icanhazbeard!!1

Ever since I hacked my thumb to bits (read: sliced a little bit of the end of my thumb) I'm afraid of sharp objects. Obviously this presents a problem in the morning routine. Ergo, additional facial hair accumulates. Luckily, my wife has a secret obsession with hockey players and their playoff beards.



Christmas posts to follow - wife gots a new camera to show off :)

i chopped my thumb!

in the spirit of minimizing the amount of typing i need to do, i'll trade in the following picture for 1000 words.



To make a long story short, an 8" chef's knife took a decent chunk off the tip of my thumb, right through the nail. Duke urgent care sewed me back together with 6 stitches, three of which actually go through the nail. That part was pretty interesting - they had to burn 6 little holes in my thumbnail to thread the stitches through. I'll go back today to have them check it all out and make sure it's not going to fall off. I'll take a better picture later when I change the bandage :)

on the internets

Today we see (a satire of) Microsoft's latest "wow" gadget: Surface. While the video's newly updated audio track is a bit on the sarcastic side, it does beg the same question that I had when I first saw this thing: WHY. SO. BIG?! Video.

Speaking of Microsoft, looks like they'll be in hot water soon over bundling their cheatin' web browser Internet Explorer with Windows. The short version is this: Opera (3rd party browser developer) is suing Microsoft for bundling IE with their operating system, complaining that it takes advantage of their "dominant position" in the market. Additionally, the offense is further aggravated by the fact that the browser doesn't even conform to standards widely accepted by nearly all others. This results in developers designing websites to function properly in IE (again, due to its prevalence) which indirectly defames other standards-conforming browsers with how poorly the pages are rendered. I think there's some weight behind this one - MS is in for some trouble.

Now I've been a little hard on old Billy G today. Steve Jobs is no better - I've got to hand it to this guy - Apple went too far with their representation of perceived Windows machines on your network. It was funny to me until I realized that it was on every Mac running Leopard in the world. Smug, indeed (yet somehow still funny).

I'd pick on Linux today, too, but... well, market share speaks for itself :]

Toyota's new 'bot needs to go pee-pee

What is it about making a robot look semi-human that these brilliant engineers find so difficult? It seems like a slew of freakish contraptions emerging as of late are just dying to prove that we're actually moving backwards from R2D2? Toyota is taking this in an entirely new direction, proving that making a robot which appears to have its continence in check is just far too difficult.



Perhaps it's because I work in children's ministry, but my first instinct was to hold its hand and walk it to the toilet before I have to have an embarrassing talk with its mommy.

why say anything nice when you can say nothing at all

*the title is not a reference to anything, other than a BNL song*

One of the guys from the water treatment facility (which I support) brought me a brand new 2008 wildlife calendar and a can of peanuts, both clearly branded with the logo of the contractor who handles all of our chemical treatment needs. Thanks to the recent email in circulation regarding the gift policy, I know it's that shameless branding which makes this gift acceptable. The exact same thing, if not labeled as such, could be considered a bribe. Tricky devils - how did they know that a can of peanuts and a wildlife calendar are all it takes to bribe me to - well, do nothing. Their biggest computer problem since I got here was a failing floppy drive.

OK, I suppose one could argue that the bigger problem there was that they still use a floppy drive. Apparently the water treatment world hasn't caught up with this decade's technology.

two fer tuesday

You lucky blog reader, you! Two updates in one day, after such a lengthy absence. Whatever shall you do with yourself?

Probably tune right out, unless you're a tech-savvy (or at least tech-curious) gmail user who likes to keep their mail on one too many devices! This is my story - I hope it's useful for those of you "coping" with the advent of Gmail IMAP.

I guess that most people check their Gmail mostly from three different places: the office, at home, and on the go. Thanks to Gmail's new trick (namely IMAP), you now have some new options. For the longest time, I've checked my Gmail account at home on a Windows PC running Outook via POP. This worked just fine for me. Sure, if I sat in the office all day emailing people (and not working) then I'd have a bit of cleaning up to do when I got home. After all, the web interface doesn't sync w/POP clients - it just dumps new messages to the client and leaves it up to you how to handle them. Simple rules handle my most common messages. I've done this for years, so I have an elaborate (and hefty) virtual filing cabinet of emails.

Recently, I migrated all of that clutter over to my new iMac. I chose to go with Mail.app for email (because it's free, and its slick). Sure, that means I need two more apps to handle my calendars and contacts (iCal and Address Book, also included), but I'm OK with that since OS X does so much behind-the-scenes coordination between these applications anyway. I don't even think of them as three separate apps, really. Anyway, all of that to say this: I use Mail.app at home to check my Gmail via POP, and a combination of Mailboxes on my Mac and rules to deal with organizing them.

