When the ad tells the story
Posted on July 30, 2007
Filed Under Internet & Technology | Leave a Comment
Chuckle of the evening…TechCrunch has a story now about how the amp’d mobile folks squandered their money and put investors in the lurch.
This is how the bottom of the story looks in iGoogle…almost hard to tell where the editorial ends and the ad begins, isn’t it?
Trying to appreciate Mail.app
Posted on July 27, 2007
Filed Under Macintosh | 5 Comments
When I switched from fulltime Windows to fulltime Mac a few months back, I went right from Outlook 2003 on Windows XP to Thunderbird on Mac OS X, with only a slight pitstop at Mail.app. Now with the news that Mozilla is considering inching itself out of the mail biz, I’m wondering if I gave Apple’s Mail a fair shake. I also considered web-based email. Still not interested. I like having my email in separate windows that aren’t dependent on the browser.
But I do keep all my email online. I rely on Island Email’s IMAP server. This makes switching local clients easy. No messages to transfer. With IMAP, you can organize your email in folders right on the server. An email read in a browser or Thunderbird comes into Apple mail already read. Delete in one client or move to a sub-folder, it’s that way in the other client. Island’s IMAP server is excellent. If I can help it, I’ll never go back to POP3. I have around 5,000 messages saved on the server from April 2007 forward. I’ve also been forwarding all my email to Gmail for over 2 years, for backup purposes.
Spam filtering is not an issue since both applications use the wonderful (98.3% correct and counting) SpamSieve.
After a few hours I can say that Mail 2 does have advantages I never appreciated before over Thunderbird:
- It’s much, much faster for searching. In Thunderbird, searching for a word or phrase that appears within the body of a message in a folder with over 5,000 messages saved remotely is very painful. Plus I had to know which folder I was searching. Mail easily searches multiple folders, locally or remote.
- Messages are so much prettier. Thunderbird has improved font and image rendering, but it doesn’t come close to Mail.
- Growl support is better. I kept getting double notifications in Thunderbird. Mail notifications work very well, and I can tell it to ignore the spam folder.
- Smart Mailboxes are handy.
- In Thunderbird, opening an attachment downloads it to the desktop. In Mail, the download is saved to a “Mail Downloads” folder keeping the desktop a little neater. If I open the same attachment from an email again, it opens the same file I already saved locally. Thunderbird would download it again with a filename-1.doc title. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t be uncommon to find 50+ files on the desktop.
- I can use Maildrop to work with Salesforce data in email. Works beautifully.
- One more thing: message threading. This morning I clicked on a message and was getting ready to reply, when I noticed other messages in my inbox were highlighted, saving me from answering a question that was already answered. I forgot about this feature. Helpful.
The downside:
- I can’t stand iCal. That’s not changing. I like having the calendar integrated right in the window with Lightning (which synced with Google Calendar).
- Identities. This is going to be the biggest challenge. I have 3 different email addresses that all go to the same Island Email account. In Thunderbird, I was able to set up identities so when I replied to a message, it would select the identity based on the “To:” field of the message I was replying to. In Mail, I can separate the 3 email addresses with commas and that way I can select from them when I reply, but I have to do that manually and change the signature each time. This is a pain and I’m sure I’ll forget and make mistakes (I made the default my work address, just in case). I’m hoping there’s a script or something somewhere that can duplicate this functionality that I miss. Anyone know?
Maybe Mail in Leopard will fix this shortcoming. For now, I’m willing to stick with Mail and see if I can get used to it.
What do you expect for $3.99 a month?
Posted on July 26, 2007
Filed Under Internet & Technology | 1 Comment
Phone rang a little earlier. Man sounded surprised. “Um, I’m sorry…is this (my home number)?” “Yes. Who is this?” “Well, there must be some mistake because I was calling to check my new Vonage work number.”
I then explained to him that this used to be a Vonage number, but I took it with me when I canceled Vonage and went to Verizon a few months ago. He was friendly enough, apologized and hung up to call Vonage and complain.
I’m guessing that Vonage knew that the number belonged to a canceled account, but they forgot to check the eensy weensy little detail of whether they still owned it? Doesn’t make sense. I have no idea how it happened, but it was kinda funny nonetheless.
I’m just glad the guy decided to test it before printing on his business cards.
Update: Vonage tech support (someone with a very heavy accent) called a few minutes ago. I was in the middle of another call at the time. I only took it because the caller ID said “Private” and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t about the kids. As soon as he identified himself and asked, is this (my number), I knew why he was calling and I explained that this used to be a Vonage number and it’s now ported to Verizon. Their new customer who called last night can’t have it.
He confirmed that they didn’t delete it from their database. Oops. Then he asks me for our old Vonage account number. I told him that I didn’t have that information handy at the moment since it wasn’t a current account, all I remembered off the top of my head was my username on vonage.com, which I can’t log in to anymore. He asked for it. I told him, but due to the language differences he couldn’t make out the letters I was saying. When you say, “A as in Apple, B as in Boy…” and he still can’t get it, you know you have a problem.
Finally, I said, “Look, I’m no longer a Vonage customer and you’re taking MY time. I have another call waiting. This is my phone number and it’s now managed by Verizon. You can’t give it out to anyone else. If you’re having trouble looking up the account information of the customer who used it last so you can delete it from your database, then that is simply not my problem. Sorry. Bye.”
I was nice about it and never raised my voice, but sheesh. Vonage, I didn’t like when you wasted my time when I was a customer, I certainly won’t put up with it now.
546 days, 1 hour, 5 minutes and 35 seconds
Posted on July 24, 2007
Filed Under Life | Leave a Comment
As reported by the Houston Chronicle:
After the Senate Finance Committee approved an expansion of the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover nearly 10 million kids, President Bush offered a strange rationale for threatening to veto it.
“People have access to health care in America,” he told an audience in Cleveland. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”
Strange? How about clueless, uninformed and for the 10 million children he’s talking about…downright cruel and heartless?!?
I have an idea. Let’s not fix any of our problems with homelessness or education. After all, you can just get arrested and go to prison.
Syncing GCal with Plaxo? Check your email
Posted on July 23, 2007
Filed Under Internet & Technology | 1 Comment
I got this message from Google Calendar support a little while ago:
Hi user,
It’s come to our attention that the some of your Google Calendar information may have been mistakenly deleted through your Plaxo account. Because many users were unaware that deleting the data on Plaxo would cause the data to be deleted from their Google Calendar accounts, we are going to restore all of the calendar information that was deleted through Plaxo.
If you do not want Google to restore calendars affected by this issue, please reply to this email by Wednesday, July 23, 9AM PDT. For questions relating to the Plaxo service or this issue, please contact support@plaxo.com.
Thanks,
The Google Calendar Team
Plaxo now greets me with this when I sign in. Just fine by me. Hasn’t worked in 28 days according to the log anyway.
I replied that my Google Calendar was fine the way it is, and asked that they please not touch it. Somehow, I always understood that “sync” meant just that. Delete an event in one location, and it’s deleted in the other. Plaxo wants to think of itself as the hub. So an action taken in Plaxo would be taken at the various sync points and Plaxo would make the external calendar look like the Plaxo one.
I rely on Plaxo to sync my contacts between Thunderbird and Mac OS X (so I can get them to my Blackberry) and it does a fine job. Will be nice if it would work with Gmail contacts. But the calendar? Ugh. Needs a lot of work.
