It's not the holiday season, and my birthday is still three months off... otherwise, I could ask someone to buy me this.
...so that entry wasn't actually "brief". Sue me.
I haven't been up to communicating much lately, and I'm still not -- but I don't want this page to go all white again, so I'll do a brief update.
I was going to do a review of QuickMail and PowerMail, but I don't really have the inclination to do so any longer. For various reasons, I've decided not to use either of them -- they're reasonably good apps, but not worth the price. One of them also has that weird "feature" where, if you show full headers and click "forward", the forwarded message has only brief headers (what are these people smoking?) It also puts the headers at the bottom instead of the top -- hint, guys: they're called "headers" for a reason; if they were supposed to go at the bottom, they'd be called "footers".
Anyway. It's now a choice between Apple Mail or sticking with Eudora. In doing some more research on Mail, I found, unsurprisingly, that I was not the first person to take note of its shortcomings, and quite a few people have written various Applescripts to compensate. What did surprise me was that Mail is partially open source, which means that you can modify the source code to add or change features. (I put in a bundle from one developer to make Mail support priority flags and return receipts, for example.) That being the case, I'm much more inclined to move to Mail now, although I do intend to give it a more rigorous workout before I'm sure about the move.
I ran various errands on Saturday and discovered, while I was buying new clothes, that my formerly forty-inch waist is now down to a thirty-six. I also discovered, when I went to the movie theater, that the critics were largely correct about "The Punisher".
I put a bunch of stuff up on eBay on Sunday, including all my back issues of Playboy -- then, much to my annoyance, eBay pulled the auction and sent me a reprimand, saying that Playboy can only be listed in the "Adult" section. I wrote them back and gently pointed out that they themselves have Playboy listed as one of their categories in the "General -- Magazine Back Issues" section, so I couldn't understand what they were complaining about, and to please put my auction back up. I haven't received a response yet, so I suppose this weekend I'll throw in the towel and list them in the "Adult" section instead.
I had plans to go to Six Flags today, but when I was looking into that a few days ago, I discovered, much to my extreme annoyance, that they are currently only open on weekends. I'm thinking about going to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg instead, since I know they're open during the middle of the week (I would very much prefer not to go to an amusement park on a weekend, for obvious reasons).
Almost done watching Bab 5 -- only six more eps to go, plus the special features on the last two discs. Probably wrap that up over the next few days.
I haven't been shooting in quite some time, so if I don't go to Busch Gardens next week, I'm thinking about renting a car and heading to the NRA headquarters firing range to burn some powder. If I do rent a car, I should probably also run some errands while I have it, like donating some old books and clothes -- might as well make the most of the rental as long as I'm doing it.
There's been a pretty nasty stink in the local news lately about a 15-year-old girl who said that three boys raped her in the high school bathroom. The three boys were arrested almost immediately and spent the next several days in jail -- then, after various witnesses told the police what they saw and the accuser herself admitted she had lied, the charges were dropped. These three underage boys were all publicly identified by name and age, as well as the high school they attended. The girl's identity is still being concealed, though, and -- get this -- the police have said that they're not going to charge her with a crime. This girl committed a felony and did irreparable damage to those three boys' lives (you know that, no matter what happens, there are going to be people out there who will still think they're guilty), and the police are still concealing her identity and saying that "she needs help, not punishment". Am I the only one who understands that this kind of thing produces a backlash against feminism? Equal rights means equal responsibilities, folks. It's not going to do a heck of a lot of good for race relations, either, considering that the girl is white and the three boys are black. Well, at least one of the boys' fathers is talking about a lawsuit, which is something, at least. "Help, not punishment." Maybe she needs both. OK, rant mode off...
Hmm. I spent the last couple of weeks sweltering in the heat, since the AC in this building isn't turned on until the last weekend in April. So it got turned on Saturday morning, and -- naturally -- the weather turned cold again. Very cold... last night, it dropped to about forty degrees, which is very unusual for this time of year.
I'm slowly managing to get more stuff done around the apartment... I did two loads of laundry on Monday and was planning to do two more yesterday, but discovered, much to my annoyance, that both the washing machines in the building are broken again. Other than that, I'm making progress -- I've dusted about half the baseboards and hope to finish that tomorrow, then vacuum the entire apartment. I still have junk in the closets that I have to sort thru and either donate, organize, or throw out. I really hate cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom, but fortunately, I never have to. They always stay spotless on their own. *cough cough bullshit cough*
And that's the latest... now returning to stealth mode for who knows how long...
