My new governor is an Austrian bodybuilder/actor, my dotcom company is making tons of money, and the Red Sox have won 4 straight playoff games.

Now, I think these are all good things, but they’re making me suspicious again that the apocalypse is near.

I’ve finally gotten all my Geocaching log entries into my Geocaching blog. I did about 2/3 of them manually, but then thought it would be worth it to write a script to grab them off the site. The new page on the Geocaching site that shows just the log entry made this a lot easier. For now I have a script that given a list of caches, scrapes the site, decodes the logs and exports them into blogger format for importing. It even updates the timestamps with the times like ‘4:26 pm – ‘, as is my convention in the logs.

Ideally what I want is ‘sync’ button that will pull all changes from the site into the blog. But that will require more time. It’s not so bad to log caches in both places right now.

The reason that I’m doing all this is because these little stories contain interesting anecdotes and experiences in our lives. With over 300 caches done now and what I figure as an average of 20 minutes spent on each cache, that’s a written log of 100 hours of my life. Next to my credit card statements, it’s probably the most detailed journal of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. I’m looking forward to much more.

I’m pretty sure there was a Faustian bargain made some time ago that went something like this:

Medical school flunky:”I really want to sign my checks with ‘Dr.’ and drive a Porsche but memorizing ALL those body parts is too hard.”
Satan: “OK, I can make you a doctor, but your job will consist of menial, repetitive tasks and all your patients will hate you. You’ll probably decide that suicide is a better option.”
Medical school flunky: “But I get the Porsche?”
Satan: “Yes.”
Medical school flunky: “Sounds good!”

Then Satan created dentistry. Suddenly human teeth required several sessions of dedicated maintenance per day brushing, flossing and washing. Otherwise teeth would become extremely painful and simply fall out.

It certainly explains why for thousands of years of human history there are no dentists and suddenly it’s one of those ‘required’ things you must do.

How else could you explain that of all your body parts, this particular one requires so much maintenence? Skin and tissue grow back, bones heal. I don’t spend any time cleansing my elbows meticulously and they seem to work just fine. My cat has yet to see a dentist and I have plenty of marks to prove his teeth work just fine.

Why is it that you only get two shots at healthy teeth and one of those comes at an age when you’re too young to really care? I think we should get our second set of teeth around mid-life, say 40. Or maybe we can cross-breed humans and beavers. Their teeth never stop growing and they must continuously gnaw on hard stuff like wood to file them down. I chew up enough pens; that should be sufficient.

This is all very suspicious. It could only be the work of Satan.

Oh, if you’re reading this Dr. Yu — nice Porsche. No, no I’m kidding really. I’ve been flossing, really I have. Please don’t hurt me (any more than usual)!

I’m on the hunt for another email client for Windows.

Here are my requirements:
1. It must be graphical, client-based. (Web-based is too slow; terminal apps require too much thinking and I like my cut and paste.)
2. It must support IMAP
3. It must support multiple accounts and allow sending from either
4. It must not only check the IMAP Inbox, but also IMAP folders for new messages. I do server-side filtering into multiple folders.
5. It must use subscriptions to IMAP folders; it shouldn’t just display them all.
6. It should be able to group by thread
7. It must be able to hide IMAP messages marked for deletion
8. It must render HTML in messages.
9. It must have a 3-pane interface, with folders on the side, messages at the top, and message preview below
10. It must auto-mark messages as read after viewing in the preview window for a few seconds (customizable)
11. It must allow different filtering/grouping display by folder.
12. It must allow sorting by date, most recent at the top
13. It must allow me to define the folder names for sent-mail and drafts
14. It must allow setting of the IMAP folder root.

Some nice to haves:
– Free would be nice, but this is something that’s important enough to me that I’d be willing to drop $50 or so.
– Redirect and bouce features sure are handy.
– Spell checking (pretty standard these days). This helps keep me from looking stupid.
– Signatures based on account
– A good find command. Apple Mail’s incremental search is pretty nice.

Outlook Express (Windows) falls down on #11 and has this problem where it will show there are messages in a folder but when I open it, none are there. It seems to have problems downloading them. Other than that, it’s pretty well-designed and powerful.

I used Outlook XP for a while, but it was very slow and clunkly, at least for IMAP. Outlook Express is way faster.

Apple Mail is pretty good, except for #5 and it’s kinda slow. It also doesn’t do #4 automatically except on startup or if you “Synchronize” the account.

Outlook Express allows you to subscribe to folders, but you can’t say don’t check this folder unless I open it. The interface looks like you can do that, but it doesn’t work. This is important because there are thousands of messages in my sent-mail folder and it takes a while for the imap server to check for new messages. I still want to have that folder in my list though.

Last week I tried Mozilla and then Thunderbird. Both seemed to have a lot of options, but they were really slow and it didn’t support #4, an absolute necessity.

Everytime a new version of Eudora comes out I try it out and everytime I’m dissapointed. At least this time it didn’t delete all my mail. Eudora is a mess of historical interfaces. I never found it intuitive, especially for IMAP. The one feature I really like from Eudora that I can’t find in other clients is default domain for sending mail. ‘@yahoo-inc.com’ is a real pain to type.

The best email client I’ve used was Claris Emailer back in the day. They really understood what users wanted. So much that subsequent versions of Outlook Express for the Mac were based on Emailer’s interface after Apple killed Emailer. (I saw the product requirements when I worked at Microsoft.) It didn’t support IMAP, but I those were the days before I used IMAP, so that wasn’t a problem.

I’m sure others won’t agree with my requirements, but this is how I use email. And since it’s probably the application I spend the most time in, it’s pretty relevent to my productivity.

