mail you delete locally to be deleted forever on the server as well.
If, like me, you have multiple GMail accounts, you’ll end up with an entry for each account, nested under Inbox, Sent, Drafts, and Junk. Clicking on the containing folder, Inbox for example, will show you the aggregation of all your incoming mail. Clicking on one of the account labels underneath the containing folder will show you just that category of mail for that account.
One of the nice features about GMail on the web is being able to archive mail, which removes it from the inbox, but leaves it in any assigned labels and in the All Mail label. Apple Mail does not provide an archive button, but you can use the Delete key to get the same functionality. Since we didn’t link the local Trash folder with the [Gmail] folder, selecting an email in an inbox, and pressing the delete key just removes it from the inbox. The mail is still in the All Mail folder on your machine, which corresponds to the All Mail label on GMail. I admit that pressing the delete key to archive is uncomfortable; I suggest trying it our for yourself on some test mail. (A) to convince yourself that it works that way, and (B) as a check that you do not have local Trash linked to [Gmail] trash.
The final step I took was to adjust the Mailbox behaviors for each account. Drafts, Sent, and Junk I set to store messages on the server. For Sent I set the “Delete sent messages when:” option to never. For Junk I set the “Delete Junk messages when:” option to one week.
For the Trash folder I unchecked both “Store deleted messages on the server” option and the “Move deleted message to the Trash mailbox” option. This allows the delete key to act as an archive function.
I’ve been up and running under this configuration for several days now and I am very pleased. I’ve had less success with Windows Live Mail, and Thunderbird as desktop email clients in general, and with their configuration to use GMail via IMAP in particular. They are nice enough but neither provides (to my knowledge) any way to neatly synchronize the Drafts, Sent, and Junk folders the way Apple Mail does. Also, neither Live Mail or Thunderbird handles threaded conversations as neatly.