Testing of PowerMail and QuickMail are both complete. They both have good features, but they've also got some problematic flaws, so I won't be switching to either of those apps, either. The options for email clients are therefore either:
1) Stick with Eudora (most likely choice), or
2) Switch to Apple Mail.
Option three, switching to Entourage, would also be a possibility, assuming that later versions have fixed its bugs, but at this point, I'm rather tired of testing email clients, so I don't think I'm going to go to the trouble of seeking out a later version of Entourage for testing.
A fuller report on PowerMail and QuickMail will be coming up later when I feel up to writing it (the main problem I'm having right now is that the AC in my apartment isn't turned on yet, and it's too hot in here for me to write anything like that).
Meanwhile, at Denise's suggestion, I quote the text of an advertisement from Sunday's Washington Post. I am not making this up. (And, for the record, the woman in this ad looks almost exactly like Julianne Moore, which I find pretty strange somehow.)
-----
I'M NOT A SHARK
My name is {blank} and I am a Divorce Attorney.
Even though my line of business forces me to be aggressive and cruel to men, I am a human being with caring and professional morals. You should feel like you have a partner on your side that understands your wants and needs during this difficult time in your life. Let's work together and show that scumbag that you are not weak and fragile. You are an independent woman who's going to take what is rightfully yours. Beware of the bottom dwellers that suck you of your youth and energy while they play with your emotions. Let me be there for you.
-----
I don't even know where to start with this one... the first sentence speaks for itself, of course: "I'm a nasty, misandristic bitch with a heart of gold". I also like the bit about the independent woman taking what's rightfully hers (when what they really mean, of course, is taking property from the man and giving it to the woman, which is hardly a sign of independence whether you think the man deserves it or not).
I could go on for pages about this ad, but why should I have all the fun? :-)
The experiment with Apple Mail is done. A decision is pending... in the meantime, I've begun to study PowerMail and will probably be writing a review of it in a couple of days or so. Actually, I could probably already write one now, but I want to be sure to put it thoroughly thru its paces before I post a review for all to see.
Denise and I spent some time last night experimenting with DVD ripping on my PowerBook. It works -- sort of -- but it's a time consuming hassle. So far as we've been able to discover, there are no apps under OS X that make ripping DVDs as simple and straightforward as CD ripping apps typically make it. We'll keep researching and see what we can find out.
I've been using 800x600 resolution on my PowerBook, but I want to start using 1024x768 instead -- 800x600 works fine, but images and text are sharper and cleaner at 1024x768 because the OS has to dither everything at the lower display. I'd also like to have the extra room on my screen, and somehow, the higher resolution just looks... I don't know, more modern or professional or something like that somehow. The only thing is, it's going to take some experimenting with fonts to make everything easy on my eyes... I'm getting to be the age now where smaller fonts are harder on my eyes.
A related annoyance in this area is that fonts are not displayed consistently across applications in OS X. As nearly as I can tell, this happens in apps that haven't been fully written (or rewritten) for OS X. For example, Safari, iChat, Apple Mail, PowerMail, and even Internet Explorer (all modern apps) show fonts correctly, but AOL Instant Messenger and Eudora (which obviously suffer from a lot of legacy code) don't.
In watching today's eps of "Babylon 5", I remembered something from a while back that I had forgotten before: I need to write an essay comparing the plight of autistics in our society to the plight of telepaths in Babylon 5. The nature of telepaths, and the way they're treated in human society, has a lot of parallels to what it's like to be autistic in our society, and how our society often treats us. In fact, there's even a "telepathic spectrum": telepaths are rated from P1 (very slightly telepathic, not much more than an unusually strong intuition) to P12 (telepathy so powerful that you have to learn how not to hear other people's thoughts, and you can even control other people's behavior in a limited way). There are also unusual telepathic abilities, such as telekinesis, but they're very rare; most telepathy consists of mental communication, nothing more.
