Category: life

where everything else happens

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.

Apologies to my readers…

I have not done a very good job of keeping this site updated during the past week on the Going To The Sun Rally. Not up to my usual standards. I managed to get the JagCam movies posted almost every day, but really haven’t been able to keep up with writing and photo editing. I will admit to having some serious challenges with JagCam footage editing… mostly to do with my now 4 year old laptop and cranky editing software. Import & Rendering times usually stretched to many hours and iMovie frequently crashed. It got to the point where I could not insert any titles or effects for fear of ruining the output, or just having hours of work vanish in a blink of an eye.

So… often I would just give up and go have a drink.

I’m back at home now and have a pile of work to do, most of it lots of finish work involving the deck and painting, plus some BioDiesel processing… but I promise I’ll set aside some time (and the bottle) and plow through the writing and photo editing backlog as fast as I can. Thanks for your patience!

–chuck

Deck Progress

Here is the reason I haven’t been posting stuff here, answering email, or available to any of my friends of late. The past few weekends have been spent measuring, sawing, pulling old rusty nails, demolition, and replacement. I have swapped EVERY beam and plank seen in this photo, with the exception on the ones along the railing and those that remain painted green at the bottom of the photo.

I had to replace the beams underneath first – one at a time. Christopher did a lot of the work by pre-painting the beams and planks. (The unpainted beams are some emergency replacements from our snow-storm breakage from a few years ago.) The planks were only done on three sides, leaving the tops raw wood. The paint chosen was an oil-based alkyd, so he put on a coat of primer then finished them with a coat or two of the color. The past two days I’ve been laying in planks on the top. Basically removing the old ones, and laying in new ones. Chris & I screwed them all down yesterday.

Oddly enough I am not a very mathematical person, and really more of a visual thinker. At the start of the project I counted up the beams but then when it came time for the planks I just looked at it and literally guessed how many I’d need. My spatial estimation powers were confirmed when I completed the project just one plank short. I think I would have been dead on but I ruined one plank with the saw in the process. Yesterday we came to a point where the drill batteries were dead and we still had half the planks to screw in… so we all loaded up the pickup with all the scrap. I had to saw up the longer planks to fit in the truck’s bed, and in the end it was stacked up to the height of the cab. Chris & I took all the scrap to the dump and spent the better part of 45 minutes unloading them one by one. 3.38 TONS of scrap according to the scale. We swung by the hardware store and I purchased that one last plank, and a cheap Hitachi corded drill to finish the job.

This morning I was up @ 5 am and used up the rest of our cache of crack filler to uh… fill in all the cracks and over-driven screw holes. Chris is sanding the surface now and I raised up the tarp in hopes of keeping it dry if the weather goes to hell. My hope is to finish before I have to leave for Montana and the GTTSR. I doubt I’ll make it all the way, but we’ll see. Next summer we’ll have to replace a few more beams and the railings of course. Sigh.. the joys of home ownership!

The Moron Mechanic Strikes Again!

I recently performed an oil change on my wife’s Jeep Liberty CRD, as I’m an almost total “do it yourself-er” when it comes to car maintenance (NOT that I have any real skill… I’m just too cheap to pay for this sort of thing!) Usually that is a good thing. Today, I wonder however. It seems that when I pulled off the oil filter the rubber gasket stayed behind, and I installed the new filter right over it. This created a poor seal which as you can imagine, leaked oil.

Thankfully this condition was caught before things went REALLY wrong, but boy… what a mess. Sort of tossed a huge monkey wrench into my day’s schedule too.

Of course being a cheapskate once I realized that there was no damage done I was ticked off that I’d just wasted a few quarts of brand new oil! 😉

No photos sorry. I didn’t have my camera with me but if you do a google image search for “Exxon Valdez” and mentally erase the water, you should get a pretty good idea of what the scene looked like. Thankfully I had just bought a 50lb bag of “Oil-sorb” for use out in the BioDiesel home brewery in the barn and it was still in the back of the pickup truck! I think I used up 1/3rd of it.

Something like this... just subtract water.
Above: Just subtract water!

At least I’ll not make THIS mistake again!

Goofy Online Petitions

I never participate in these things, but this one was just too goofy to pass up: “Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister”

Apparently the Prime Minister’s office in the UK has an website where the Queen’s subjects can request favors and allow others to vote for it. Somebody wanted Jezza as PM, and they actually ran it. Mind you just to prove how lame the system is it allowed me to vote – using nothing but my old address in Wiltshire as “proof of eligibility”… hell I was merely a resident alien and that was a decade ago!

Well, yesterday I received an email from the PM’s office stating:

From: “10 Downing Street”
To: “e-petition signatories”
Subject: Government response to petition ‘PMClarkson’
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:10:11 +0000

You signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to “Make Jeremy Clarkson
Prime Minister.”

The Prime Minister’s Office has responded to that petition and you can view
it here:

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page16590

Prime Minister’s Office

The page they reference points to a YouTube Video:

Unlike our government, at least the brits have one with a sense of humor, or humour, as the case may be.

Entropy.

When I was a college kid I had a t-shirt that read “Fight Gravity.” I was a climber and it made for a good joke. Now as a middle-aged homeowner I should get one that says “Fight Entropy.”

My son Christopher’s summer project was going to be painting our deck. His reward was to be a laptop for use at college. The first step in the job was sanding and scraping. That took quite a bit of time, especially as the weather here stayed rainy until early July. A couple of weeks ago, when I started inspecting his job as it neared completion of this step, to my horror he had uncovered a LOT of rotten wood. Major portions of our deck have been held together by a layer of paint!

Above: This is the worst of it. We replaced those big main beams two winters ago when they broke under the weight of a big snowfall. Long-time readers of this website will recall that bad winter. After Chris sanded, I tapped the exposed wood with a claw hammer and it basically vanished. Lots of rot in both the intermediate beams, the deck top, and the facia under the railings. I suspect I’ll be completely dismantling this part of the deck soon.

What started as a paint job has transformed into a complete rebuild. Ugh.

Above: Chris painting the trim around the windows.

Above: The same spot, viewed from below. You will note the deck railing is off, and there is a pile of lumber in the driveway. Most of what Chris is standing on has to be replaced. He has a plank-painting factory going on in the garage. I prefer to pre-paint all the beams and planks.

Above: The deck on the south side of the house has two parts, the main part near the kitchen, and the other part near the back bedrooms. A thin walkway connects them. It is still in good shape, with only one support beam that requires replacement. This is a view of that part. Chris has already painted most of it. You can see some rotten planks out in the yard that I removed from the main part near the kitchen. The tarp is up because rain is in the forecast tonight and tomorrow.

Above: This is the main part of the deck. This is where we cook out, sit in the evenings, watch the stars, etc. You can see I’ve replaced three planks here, and done a lot of patching here and there. I bought some uber high-tech deck coating for this section, which requires 4 days to put on, and 7 days of curing. Hence the tarp to make sure it stays dry and out of direct sunlight. Hopefully it will last longer than the 2-3 years we’ve been getting from the paint.

Oh yeah… it has been REAL hot this weekend too. In the 90s, which is very rare here. 😛