Anybody have any good suggestions?

I bought this swanky new Dell 20″ LCD monitor a month ago. When I first got it, I plugged it in to the DVI port on my PowerMac G4 and it worked like magic. It was so clear and large at 1600 x 1200. Then I rebooted for whatever reason and I noticed that my resolution had dropped to 1280 x 1024, which doesn’t look great since it’s a non-native resolution. Worse, the monitor preference panel wouldn’t allow to me select any other resolution or bit depth.

I searched around the web and found a couple of solutions on MacOSXHints. One was to try the SwitchRes X utility. This didn’t seem to work at all. I had no options for changing the resolution. Maybe this only works with analog monitors. DVI is too smart for its own good. The other solution was really simple – turn the monitor off when you reboot. The machine won’t know what to use as the default resolution, so it will will just give you all the standard options. It turns out that this is what happened when I first installed the monitor since I didn’t turn off the machine; I just plugged it in. If I hadn’t done that, I’d probably still be scratching my head trying to figure out how to get the thing to run at 1600 x 1200.

It didn’t seem to matter if I turned off the monitor or not. The only thing that worked was to physically unplug the monitor cable from the back of the machine which involves a lot of fumbling around in an area I can’t reach very well.

I thought I would see if OS 9 would work better. I switched the boot to OS 9 and rebooted. It’s so long since I’ve seen OS 9. I can’t even remember the last time I had to start Classic mode. Well, part-way into the OS 9 boot, my monitor showed a lot of horizontal lines and got stuck. I hit the reset button to restart. It bonged and started up, then rebooted itself again, which is usually what it does after it decides to reset the PRAM. Then it started up again and uh oh – blinking question mark. It can’t find anything to boot from.

After restarting a few more times and trying to start with the ‘x’ key down and intentionally reseting the PRAM, it still wouldn’t boot. I stuck in the Jaguar install disk and got that going, but there’s no option there to reset the startup folder. I tried booting from my OS 9.1 disk, but apparently it doesn’t understand HFS+ or something because it wouldn’t mount 2 of my 3 disks. Hmm, problem. How do I start up this machine? Tried some more disks, but most of them won’t boot my particular G4. Luckily I had gotten a cheap version of Norton Utilties a while back and that one seemed to boot up OK. I was then able to use it run the Startup Disk control panel and set it to startup in OS X. I rebooted again and breathed a sigh of relief as OS X booted cleanly.

It’s still very annoying to have to unplug my monitor everytime I reboot and Safari and the Finder are crashing often, which I don’t think happens at 1280 x 1024. Another option is to try my DVI to VGA converter, but then what’s the point of having a DVI monitor?

I think Apple is punishing me for saving $1000 and not buying one of their monitors. Grrrr. I wasn’t planning on buying 10.3, but if it fixes this problem, it might be worth it.

Who am I kidding? I may last a month or two, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to permanently resist buying the latest version OS X.

When I was growing up in New Hampshire, I used to go hiking a lot with a group of friends. One of our running jokes was to announce that we had to go “due North”, which always meant up the mountain, no matter what direction it really was. I’m not sure why it was so funny, but it was.

Last night my Anne and me were watching Star Trek Enterprise because for some reason, this is one of the shows we agree on. (Sidenote: have you noticed that they jazzed up the theme song a little bit this season? They sped it up a bit and added some drums. It’s still pretty melancholy, but what do you expect from Diane Warren? It could only be worse if Celine Dion was singing it. OK, it isn’t quite Deep Space Nine depressing, but it’s up there.)

The whole crew seems like they need some sort of group anger management therapy session this season. The captain is torturing people and they’re all making brash decisions go after the Xindii, some new race that burned a big hole through Florida in an act of galactic ‘terrorism’. Now Enterprise is sent on a mission to find these Xindii and I assume bomb the hell out of them. Sound familiar?

Anyway, the captain is barking his usual obvious reactive commands:
Ensign: They’re hacking into our computer!
Captain: Block them!

Then maybe all this anger gets him confused because he says this:
Captain: Change our course 22 degrees North!

Umm, North? What exactly is North way out in outer space? If you haven’t been paying attention “North” is defined as the direction towards Earth’s North Pole or usually as we measure it, towards a particularly magnetically attractive area of earth someone near the North pole.

So how exactly do you define North in outer space? If they’re using Earth’s notion, then any direction is going to be directly back to Earth for a few light years.

‘Years’ have their own set of problems too. What planet? Why should Earth be the definition?

I hope we never encounter beings from another planet. Integration is going to be a bitch. We can’t even get computers with different software running on them to work properly together. How are we going to get machines made by different species working together?

I know, SOAP!!

“Because in `Terminator’ we always had powerful women. If she takes it the wrong way, it’s not my fault.”

— Arnold Schwarzenneger on his comment to Arianna Huffington during last night’s debate when he said “I just realized that I have a perfect part for you in `Terminator 4.'”

You’ve got to at least give this guy credit for his sense of humor.

We spent a while trying to find something like this last week as time is running out to send in our absentee ballots for the CA recall. KQED (which seems to be the only thing I listen to these days) has a vote by issue quiz you can use to vote on the candidates based on their responses on critical issues. After listening to the debate last night, I could see some of the candidates through their responses, but it was still an informative exercise. Take the quiz.

All my boulter.com mail is bouncing right now. The hurricane cut the power to the mail server, which lives in Maryland. Hopefully the power will be restored in the next few days. In the meantime, I can be reached at bowtah@yahoo.com.

A cribbage hand scorer, written entirely in Javascript.