Telepaths, once they're identified as such, are required by law to either join the Psi Corps so they can be monitored and regulated, or to take special drugs, called "sleepers", that suppress their telepathy (and which also have some pretty harsh side effects... those who take the sleepers are often compared to zombies because they're always so out of it). And there are laws on what telepaths may or may not do; for example, it's illegal for telepaths to go into casinos, even if they're not actually gambling.
From the ep that I'm watching right now, "The Paragon of Animals", here's a quote from Byron, a P12 who is the leader of a small group of telepaths that are rebelling against the tyranny that they're subjected to on Earth. "Do you know what a telepath has to do in order to avoid picking up stray thoughts? We have to kick down our natural abilities. Run rhymes and little songs through our heads, round and round. All that to keep from picking up what you're broadcasting loud enough to be heard halfway down the hall... Mundanes want us to fill our heads with noise and babble so we won't hear what you're shouting at the top of your minds."
Not an exact parallel to being autistic, but pretty damn close...
Ahh... at long last, the complete Babylon 5 collection on DVD... and I'm one of the first people on the planet to have the full set.
So, today has been relatively quiet. I started off the day by successfully using my PowerBook as an alarm clock, set to play some music in iTunes. For tomorrow morning, I'm going to try having it open a stream from the local public radio station, WAMU. Assuming it all works, I can unplug the clock radio and toss it in the closet.
I downloaded the next email client that I'm going to test, PowerMail, but haven't looked at it yet -- I'm going to wait another a day or two, until I'm finished dissecting Apple Mail.
Ran to the bank today and deposited my unemployment check and payment from my mother -- I'm doing some miscellaneous research and clerical/administrative type stuff for her. I then came straight back to the house because the weather around here is absolutely miserable right now.
Amazon reports that my fifth season Babylon 5 DVDs have been shipped and should be here on Wednesday. *hop hop* I also find, in looking at Amazon, that they're selling two different "bundles": the first four seasons, and all five seasons. For some weird reason, it actually costs a dollar less to buy all five seasons than it does just to buy the first four. Whatever... it's obviously no concern to me.
So... after all these years of patiently waiting, I'm finally going to have the complete Babylon 5 collection (well, except for some of the made-for-tv movies). What else is there to say? Actually, I think I'll quote a haiku that a certain someone (nudge, nudge, wink) made up about me and Denise in the Fall of 2002...
guns are good weapons
in the babylon five suite
wedded bliss back east
(Hmm... I'm actually not sure about this. Are there formal rules on capitalization in haiku? I'd assume there isn't, since it's a Japanese form, but I think it looks better in all lower case and with no punctuation.)
And so, another fairly quiet weekend wraps up. I went to Union Station yesterday, bought a Powerball ticket (and didn't win), mailed another book that sold on Amazon, and saw "Hellboy", which was an enjoyable distraction. Now that we've got that out of the way...
I'm currently in the second day or so of beta testing Apple Mail, and thus far, I can say that from what I've seen, it's a big improvement over the version I tried a year ago, although it still needs some work.
Mail now supports threads. This is the first client I've used that did that, so I can't really say whether the threads are well-implemented or not. It does take a little bit of getting used to; one oddity is that you may be looking at something in your inbox that's actually a thread summary, rather than an individual email, which is something I've never experienced before. I suspect I'd come to like this feature, given a bit of time.
The spam filter, pretty good in the earlier version, is now even better. I was getting about 90-95% accuracy before I even started training, and it appears to be learning very quickly. Mail also offers another nice feature, not present in the earlier version that I tested: if an HTML-enabled message is marked as spam, Mail doesn't load any images unless you click the prominently-displayed "Load Image" button. This saves time, of course, and also offers the added benefit of preventing bugs from confirming your email address. Nice touch. (One thing I do miss from Eudora is a "spam score", a numerical value from 1 to 100 that tells you the client's estimate of how likely it is that any particular email is spam. With Mail, it's strictly a "spam or not spam" proposition.)
I reported that earlier versions of Mail did not support BCC. As it happens, this is incorrect... BCC was supported, but the feature was hidden (and no information was available on it in Help, either, which is why I assumed the feature didn't exist). You also had to turn it on with each and every email in which you wanted to use it. It can now be set to appear by default every time you start a new message. Three cheers to whichever genius at Apple fixed this incredibly knuckleheaded blunder.
