Many years ago my father pointed out to me that increasingly people don’t say, “you’re welcome” anymore. Since then I have become aware that by and large he’s right. At the end of most transactions, be they in the grocery store, at the bank counter, or in a restaurant, both parties say, “thank you” to each other, but neither says, “you’re welcome.”
Watch for yourself the next time you are at the fast food counter, the employee will had you your food, and when you say, “thank you” they’ll respond with “thank you” as well. Or at the grocery store check out, or the bank, or restaurant. I find that I am conditioned to say “thank you” myself, even when I know that proper response is to say, “you’re welcome.” Just last night as Sibylle and I were leaving the new Longhorn Steakhouse we were thanked by several people and I said “thank you” to each of them in return.
It’s time to become welcoming again. When someone thanks you, say, “you’re welcome.” Or, if you want to thank them too, “you’re welcome, and thank you!”
Thanks for reading, and, you’re welcome, I enjoy the writing.
Recently I joined a very active mailing list for the Ubuntu operating system. In doing so I discovered a “feature” of Gmail. By default (and a setting that you can’t change), any mail you post to a mailing list isn’t reflected in your inbox. Instead the mail is shown only in Sent Mail and All Mail on your account. If you search the Gmail help pages you will find that this is done “to save you time and prevent clutter.”
Normally when you post a message to a mailing list, you see your message and (hopefully) some responses to it. If you thread your messages the responses are all neatly tied back to the original message, allowing you to read entire topics of discussion easily. The problem with Google’s approach to mailing list is that you can’t find your thread in the conversation, even if it is the originating post.
Apple Mail Smart Mailboxes To The Rescue Apple Mail provides a feature called “smart mailboxes.” These are folders that have a filter or set of rules that determine their contents. To see your postings in a mailing list create a new smart mailbox with these rules:
Make sure you select the “meets any” condition and not the “meets all” condition, and tick the “Include messages from Sent” for good measure.
The new folder will now contain the messages you sent as well as the messages you received; and they will be properly threaded.
NB: In my case I have a separate email address for the mail list, so the only messages in sent are ones I’ve posted to the list. I’m not sure how this would work if your primary sent folder was included in the rules for the smart mailbox.
There are always two or three or four books currently being read. Here is the current crop:
The Pillars of the Earth Originally published almost 20 years ago, this Ken Follet masterpiece takes place in 12th century England and centers around the building of a cathedral. Somehow I missed this when it first came out. Oddly enough, since purchasing this copy in Germany, he has published a sequel to the story.
Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager I’ve been a huge fan of the author’s weblog for years. The book takes the stories and “messy thinking” there to new levels. Highly recommended.
The Hacker Crackdown While this book is now somewhat dated (it describes events and technologies in the early 1990s) it is still am interesting and compelling look at the Internet underground.
The Fellowship of The Ring It has been several years since I read the Lord of The Rings in its entirety. Having the excellent movies by Peter Jackson is wonderful, but they aren’t the same as reading Tolkien’s word on paper. Thanks to Sibylle, I’m able to read a beautifully illustrated hard bound copy.
Nearly five years after first purchasing a couple of Macintosh computers (largely due to OS X) I find myself “switching” again. As a software architect I spend considerable amounts of my work day developing models and diagrams using proprietary tools that only work on the Windows operating system. Two years ago, when I had saved enough money, I purchased a ThinkPad laptop expressly to be able to work with the Rational tool set on my own machine.
Windows XP is a good, relatively stable platform; it serves its target demographic fairly well. However, it lacks some of the ease-of-use features that OS X contains. It feels like there are more applications that work the way I wish to work available for the Mac.
I use both Windows XP and Mac OS X on a daily basis. I am very comfortable with either operating system; both have their strengths and weaknesses. But I find myself drawn to OS X over XP more and more. Both of my Macintosh computers are aged now. With G4 processors they are each two generations behind the leading edge curve. Even so, they are both responsive enough to allow me to accomplish the things I want to do with a computer; whether that is email, web surfing, developing new code, or reading electronic books.
