Back on the sauce again.

July 8, 2004

Regarding the headline, it’s not quite what you think. I was mainly referring to drinking tea this morning for the first time in a few weeks. Since I stopped getting up at 5:15 every morning to jog, I’ve found that I’m much more tired during the day, and some lunches I’ve even caught a catnap in my chair for the last half of my hour break. But I mainly haven’t wanted to drink tea because it’s been warm all these days, and hot tea even on a hot morning isn’t a good mix for me. The last few days, however, have been fairly chilly at night and during the morning, only warming up in the afternoons (which coincidently works out quite well for an afternoon swim I must say). So here I am, drinking my second cup of tea this morning, and I already feel strange. I haven’t had this much caffeine in me in awhile. As my friend Michiko pointed out the other day when I mentioned how I was drinking much less tea, “Your body must feel much better without all that caffeine in it.”

Not true, I replied. I compensated by drinking more Diet Coke.

But I find that it’s not very cost efficient to drink a lot of soda in the can because well, it’s expensive if you pay full price. So I only buy cans of soda when there’s a good sale, and beyond that I’m a two-liter man. I did get a fantastic deal on Coke the other day, though, when Thriftway was having a three 12-packs for $9 sale (plus deposit, of course), though I know I’ll never get the same price again. You’d think it would be $9 + (36 x $0.05) = what I paid, but instead I ended up paying $7.74 for three 12-packs, deposit included. I think the checker messed up somehow, and I scoured over the receipt later trying to figure out what he’d done, but I couldn’t seem to process the mistake. Since when I return the cans I’ll get $1.80 back from the deposit money, that means that for 36 cans of Diet Coke, I only paid $5.94. $6 for three 12-packs. That’s a great deal. Too bad I can’t get that prcie every time I go shopping, or I’d be drinking a lot more Coke than I normally do.

We had a bit of confusion here at work the other day. As I was working on one project, I was asked to spot-check a CD and make sure that the software installed properly, it worked, etc. As I started testing it, I thought to myself “Wait a minute, haven’t I already done this?” I remembered testing that particular piece of software in recent past, yes, but since we ship different versions of the software to different places, I thought it was just a slightly different version. Well it turned out it was the exact same piece of software. Towards the end of May I was told to check out the CD that our register software was shipping out on to be duplicated and included with thousands of registers, and that was my first real “if you screw up then lots of people will find out” moment. I finished my work, passed it on to the admin person, and I thought my job was done. So here it was, a little over a month later, and they’re asking me to do the same thing.

Afetr a bit of confusion and investigation from myself, the programmer, and the new admin guy, we discovered that indeed, I had checked the software before, but the CD had just never gotten sent out for duplication. Oops. So I just gave it a once-over, the admin guy burned a new copy of the CD (because we decided that it would be better not to ship out the CD for duplication with the “5/25/04″ date on it given the pressure that was on us to get it out the door this time around), and off it went. I even watched our admin guy take it to Fedex this time around, so unless Fedex loses it I can safely say that my job that was started in late May is finally finished. I just didn’t know it wasn’t done yet.

I made a change yesterday that affects my day to day routine, yes, but mainly I decided to change something that I’ve done for almost a decade now: I changed my email client. Yes, it sounds silly, but it feels like I’m giving up a part of me since I’ve used it for so long. Eudora is the piece of software other than Windows that I’ve used for the longest, but I felt that it was time to move to a different email program given what I want to be able to do with my email now. So I imported seven years worth of messages into my new program, Mozilla Thunderbird, and bid a fond adieu to Eudora. The reason why I only have seven years worth of messages in Eudora even though I’ve used it for longer can be found in my first sent message from October of 1997 where I emailed someone and basically said “Whoops, I erased all my Eudora messages…what’s so-and-so’s email address?” I think I had about two years worth of mail before that little folly, but how I have it set up now I shouldn’t have the same problems.

Now, instead of downloading mail to my computer like most people (those who don’t use webmail systems like Yahoo or Hotmail, that is), all my mail is stored on a remote server with my email provider, meaning that when I switch back and forth between my desktop and my laptop, my email is still in the same places and not stored on one computer or another. For instance, I can close my email program on my desktop, go to work, open it up, and I canstill see my inbox, sent mail, etc. Much easier for the times when I have to erase everything on my computer and reinstall Windows since it’s one less thing I have to worry about saving. Even better, if I ever want to change operating systems–for instance, start using Linux or even join teh Dark Side and get a Mac–I don’t have to worry about compatibility issues.

On a side note, I’m still accepting donations in my “Buy Andrew a 15-inch PowerBook” charity drive.

It’s made checking my email a lot less painful since I have to wonder what’s on what computer. With the excellent built-in spam filters both on the server-side and in my email client, I’m not seeing too much spam anymore, either. My only concern right now is transferring the 5200 messages that were in my sent mail folder in Eudora onto the remote server. I know it’s going to take about 20 minutes or more given the difficulty of what I’m asking it to do, and I’m a ltitle worried given the experience I had transferring one folder with only 500 messages. I had the right number of emails get onto the remote server, but for some reason they all showed up as 1k in size sent on the same date in 1969. methinks there was a hiccup somewhere. I still have the email from Eudora, and that won’t be too diffifult to do again, but it’s a pain. I’m a bit worried about how that happened with only 500 messages, so what happens when I send *5000* emails to my email provider to sit in the Sent folder there? Ug.

This is the price I pay, I suppose. I pay it gladly given the ease of use I expect. Once it’s all complete, then I just have to worry about my email provider going out of business, or their servers crashing and me losing everything, or any number of other things. The first one is the only one that really concerns me, though. I don’t think that will happen, though, but it’s alwasy a possibility.

The other reason that I did this is because my email provider, Runbox, gave its user ten times as much storage space, bumping us all up to 1 GB of room, just like Google’s email service. I figured this was as good a time as any given that amount of storage space. Even with all my email from the last seven years loaded in my account, I can’t imagine I’ll have more than 3-4% of my space filled up. Bless you, Google, bless you. Thanks for jumpstarting an industry that had laid stagnant for so long. Sometimes all it takes is one ambitious company to make things better for everyone. Google’s email service isn’t even open to the public, yet, and the major webmail providers have already increased their storage amounts by huge numbers to try and keep up. Yahoo! went from 4 MB to 100 MB. Hotmail went up to 250 MB. And my provider gave me a gigabyte. Huzzah!

So now I bid one final farewall to Eudora. You’ve treated me well, but I can’t keep forking over $30 every time you release a new version. Sorry, pal, time to go.

Silly, huh? Oh well, just showing my loyalty. I’m so glad that it’s Thursday instead of Wednesday. That means that tomorrow is Friday, and then I have two days in which to do nothing but bask in the glory of extra sleep. I expect today to pass fairly quickly given that I’ll likely be visiting the restroom numerous times resulting from my large mugs of tea and that I have some actual work to do before the end of the day. Always good to get something to do.

Which reminds me, I should probably get to it before I get a lecture from a family member about work before play.

Later.

Posted in Geekery, General