Another knuckleheaded blunder that's been fixed: email forwarding. In earlier versions of Mail, if you opened an email, revealed full headers, then clicked "Forward", the forwarded message would contain only brief headers, not full headers. Excuse me, but when I reveal full headers and click "Forward", I'm doing it for a reason. This now works the way it's supposed to.
Previous versions of Mail were helpless at forwarding HTML-enabled email as well. This function has been somewhat improved in the latest version of Mail -- now, at least, images and text do appear in the email, whereas originally, all my recipient/victim saw was badly garbled code. Nevertheless, there's still a good deal of room for improvement. A forwarded HTML-enabled email should at least look the same when you're composing it as it did when you received it -- which isn't the case with Mail; the message becomes pretty significantly deformed.
Mail supports multiple accounts, and it supports POP, IMAP, .Mac, and Exchange servers. (SSL is also supported, although SSL options are too limited, especially compared with Eudora's.) Each email account can be individually configured with a pretty good degree of flexibility, with one exception: you can't configure each account to be automatically checked at different times. I have three accounts, two of which I rarely use and prefer to check only once a day (since I don't like to hammer servers), whereas I prefer to check my main account once every five minutes. This can't be automated in Mail -- only a minor nuisance, but a nuisance nonetheless. Of course, there are ways to work around the problem if you use manual email checking or are fluent in Applescript, but kludges shouldn't be necessary for such relatively basic functionality.
One annoyance that I found when I originally configured my three email accounts: when I tried to create the third one, Mail told me that a certain directory path was already in use by the second account, a glitch that should not have come up since the directory path name is determined by your incoming server settings for any particular account. I'm not sure what caused this or how common it is, but it made for a pretty frustrating 20 or 30 minutes while I sorted out the problem. Ultimately, I had to delete both accounts, then create them in reverse order, which cleared everything up.
If you receive an email from someone who is in your Address Book, Mail can also be configured to let you know whether that person is on their AOL IM or iChat client. I personally have no use for this feature and leave it turned off; others, of course, may feel differently.
I'm also not a "power user" of filters -- or, as they're called in Mail, rules -- but for anyone wanting simple to intermediate filter capabilities, they're comparable. On the higher end, Eudora appears to offer more power, although Mail does offer two abilities Eudora doesn't. First, in Mail, you can filter by incoming account, and second, you can run Applescripts as a filter action. I don't know why Eudora lacks those abilities.
Mail doesn't support priority flags. Admittedly, priority flags aren't generally put to good use (so-called "high priority" emails are usually spam these days), but I don't like Apple deciding for me that it's a feature I don't need, especially when it's a simple and basic feature that would not be difficult to include. Apple, please correct this in future versions of Mail -- if we don't want priority flags, we won't use them.
Incoming attachments are handled very well in Mail: they simply appear in the body of your email, and you can decide what to do with them from there. If your friend mails you an MP3, you can even play it right in Mail without having to open another application. If you want to save the attachment, you specify where you want Mail to put it, simply by clicking on the "Save" button, which brings up a standard "Save" dialogue box. Eudora's treatment of incoming emails is sloppier: all incoming attachments are sent to the same folder, and it's up to you to move them to their final destination.
Mail's handling of outgoing attachments is much more simplistic. All attachments are encoded as AppleDouble, also known as "MIME" -- in fact, Mail offers no configuration options in this department at all. AppleDouble is supposed to work fine with both Macs and Windows machines, so perhaps this isn't such a big deal, but nevertheless, I'd rather have more flexibility, since I have occasionally had trouble in the past sending attachments to Windows users that I had to clear up by changing my attachment encoding options in Eudora.
Mail's options for handling messages on the server are too weak. There are five settings: remove from server immediately, remove when moved from Inbox, or remove after one day, one week, or one month. Those are all fine, but I'd much rather be able to decide whether to delete messages from the server on a message-by-message basis, as Eudora and Entourage both allow. Also, Mail has some problems actually removing emails from the server when it's configured to do so. For example, I have Mail configured to remove messages from the server when I move them from my Inbox, but often, the messages aren't removed, even if I wait for an hour or so and make sure that Mail has logged into the server a number of times.
