I’m on google talk as kgarner@gmail.com. You can find me there, or not.
All posts by Keith Garner
Enjoy Illinois, see Superman!
Last month I turned 30, which I meant to post about, and now its almost too late to be worth it. I really don’t have much to say except 30 is a number that is BIG and ROUND.
Anyway, for my BIG and ROUND birthday, my lovely wife wanted to get me something special. So, she went and visited my local comics pusher, Keith of Keith’s Komix. (Not related to, nor to be confused with Keith of… um… this blog.) Anyway, Keith helped Sarah pick out this awesomely huge 65″ wide Justice League poster with artwork by Alex Ross. Keith apparently hangs out with Alex and Keith told Sarah he could help her get it signed. Which he did. Sarah get it really nicely framed, and its really a beautiful piece now. The picture I have insert blow doesn’t really do it justice, however, you can see where Alex signed signed it.
Anyway, we got that right before we went on vacation. On vacation, we visited some family in Metropolis, IL and took some pictures with the giant Superman statue they have there.
I wanted to get those pictures framed and hang them on the same well and do a wall of super hero stuff. I’m glad I’ve been lazy about that, because this morning in the Chicago Tribune‘s Tempo section was an article on the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity’s tourism posters that feature quirky attractions around Illinois. Most importantly they include the Superman statue poster and had a picture of the power in the paper.
You can see all the posters online at the Trib’s site.
Unfortunately, they are not selling the posters and didn’t foresee a demand for them. I’d really like to get one of the superman posters to frame together with the pictures we took at the statue. I just need to figure out how. The image the Trib has online is too small to be printed out and still look good, otherwise I’d go for straight copyright infringement.
Anyway, getting that poster is now a goal. I just gotta come up with how.
What thunderbird needs to replace mutt for me
I still mostly use mutt for my personal mail. The times I’m not using mutt, I’m not at an ssh capable terminal and end up using SquirrelMail, but that’s only in times of emergency. Anyway, I was inspired to write these thoughts down after an IRC conversation with Ari.
However, at work I’ve switched over to using Thunderbird. I like the offline folder stuff that Thunderbird does, and I recently found a silly extension that just cracks me up: the Display Mail User Agent extension. In general, Thunderbird does what I want, but I find myself missing a few features from mutt that I really wish was there.
- The ability to arbitrarily attach other mail messages. In mutt, I can tag a bunch of messages and do a tag-forward and they are all attached to the forwarded mail. Also, from the compose menu in mutt you can do a shift-A aka
attach-messagenavigate to a mailbox, tag messages, and quit back to the compose mail, and they are attached. For the life of me, in thunderbird, I cannot figure out how to attach a message, much less a whole thread, to an arbitrary mail. I can forward a piece of mail as an attachment, but I cannot forward n>1 messages. I often send interesting threads from mailing lists to friends and co-workers and this crimps my style. - The ability to do a reply to multiple messages and have them all quoted. Similar to the above situation, I can tag multiple messages in mutt and do a tag-reply or tag-group-reply. This feature quotes all the tagged messages as well as add all the appropriate people to the recipient list, for tag-reply this is the senders of the original mail, for tag-group-reply this is everyone who was listed as a recipient in any of the mails as well as the senders. While I don’t often use it to hit people scatter shot, I do often tag-reply to one person, when appropriate, if they have send me multiple messages in the time its taken me to get back to them.
- Custom e-mail headers. This one is purely for amusement value and is nothing that would keep me on mutt over anything else. But it is fun, and I do have a lot defined. In any typical mail you might see something like this if you look at the headers:
X-If-I-Knew-Better-I-Would-Not-Be-Running: Linux 2.6.12 i686
X-Time-Married: 3 years, 11 months, 14 days, 4 hours, 21 minutes, 42 seconds
X-Dinah-Lives: 1 year, 3 months, 21 hours, 38 minutes, 42 seconds
X-Uptime: 20:48:42 up 222 days, 28 min, 5 users, load average: 0.01, 0.07, 0.07
X-The-Amount-Of-Stuff-In-My-Inbox: 92They are all silly, but they keep me entertained, and no one really sees them. However, every once in a blue moon I really give someone a chuckle.
Another feature that would be nice to see in thunderbird doesn’t come from mutt but from Apple Mail in OS X. This isn’t a make or break thing since I’m not used to it, but it is a nifty feature I admire.
- The ability to multiple select mailboxes and have them mingled and threaded properly in message header/index pane. Apple Mail does this, and its very slick. Its another one of those features you don’t use all the time, but it would be often enough to make it worth while. Being able to select INBOX, Sent, and a mailing list would be nice to see the some threads properly threaded all the way through when searching for a message.
Hopefully someone has already written extensions to do this and I just need to be pointed in the right direction. If not, I’ve considered writing some of them myself, but I lack the knowledge of XUL and other technologies I would need. Anyone know any good HOWTOs to get me started? (Oh, and a device to stop time so I have time to actually work on it?)