At work, I use the capable default Gmail web interface. A little background: I provide computer support for a branch of the government. I support primarily Windows PCs, but on a limited level, I also support Macs. I keep a Linux machine running for various tools and utilities that Microsoft has no excuse for not including in its very much not free operating system. That said, I could be using one of three web browsers from one of a couple hundred computers at any given time to take a quick look at my email. The web interface is the obvious choice.

On the go, I use my iPhone. Until now, I've used the default POP connection here as well. It's somewhat clumsy, since there is no mechanism for rules (or Smart Folders) so I'm stuck with a couple of annoyances, the most painful of which is an Inbox full of my own sent messages.

Along comes IMAP. For the uninitiated, let's review: IMAP basically differs from POP in one major way - synchronization. It allows you to connect multiple clients to a single account and have basically the same directory structure and message statuses in each place (yes, I looked up the plural form of status). "Beautiful!" you say. "All of your problems are solved!" Well, not really... remember that massively complex (and intricately nested) system of filed emails I mentioned? It would be a nightmare to try and migrate that to the IMAP environment. One major reason for this is that Gmail doesn't properly support nested folders. Another is that some of my folders don't have a simple rule for their contents. In other words, I'd have to manually sort through thousands of messages in order to migrate to IMAP. No, thanks... I'll stick w/POP at home.

However, this IMAP thing does solve a lot of problems for the iPhone - I can have a number of labels in Gmail that make finding important messages much easier. These show up as folders on the iPhone, the contents of which may exist in the Inbox as well. This is confusing unless you keep the mentality of labels and not of folders. Most importantly, I can forget the headache of dealing with my sent messages in my inbox. All in all, IMAP i the obvious choice for the iPhone.

This has a slight impact on how I view my email at work. I now have labels to deal with, which is fine. I'm actually growing fond of the concept of labels, in spite of my affinity for adherence to widely accepted standards. Gmail turns up the prettiness factor by allowing you to color-code your labels. How festive.

Final thoughts: after using the iPhone via IMAP for a while, you might notice some rules in the Gmail web interface that you didn't create. This is because the Drafts, Sent, and Deleted folders on your client don't line up to those of the server by default (surely to be fixed in the next iPhone software update). It's a simple thing to fix manually: from your iPhone, go to Settings and then to Mail. Open up your Gmail IMAP account, and tap Advanced. Note the section at the top showing you how your Drafts, Sent, and Deleted Mailboxes are mapped to the server. Tap Drafts. Now, under "On the Server" tap [Gmail]/Drafts. Repeat for Sent and Deleted, and you're good to go. You can delete those labels in Gmail now (check to make sure they're empty, as they should be). I guess this would work the same from any IMAP client.

As always, your mileage my vary.

weekend update

I'm finally starting to feel normal again, after a somewhat rough weekend. Lauren and I both woke up Friday morning complaining of cold symptoms, yet we still picked up a storage building from a certain orange home improvement store that evening. Somehow our new home is already overflowing with clutter (and it's only going to get worse). So, Saturday my husbandly duty was to erect said structure. I knew going into it that the 90 minutes for assembly that the manual estimated was by no means reasonable. All told, I think it was more like twice that. It's pretty nice, though. Around 3pm I took a lunch/coffee break to go meet Clifford at Jason's Deli. It was good to catch up with him for the first time since the wedding. Later that night, I was putting the final screws on the building with my handy (if not geekifyng) headlamp.

Sunday was pretty much the normal schedule - church, nap, AWANA. JD started a new series called "Anthem" which asked some really stirring questions about your relationship with God. However, I'm convinced that a shockingly different take on a relationship with God is the only thing that will move a non-believer past the point of prejudice against the "religion" laden culture so prominent here in the south. In other words, if it's not dramatically different, it's not going to win any souls. We can't afford to be disregarded as just another notch in the Bible belt.

Oh, in a bit of tech news, iPhone + Gmail users are in for a treat! Relief from an inbox burdened with sent mail comes in the form of IMAP for Gmail. You'll have to manually configure your iPhone instead of choosing the default Gmail config. This video shows you how. I guess it's actually good news for anybody who uses anything other than the default web interface to check their gmail account.

Time to get back to work. Pray for me - there's a meeting at church tonight about the future of the Deacons ministry - and I'm invited! Apparently, those attending are being asked to decide if this is a ministry where they can serve. I think that means that somebody thought of me as a candidate. Maybe I'll get there and find out every dude in church was invited. In any case, it's very humbling. I'm praying that God will put pride far from my heart and humble me with this challenge. I hope to see only His plans for me in this, and not my own reputation.