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The Bob Lee Swagger books are a bit like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books, fast paced and not overly deep. In short they are a good escapist reading. I still think {{ “0553563513” | amazon_link }} was the best novel Stephen Hunter ever wrote, but I am enjoying the ongoing Bob Lee Swagger saga.
In honor of Carol Burnett’s birthday today.
The state is rebuilding a grade level crossing near our home, turning it into an overpass. This house used to be on the southeast corner of the intersection, where there will soon be an on-ramp. This morning while waiting for an appointment to start I happened to be in the right place at the right time to take this video. The house had to be threaded through each intersection’s traffic lights.
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This is the third time I’ve read the Millennium Trilogy and it was just as good as the first time. It is an absolute shame that Stieg Larsson died just after completing these books. His story telling is unparalleled. These books are compelling, gripping, and ultimately very satisfying. This series is among the very best I have ever read.
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I actually started listening to this book on CD but the penultimate disk wouldn’t play in any of my available players. I returned the set to the library and checked out the hardback copy to finish the story. This book reminded me a lot of Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series. A bit over the top at times but a good listen, er, read. I’ve now started reading the first book in the series to catch up.
Very cool looking new IDE concept. I wonder if it’ll come to fruition.
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Ever since Stieg Larsson erupted on to the literary scene there have been any number of Scandinavian authors being translated into English, hoping, I think, to cash in on the “Scandinavian best seller craze”. 1222 by Anne Holt is one of the better ones I’ve tried. She manages to out Christie Agatha. I’ll have to look for others by Holt as I quite enjoyed the central character of Hanne Wilhelmsen.
Recently there was an excellent hint on Mac OS X Hints about how to show only personal emails in the badge on the Apple Mail icon. I liked the hint enough that I’ve implemented it on my machine, with a slight modification as I have multiple mail accounts and wanted personal emails from two of those to aggregate into the unread badge.
The first step is to create two new mail rules for each account that receives personal email. You can create a new rule by choosing Mail > Preferences > Rules and then clicking on “Add rule”. One rule will flag previous senders and the other senders who are already in your address book. I named my rules “flag account previous senders” and “flag account address book” where “account” is my name for the given account. The “previous senders” rule should have the following selections made:
The “address book” variation should have these selections made:
The reason for splitting these rules apart is so that we can filter by account. My address book contains the email addresses of my co-workers, and if these rules are combined as shown in the Mac OS X Hints article, you will end up flagging work emails.
Repeat this pair of rules for each account that gets personal mail.
The next step in the article is to create a smart mailbox that uses the “previous sender” and “address book” rule pairs. Since I have 4 email accounts set up in mail, two of which are personal accounts, one of which is for mailing lists, and my work account; I needed two smart mailbox rules – one for each personal account.
Create a smart mailbox called “Relevant account email” where account is the name of the first personal account. You can create a smart mailbox by choosing Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox. Specify that emails in the smart mailbox should satisfy all of the following conditions:
Repeat these steps for each account that receives personal email you wish to aggregate into your unread mail badge. Since the smart mailbox filters on account, emails in the work account which would have been flagged by a combined rule above, would not be shown in the badge. However they would still be needlessly flagged.
Next create a smart mailbox to “sum” the counts from the “Relevant” smart mailboxes. (Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox.) Call this smart mailbox “Mail Badge”. Add the following condition once for each “Relevant” mailbox you created in the previous step.
Finally go to the General Mail preferences (Mail > Preferences > General), and set “Dock unread count” to be the “Mail Badge” smart mailbox.
The mail badge will now count unread personal emails. You will no longer be nagged by unread work emails over the weekend or while on vacation.
Remember this kid’s name – he’s going to go far in this life.
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Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s latest Gideon Crew novel, Gideon’s Corpse, is good pulp fiction but not a terribly deep story. Like too many action movies this story jumps from one implausible episode to another. I suspect that there are publisher deadlines in the background requiring a new Preston/Child novel on a regular schedule. Books like Gideon’s Corpse are the result of trying to fit creative work into a set schedule.