For the past of couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with Ubuntu 7.10, and I am finding it very easy to use and configure. I like tinkering around with the various configuration files and settings. Since Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD, exploring the Debian-based Ubuntu distribution is like coming home again. I know where to look for things, I know how to perform basic system administration already. I am planning on getting a second hard drive for the ThinkPad and installing Ubuntu on it so that I can have pure Linux machine to play with and learn from. But I suspect that I will still return to the Macintosh for the majority of my computing.
Like many people I was excited when I learned that Google was adding the IMAP protocol to GMail, and I have been playing with it in various desktop email clients ever since my accounts were all enabled.
By far, Apple Mail handles the fusion of Google Mail and desktop client the best. The directions Google provides are great as far as they go, but there are some additional steps one can take to tighten the integration between the two platforms. Once you’ve added a GMail account to Mail, you will see a [Gmail] folder, and nested inside that will be folders for All Mail, Sent, Drafts, Trash, and Spam. Unless you take an additional step, these folders on your Mac won’t be synchronized with their counterparts on GMail. (You will also see folders for each label you created on GMail.)
Select [Gmail]/Drafts and then click on the Mailbox|Use This Mailbox For menu option. In the popup dialog select Drafts. This will link Mail’s drafts folder with Gmails. Drafts created on your computer will be synchronized with the folder on Googles server.
Repeat these steps for Sent, mating [Gmail]/Sent with Sent, and for Spam, mating [Gmail]/Spam with Junk. Do not mate [Gmail]/Trash with Trash. Linking your local trash with Google’s trash will cause any mail you delete locally to be deleted forever on the server as well.
If, like me, you have multiple GMail accounts, you’ll end up with an entry for each account, nested under Inbox, Sent, Drafts, and Junk. Clicking on the containing folder, Inbox for example, will show you the aggregation of all your incoming mail. Clicking on one of the account labels underneath the containing folder will show you just that category of mail for that account.
One of the nice features about GMail on the web is being able to archive mail, which removes it from the inbox, but leaves it in any assigned labels and in the All Mail label. Apple Mail does not provide an archive button, but you can use the Delete key to get the same functionality. Since we didn’t link the local Trash folder with the [Gmail] folder, selecting an email in an inbox, and pressing the delete key just removes it from the inbox. The mail is still in the All Mail folder on your machine, which corresponds to the All Mail label on GMail. I admit that pressing the delete key to archive is uncomfortable; I suggest trying it our for yourself on some test mail. (A) to convince yourself that it works that way, and (B) as a check that you do not have local Trash linked to [Gmail] trash.
The final step I took was to adjust the Mailbox behaviors for each account. Drafts, Sent, and Junk I set to store messages on the server. For Sent I set the “Delete sent messages when:” option to never. For Junk I set the “Delete Junk messages when:” option to one week.
For the Trash folder I unchecked both “Store deleted messages on the server” option and the “Move deleted message to the Trash mailbox” option. This allows the delete key to act as an archive function.
I’ve been up and running under this configuration for several days now and I am very pleased. I’ve had less success with Windows Live Mail, and Thunderbird as desktop email clients in general, and with their configuration to use GMail via IMAP in particular. They are nice enough but neither provides (to my knowledge) any way to neatly synchronize the Drafts, Sent, and Junk folders the way Apple Mail does. Also, neither Live Mail or Thunderbird handles threaded conversations as neatly.
This morning for frühstück we had Pfannkuchen, or German style pancakes. The recipe was a little thinner than Sibylle remember from her childhood, but the flavor was right, and we both enjoyed them.
(I actually only used 5 eggs, as that was all we had. I might be tempted to try 4 eggs to get the batter a bit thicker the next time. Your mileage may vary.)
Mix the flour and sugar together, and then add the milk and mix. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl before adding them to the dry mix. Mix thoroughly with a whisk.