Finally, in the "little things mean a lot" department. Many other clients offer a lot of small settings that you might not think much about until they're not there anymore, and in Mail, most of them aren't there. In Mail, for instance, you can't change the format of the "date received" column. All dates are age-sensitive and are shown in your time zone, and that's that: if you would prefer that Mail give the actual date of an email instead of saying "Yesterday", or if you happen to prefer that the date be shown in the sender's time zone rather than your own, you're out of luck. When you've opened an email message, the only thing you can do with it is delete it or close it -- you can't, for example, page down to the next message or page up to the previous one. You'd like to configure how Mail behaves when you close or delete that message? Mail returns you to the mailbox you were just looking at, and if you'd rather it did something else instead, that's just too bad. Return receipts, in either direction, are not supported. And so on.
One "little thing" that I'll give Mail credit for: when someone sends me an HTML-enabled email in a microscopic font, I can simply increase the font size to make the email more legible. (Why doesn't Eudora do this...?)
So what am I going to do? Well, I'm really not sure yet. I've been using Eudora 6.0.1, which is showing its age in a lot of ways. It's aesthetically displeasing, mangles the hell out of HTML-enabled email, handles attachments awkwardly, and just generally seems to think that it's still 1996. Eudora does not take advantage of any of the features of OS X that I've seen. Rather, it appears that Qualcomm simply took the original source code for Mac Classic OS and recompiled it for OS X. Even at that, though, it's still a powerful and versatile app, and it offers a number of functions and abilities that -- well, I seldom, if ever, use most of them, but I'm also uncomfortable about not having them available to me.
Mail, by way of comparison, is slickly polished and has the overall demeanor of a modern-day application, as is evidenced, for example, by its handling of HTML-enabled email, its support for threads, and its handling of incoming attachments. Mail is fully integrated with OS X and avails itself of such things as the OS X Address Book (Eudora still uses its own proprietary address book). Overall, though, Mail doesn't offer as much power or flexibility as Eudora; as is often the case with Apple software, Mail seems to think that it knows the best way for you to work, rather than allowing you to tell it how you want to work. Fortunately, it's usually right (Apple's studies on how people use computers are very thorough), but I find it rather arrogant that it doesn't even allow for the possibility that it might be wrong.
I guess a few more days of experimentation is in order.
Denise wanted me to mention that I've had two more letters printed in the Washington Post. I guess she doesn't want me to get too nonchalant about the fact that it's becoming increasingly routine for me to be printed in the second most prestigious and influential newspaper in the country. :-) OK, now that we've got that out of the way...
My several-days long experimentation with Entourage has disclosed that, while it has a lot of nice features and so on, it also possesses a number of flaws. Many of them I might be willing to live with -- such as keyboard shortcuts that mysteriously stop functioning and start again, or scrollbars that gray out and refuse to activate when you click on them. However, I also discovered, after further investigation, that Entourage sometimes refuses to retrieve certain messages from the server (and yes, I'm sure it's the app, not a server issue). Obviously, that's not acceptable in any way, so Entourage is no longer under consideration. My next review is going to be Apple Mail. The last version of Mail was terrible, but this version is supposed to be a lot better. We'll see, he said skeptically... I've already run into problems with it. I was working on configuring it this afternoon, and I was getting an obscure error message when I tried to create my third account. I had to work around the issue by deleting another account, creating the third account second instead, and then recreating the account that I deleted. Not an auspicious start.
The other day, when I was going thru IMDB checking on various people, I happened to remember something that happened when I saw "Austin Powers: Goldmember" in the theater a while back. I knew I recognized the character "Fook Yu" from somewhere, so I checked during the credits and was pretty sure that I recognized the name, Carrie Ann Inaba, as a classmate from junior high. Turns out I was right... the last time I Googled her, I couldn't find any information, but when I looked again this time, it turns out that she now has her own web site. I dropped her a note, saying hello, mentioning one or two funny stories that I remembered about her from the seventh grade English class that we had together... I told her I wasn't sure she'd even remember me, since we didn't really know each other very well, but that I just thought it would be neat to say hello. I wasn't sure she'd write back, but she did... she didn't remember me at first, but with a bit of prodding (and a photo of myself around that age), her memory was jogged. We exchanged a few emails, gave brief life stories, and talked a bit about life, the universe, and everything. It was a gratifying experience.
