Author: chuck goolsbee

Car Photo(s) of the Day: a Two-fer.

Rainy Day E-type

The Annual Rain Festival (October-May) has returned to the Pacific Northwet. As such I doubt I’ll be driving the Jaguar much over the next several months. Oh well. The above shot was taken actually far from the Pacific. It is Frank Filangeri’s (I hope I spelled that right) S1 E-type OTS. Taken on the very wet New England 2000 Vintage Rally over eight years ago. My how time flies.

Just so that all that grey doesn’t get you SAD I’ve got a sunshine shot that can provide us with a little guessing game:

Lovely seaside, or lakeside, road?

I love this shot and love this spot. It evokes memories of places in England for me. So where is it? As many of you know, this car has driven many places all over this country. East coast, west coast, and all the way across. Is that the sea, or is it a lake? It could even be a big river or a reservoir! Could be Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Nova Scotia, Ohio, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Alberta, Montana, Washington, Oregon… or could it be someplace in between?

Take a guess of where this road might be located in the comments.


View Larger Map

John got it: Ebeys Landing Road on Whidbey Island. Very close to home… due west of my house by a short distance as the crow flies (and the crows do fly around here!) but a bit of a drive. Worth it though.

Thanks for playing everyone!

Site Maintenance.

Today is my 45th birthday. I’m celebrating by quaffing a bit of bubbly, processing some waste veggie oil into BioDiesel, and upgrading WordPress here on my website. Be patient while I perform this task. Be back soon!

Update, Monday: Well… that was fun! It seems I broke it for a while. Rog was right, I should have slowed down on the drinking and sped up on the RTFM’ing! 😉

The site didn’t break for any of you (except a few display items) but I managed to lock myself out of all the admin functions for about 18 hours. Logging in just sent me into a loop, as did doing a password reset… or even manually editing my user entry in the SQL database. Finally 9at the suggestion of one of my staff late last night (Thanks Josh!) I yanked all the site plugins and blew away my user passwd in SQL. That did the trick. I logged back in, was able to complete the upgrade, then went to bed. Finally fixed my passwd via a normal reset this afternoon and it seems all is well. I’ll start re-plugging my plug-ins again when I have some time.

Thanks for you patience and birthday wishes!.. speaking of which Sue & Nick took me to The Keg with my free birthday dinner coupon. I had a great steak (with bleu cheese & garlic… which woke me up later!) and some awesome wine.

Car Photo of the Day: Autumn run.

Here’s a nice shot. IIRC this was the very first time I actually opened the door and stuck the camera out the bottom for a shot. It was taken on the Mille Autunno rally about this time four years ago. In fact I’m pretty sure it was exactly 4 years ago today.

We were driving around the Sierra Nevadas with a group of old cars. I’m pretty sure this was taken as we rounded the west shore of Lake Tahoe.

A big buffet of blog.

Here is a veritable smorgasbord of Goolsbee news, and a heap of excuses why I haven’t been posting much since my return from the GTTSR (besides my backfilling those pages when I have had the time)…

That is 90% of Christopher’s worldly possessions stuffed into the trunk of his mother’s Jeep. Yep, weekend before last we ferried the elder Goolsbee child off to college. The Evergreen State College to be exact. The trip to Olympia was a traffic-choked adventure in and of itself, but I’ll spare you the boring details.

Upon arrival there was endless queuing and parking lot trauma, but eventually we managed to get Chris into his living space for his Freshman year. His dorm room is quite nice, on the top floor with skylights.

His mother was horrified, but I pronounced it “good.” He has this space to himself, but shares a bathroom with three suite-mates. The campus is nice, and we a few of the parent things, as well as paid tuition, room & board of course. We also made a run to some nearby stores (once the Jeep was emptied of Chris Crap) and stocked his supplies, desk, etc. Chris made a list for me of things he forgot over the next week and I’ll be visiting him later this week with that stuff, along with his bicycle, which we didn’t have room for on this trip.

Last weekend Nicholas attended a big dance at his high school. This required a clothing run, as he has outgrown just about everything. I swear he’s three inches taller than he was a month ago! Here he models his new threads:

Pretty studly eh?

His mom gave him a big hug and I shuttled him off to the dance in the Jaguar. That was my contribution.