[Update 8/16: This is a mad knowledge bomb from Mark via IRC:
15:06 <spruance> hey, keith
15:06 <spruance> thunderbird can already forward an arbitrary number of messages
15:06 <spruance> drag those messages to the “send” area of your compose window and they’ll be attached
15:06 <spruance> grab a thread handle to take the whole thread
15:07 <spruance> Similarly, you can highlight more than one message and right click and choose “foward as attachment”
Well, the arbitrary forwarding works, I just must never have multiply selected images. However, under Fedora Core 3, with Thunderbird 1.0.6-1.1.fc3 (20050720) the dragging the message into the compose/address aread doesn’t work. The attachment box opens, but no messages are attached. Mark reports this works on Mac and Windows. Damn Linux.]
Do you use your powers for good or for awesome?
13:42 <meekay> I was on a train once and the woman in front of me called her bank and started giving them identifying information over the phone.
13:42 <meekay> Name, birthdate, social security number…
13:43 <meekay> I was like, “I must not use my powers for evil… I must not use my powers for evil…”
Today’s phrase I hate
I really hate when e-mail is sent where a reply is clearly required, but then they tack on “Please advise.” I’m so sick of that phrase, and I can’t exactly put my finger on why. I’m seeing it quite often in e-mails at work, and maybe its the industry I work for, but I see it at least once a day. Well, just as often I see “Please advice” and I get a slight laugh out of that.
In any case, I think I’m finding the phrase rude, but I’m not sure if that’s why it fully bugs me.
Creative Commons
I’ve been looking into the creative commons licenses for work. For shits and grins, I’ve licensed this site under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. I’ve dumped that attribution into the footer for all to see.
News items that blew my mind
In my reading of the Trib this morning, I came across two articles that blew my mind.
On the front page was: For sale: Trailer w/ocean vu, $1 million obo
So wonderfully Californian, Marsha Weidman’s home has it all–along the beach, far from noisy traffic, with a Jacuzzi used to watch sunsets over the Pacific.
For this, she and her husband recently paid $1.05 million.
For that, they got a trailer, built in 1971, without any land.
Plus, the family must pay “space rent,” which at two Malibu parks dotted with seven-figure trailers ranges from $800 to $2,500 monthly.
The nation’s frenzied housing boom has come to this: Even trailer parks, long the butt of jokes about tornado targets and redneck living, are enjoying fat greenback prices.
My mind started to melt at that, but then I read on…
The seven-digit prices, touching only those trailers parked permanently beside the sea, have made for giddy moments with neighbors such as George Keossaian, 46, who with his wife and two children moved five years ago into the gated Point Dume Club mobile park, where Weidman also lives.
The mobile home he bought for $140,000 then will be worth $950,000 once he completes an 800-foot addition, Keossaian says. A reappraisal this year assigned a $750,000 value to his home, which has no ocean view.
My mind asplode…
The other article was: Bush backs teaching of intelligent design along with evolution
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Bush said Monday that he thinks schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about creation.
During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to detail his views on the origin of the universe. But he said students should learn about both theories.
“I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”
I shouldn’t really be suprised by this, but I am. At the same time, he didn’t really say (at least as quoted) what the headline says. However, given his background, I’m sure he feels that way.
Well, we’re moving on up….to the east side…
I’ve just moved www.kgarner.com and all its associated stuff (i.e. the blog) up to the co-located box I split with some people and off the server that sits in my house. This is part of a larger migration, which I’ll go into later.
If you see anything weird, let me know. I think I did it all right, but Dinah woke up from her nap just as I was finishing, so I had to rush the last little bit. It’ll take a few days for everyone’s DNS to catch up anyway.
Taste of Chicago
On Wednesday, Dave and I ran over to the Taste of Chicago for lunch. (I link to the Sun-Times site because its much much better than the city’s web page for the Taste. So goofy.) We’ve been doing it every year we’ve been working nearby, so we didn’t want to break a 4 year thing. That and the taste can be yummy.
Anyway, I had some thoughts related to the taste, but I’ve been too busy the past few days to follow up with them. Luckily, Nick went there as well and had many of the same thoughts.
To add to Nick’s thoughts:
I noticed some of the same things he did. It seems to be getting a little worse in the non-sensicle taste portions each year.
And while I love going on the 3rd, I have to say this past wednesday 6/29, was perfect for lunch. Fairly low attendence so we were able to get in, get tickets immediately, and never had to wait for food.
My find of the taste was the taste portion at Robinson’s ribs. It was a full link of italian sausage slathered in BBQ sauce and in a bun. On a normal day, that’s pretty close to a full lunch for me.
ezRETS
I normally try to avoid posting about work, as that way often leads to being fired or other unpleasentness. However, I think its okay in this case.
I’m really excited about our beta release of ezRETS an ODBC driver for RETS data sources. This has been one of the coolest projects I’ve worked on for a long time.
We just put out the windows binary today, but the source is available via subversion and if you can build it, it’ll run under Linux or Windows. OS X to follow. We will probably get out a source release next week, we just didn’t have time this week.