I just got back from a very satisfying evening of dinner and hookahs with Rob. We parked in Bethesda and wandered around a bit to see what we could find... Rob first wanted to try Jaleo, but the wait there was too long, so we ended up instead at a smaller Italian place called Centro. The appetizers were excellent, the entrées and dessert were just average. The atmosphere was very good, and the service was outstanding... I think my favorite part was when we had two different people at the same time refilling our water glasses. :^)
My evening smoke went quite well, even though my tobacco is getting too old... Rob, unfortunately, had worse luck. He discovered that his base has a crack that caused a pretty rapid leak, so he had to smoke with a towel under his hookah. (Later, when he was taking the hookah down after we were done, he dropped and broke his clay bowl, too. It really wasn't his night.)
We spent some time trying to install Panther on his iBook, but the installation CDs didn't play well with the external CD drive, so after we tried various methods, we had to throw in the towel.
Rob hasn't done a heck of a lot of work on the house lately, except to clear out a lot of the deadwood and weeds in the backyard -- it's really started to look good back there. Once he yanked all the poison ivy and dead shrubs, he made several odd discoveries, including the rusting hulk of a pushmower. He also found that there were tulips in the soil that hadn't had the opportunity to grow in who knows how long... this Spring, though, they're coming up.
I also finally got to meet Rob's cat, Jinx (unfortunately, I didn't bring the camera with me this evening, so I couldn't get photos). Jinx was a stray that Rob took in. She's a solid black cat with a somewhat oddly-shaped head, almost like a triangle. Rob reports that she's usually a very standoffish cat, but she took to me right away -- cats seem to like me, or at least many cats do. Rob has taken her to the vet and given her a full checkup and gotten her all her shots and so on. She's in excellent health, especially as is evidenced by her very smooth and shiny coat, but she does have four cavities, all in rear molars. The vet wanted to pull the teeth, but Rob refused, saying that cats need their teeth for defense (especially outdoor cats like Jinx). I told him I'd check with Denise to see what she has to say about treating cavities in cats, since she'll no doubt have suggestions on what to do... Denise? :-)
The test of Entourage is going to go for another day or so, then I'm going to try Apple Mail for a few days. Entourage is powerful, but it has a few weird quirks and bugs... of course, I'm using version 10.0.0, which explains a lot -- later versions probably corrected a lot of the errors. x.0 versions of software tend to be pretty buggy, especially in a case such as this one, where it's the first version of the software.
Anyway, here's the kind of thing I was talking about with Eudora mangling the hell out of HTML-enabled email. I'm a soon-to-be-ex-member of Columbia House DVD. Here's one of their marketing emails in Eudora. And here's the same email in Entourage. (Which is also how it would appear in most other HTML-enabled email clients.)
That's just the top portion of the email, not the whole thing, but you get the idea... notice, for example, that the JavaScript drop-down menu appears properly in Entourage, whereas Eudora doesn't know what the hell to do with it -- all the different film genres that should be in the drop-down menu just appear as text in the email.
I'm beginning to wonder whether I'll ever manage to try any other recipe in my bread machine... I love this pumpkin spice bread so much that I've never gotten around to trying the others that I'm interested in, such as banana bread and corn bread.
Well, the bread is started, and it'll be done in about another half an hour, and it's making the apartment smell really nice... I like that part of it almost as much as I enjoy the bread itself. :^)
So, less than twenty-four hours after I told Denise that there hadn't been a new Mac virus in three years, and after we spent some time wondering how long it would be before the next one would appear, we see from Slashdot that there's a new OS X Trojan Horse. We both knew it was just a matter of time, and this one is only a "concept virus", but even so... eerie timing.
Well, back to finishing up the laundry and preparing all my ingredients... I'm baking another loaf of my signature pumpkin spice bread this evening. Yum...
Wow, it's been a week again, hasn't it? I am so bad about this. OK, what's been going on lately...