Cook over medium heat in a skillet with a little butter. The batter is much thinner than American style batter and so it will spread out to cover the pan. When the edges start to dry, flip to the other side. The second side won’t take nearly as long as the first to cook.
The result is more crepe than cake, but delicious. Sprinkle a bit of sugar on the Pfannkuchen and roll up to eat. Or cover with your favorite fruit jelly, or syrup, or honey.
Guten morgen.
I’m not sure when the phrase “twenty-four by seven” entered the mainstream. Recently it has grown to become “twenty-four by seven by three-sixty-five.” Which I think is wrong.
Twenty-four by seven means twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Following the “hours per day, days per week” pattern, the next number given, three-sixty-five, should be weeks per something. Instead it’s days per year, a retreat.
The phrase should be “twenty-four by seven by fifty-two,” or “twenty-four by three-sixty-five.”
Living in the Midwest there is one sure sign of autumn’s arrival. No, it isn’t the fiery red of the leaves on the Maple trees. No, it isn’t the sudden appearance of pumpkins for sale in every parking lot around town. And it isn’t frost on the car windows in the mornings.
No, it’s the invasion of lady bugs into your house. It start innocuously enough with one or two on the screen of a window or sliding door. Then there are a few inside the house, maybe up by the ceiling, in a corner of the room, huddled together. Then one morning you come downstairs to find a dozens of the little beasts on the walls, floor, and furniture.
They are attracted to the warmth of your house and want to winter there. They release pheromones, which tell all the other lady bugs where to go. Being tiny little monsters, they are able to sneak through cracks and crevices not easily found or plugged. Once you’ve had them once, you’ll continue to get them; the pheromones don’t fade from year to year, washing the house to remove the pheromone trail is almost impossible.
Once in your house they don’t do anything but hibernate. unfortunately our homes are too dry in the winter for them to survive so most of them camped out inside will perish. If stressed they will release a tiny bit of blood (it’s yellow), which has a foul smell to scare away predators. The most expedient way to get rid of them is using a shop vac to hover them up and take them back outside.
There are two types of people in the world: those who wait until the car’s low fuel light has been on solidly for a few miles before getting gas, and those who fill up at half a tank. I’m firmly in the fuel light group.
Yesterday when I left work the miles to empty mode of my car’s trip computer read “138.” By the time I was home, some 24 miles later, it read “120.” I figured I could make another round trip to work at that rate.
This morning, however, I discovered that not all traffic is created equally. The stop-and-go build-up on I-35 clobbered my mileage. By the time I reached the parking garage the mileage to empty was a mere “76.” The contrast is amazing. The same trip, the same road, the same car, the same driver; two entirely different results. Yesterday afternoon I covered the 24 mile physical distance using only 18 miles of fuel. This morning I covered the same 24 mile distance using 44 miles of fuel.
Perhaps it really is uphill all the way to work.
Many years ago, when I worked in Vancouver Washington, I was introduced for the first time to the idea of naming servers. All servers have names, but the manufacturing client I worked at was the first place in my experience to use human readable names over something like “lkhmx18.” The development servers there were all rivers (Danube, Orinoco, Nile) while the production machines were stars or planets (Mars, Orion, et cetera).
Some of the places I have worked since then also used names for servers, some with a theme, others just willy-nilly. My computers have had names for a while now, mostly centered around the Winne-the-Pooh characters. My laptops are Eeyore and Tigger, while the iMac is HundredAcreWoods. The problem with Winne-the-Pooh inspired names is that you run out of names fairly quickly. I have been looking for a new theme for some time, one that would allow more latitude in naming.
Recently I have been watching the Lord of the Rings movies and special features. I’m also re-reading the novel. It occurred to me over the weekend that Tolkien’s masterpiece is filled with place names that would make good server or computer names too. Server towers could be named after any of the many towers in the story, while workstations or laptops could use place names. You could even use the names of the various characters for a good long time without running out new material.
With that in mind, I am thinking that the Mac OS X based machines are more elvish and the Windows boxes are dwarfish. The Linux based machines would then be wizards.