Speaking of the Jag, I finally got around to giving it a good wash and wax this past weekend. The weather was glorious… a sort of Indian Summer after a few weeks of rain & cold. Sue & I took a drive as she had an errand to run down in Snohomish and actually suggested we take the E-type. I was planning to relocate it from the barn to the garage for the winter so it was a good excuse to take it out. As I was waiting for her to complete the task we drove to Snohomish for, I noted the car was seriously grimy from the long rain & bug filled road trip to Montana & back. When we arrived back home I washed it and pulled out the Meguairs wax and gave it a good rubdown.

Wax On!

Wax Off!

Pretty soon the rains will return in force and the car will go into hibernation until spring. I have a few projects to complete with it, but it will have to sleep in the garage as our damn cats have manifestly failed in the ONE real job they have, namely keeping mice out of the barn and therefore my car. Last winter I found signs of the damn thing all over the engine bay. Oh well.

So all this, along with some projects at work (involving more time with my nose in spreadsheets than I care to ever do) have kept me away from here for a while. Hopefully I can return to regular posting soon.

An old habit dies… hard.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been using the same email user agent for about eighteen years. Yes… EIGHTEEN years. How many software products from 1990 do you still use?

In 1990 I was using a Macintosh IIsi, System 6.0.7, and Eudora 1. If I recall correctly it was version 1.3 or 1.5. I used my wife’s student account at the University of Washington to get online at first. A shell account on a UNIX host, a newsfeed (Newswatcher!) and trusty old Eudora for reading mail. I had a Hayes 2400baud modem at first, then I joined the 90s eventually with a Prometheus 14.4k modem, with built-in fax AND voicemail. (I was doing full-blown telephony in 1991!)

But trusty old Eudora was my mailer. It stayed my mailer.

I went through many machines (MacII, Centris 650, PowerBook 170, Duos, the infamous green 2400c subnotebook, iMacs, G4s, a TiBook that wheezed itself to death eventually, and now my current, though aging aluminum G4 PowerBook.) But Eudora remained my mailer.

I upgraded operating systems (System 7, OS8, did my best to skip OS9, jumped to X when it finally stabilized, through all the iterations of OSX up to 10.4) and Eudora kept on chugging. I managed to keep just about every bit of mail I had sent or received from about 1994 through 1998… when the great Jaz drive failure hit me as I was moving machines in the UK. Did I give up? Nope, I just started again.

Now I have just about every mail I have sent or received since 1998… all carried around in a pair of “Eudora Folders” on my hard drive (and backed up here, there, and everywhere!)

I have adapted to Eudora and it has adapted to me.

I have two distinct mail modes: work and non-work. I don’t read non-work email at work (except around lunchtime) and I TRY not to read work-related email when I am not at work, at least not on my laptop (that is what my Blackberry is for!) I have YEARS of well-tuned mail filters built (I should screen-shot them… they would astound you! Want to see them? Ask in the comments) and a signature file that is very long (it is how I have packed the “random quotes” here on my site.)

Unfortunately Qualcomm announced Eudora’s demise a while back and I knew this day would come. I test drove several other mail clients, but to be honest… all of them sucked. I know people think Eudora sucked, but it worked for me and I liked it. Hell, I stuck with it for EIGHTEEN YEARS!

I thought about Entourage. Yuck. Way too MS Office-ish. That big honking monolithic mail database terrifies me. Eudora has always stored mail is unix mbox format – plain old text files. Dealing with a corruption was just a matter of firing up BBEdit or vi. Clickty-click. I think that has happened to me three times in 18 years. I have known way too many folks who have had one form or another of Microsoft mail database files go tango uniform on them at inopportune moments. Frequently. No thanks.

I tried Mail.app. I really did. Inertia almost drove me there. It was the one I have test driven the longest. But the rules/filtering is just abysmal compared to Eudora. The mailbox handling lame. And I noted that it becomes a complete pig when you try to deal with large volumes of mail like I do. Searching through my multi-gig mailing list archives for some string of words? Seconds in Eudora! Minutes or a system crash in Mail.app. Yuck.

I’m planning a jump to OSX 10.5, mostly so I can support my family members who all use it. There have been issues reported for the last version of Eudora (6.2) on the latest OS from Apple. I figured now is the time to make the leap away from my old friend.

I thought about Odysseus, as it is billed as a modern replacement for Eudora. However it seems to be in perpetual beta, that seems more like alpha from the users I’ve talked to.

I looked at Thunderbird. No thanks. The UI is just … well… bleagh.

I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)

I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period.

Good-bye Eudora… it has been a good 18 years.