Well, I upgraded to OS X 10.3 on Saturday afternoon. The upgrade went quite smoothly, with the usual expected repercussions -- just some apps needing updates, nothing more. (With one exception that I'll get to in a minute.) Panther has a lot of nice new features that I really like, so I'm glad I made the switch. Finder windows, in particular, are greatly improved over Jaguar, and the Finder's behavior has been enhanced in quite a few ways as well. The latest version of Safari is a bit of a mixed bag, I'm afraid. Many of its features are quite a bit more powerful in a lot of ways... unfortunately, Apple decided to monkey around with the fonts a bit, and while the effect is not usually noticeable for the most part, it does have the effect of really screwing up the list of displayed results in Google. Like many people, I use Google very heavily, so for that reason alone, I may have to switch browsers.
There's been only one other real mishap with Panther. After I upgraded the OS, Eudora started seriously misbehaving for the next several days (long timeouts), so I began to take a good look at migrating to another email client... something I've considered in the past but have avoided doing because of the hassle. After reading reviews and looking at various apps, I've narrowed it down to two choices, either Microsoft Entourage (which is essentially the Mac version of Outlook) or Apple Mail. Right now, I'm giving Entourage a test drive for a few days. Once I've gotten a good "feel" for it, I'm going to do the same thing with Mail. The last version of Mail that I used sucked Arcturan megarocks, but I'm told that the latest version of Mail is greatly improved. We'll see.
Eudora did stop misbehaving after a few days for some reason, but that was still long enough to convince me to migrate. Eudora is a pretty powerful app, or was in its day, but it's just getting too "long in the tooth". Especially the way it handles HTML-enabled email, which is an absolute disgrace... and please don't tell me that email should not be sent in HTML format; whether you believe that or not, HTML-enabled email is only going to become more commonplace, so having a client that can handle it is important. In any event, once I get a screenshot of a complex HTML-enabled email, such as the ones I get from Godiva and Victoria's Secret, I'll take screenshots of both the Eudora version and the Entourage or Mail version (whichever one I happen to be reviewing at the time) and the difference will be painfully clear.
Inney-hoo. My inclination right now is to go with Entourage. From what I've seen thus far, Entourage has more powerful features than Mail (such as Online Status and Priority Flags, neither of which are supported in Mail), and it also includes a PIM. Even so, I do want to give Mail a chance, mainly because I'd really prefer not to use any more Microsoft products than I have to. On the other hand, I'd like to think that I'm not so blindly dogmatic in my anti-Microsoft stance that I'll refuse to use a Microsoft product if I conclude that the MS product is, in fact, the best choice...
Mailsmith is another one that I looked at but decided against for various reasons. Mailsmith is powerful and versatile, and of all the apps I looked at, it's the only one with a spam button -- one click, and an email is automatically reported thru SpamCop. Nice feature. Unfortunately, Mailsmith's interface is pretty confusing, and Mailsmith costs an arm and a leg. I'm not paying $100 for an email client.
Had a doctor's appointment last Friday, and he reports that I'm in great shape... my cholesterol has dropped 25 points, from 192 about six months ago to 167 now. My blood pressure was about 130 over 90 six months ago, considered "pre-hypertension" by the new guidelines, but is now holding steady at about 110 over 70. Everything else in the various tests that I took also indicates that I'm in great physical shape, except for some minor breathing constriction... it's not big enough to worry about, but it is yet another indication that even the three or four cigarettes a day that I typically smoke is not a safe amount to smoke. *grumble* I hate those damn things...
I'm still having fun with Halo, although I'm currently stuck in a maze and can't find my way out. Very annoying. If I can't find the exit soon, I may have to cheat and do a search for maps.
I'm starting to study Applescript... I've never really gotten into it before, but lately, I've become more interested in scripting a lot of the things that I do, and also experimenting with some other stuff as well. It looks like Applescript is a pretty powerful tool, especially when coupled with a scheduler, so we'll see what I can end up with. I'll probably want to buy a book or two on Amazon.
The final season of Babylon 5 comes out on DVD on Tuesday! I've placed my order with Amazon and specified overnight shipping. *bounce bounce*
OK, am I the only guy who is majorly, majorly annoyed by those ridiculous "Smiling Bob" ads for Enzyte? *grumble*
I saw "Dawn of the Dead" on Monday -- I think I'm going to have to stop seeing horror films for a while. Someone who's been having problems with depression should probably stick to lighter/more positive cinematic fare. I think on my next outing, I'm going to see "Hellboy".
And that's the latest for now...