How fortuitous! I saw a blog post earlier this week with a screen shot of a desktop that had a Super Mario Bros. background. I said to myself, “Self… that’s cool! I wonder where I can find something like that?”
The answer? Right here!
Now that Gmail offers IMAP access, I’ve moved my personal email to Gmail using Google Apps. However, I’ve found a few characteristics of Gmail’s IMAP implementation that make it less than ideal, and they are quirks (to put it mildly) that seem a little baffling.
My biggest annoyance is what happens when you delete a message using an email client. Instead of actually deleting the message, it removes the Inbox label from it, but otherwise leaves the message in your mailbox. Huh? Silly me, I would have thought that pressing Delete in my email client would have the same effect as pressing Delete in the Gmail web interface. Instead, you have to move the message into the Trash folder, rendering the Delete function of your email client totally useless.
I’ve also noticed that messages with HTML content don’t show any content whatsoever in Windows Mobile 5. Now, I realize that Gmail’s IMAP implementation doesn’t necessarily support Windows Mobile 5 (it specifically lists Windows Mobile 6–err… at least it did at one point), but come on… showing absolutely nothing for HTML messages is a little ridiculous. Every other IMAP account I’ve ever configured on my Windows Mobile 5 smartphone hasn’t had this problem.
I thought this was going to be the answer to my email dilemma, but at the moment, that’s questionable at best. Unfortunately, I’ve already transferred a lot of my email to Gmail, so I suppose I’ll muddle along for now until I find the Holy Grail of personal email hosting.
UPDATE: Fortunately, I’m not the only one who ran into the Windows Mobile problem, and apparently it’s affecting both WM5 & 6. Google knows about it, and is allegedly working toward a solution. If they fix this, I think I can live with the Delete weirdness.
I never thought the day would come, but within about a week, I should have a shiny new iMac on my desk at work. I’ve never really been interested in let alone actually used anything Apple-related (yes, that includes the iPod). But the new deputy dean at Wharton is a Mac man (complete with an iPhone to boot), so in my new position, which includes indirectly supporting him, I feel it would be a good idea for me to get some Mac experience.
My fears of switching to a Mac are somewhat mollified by virtualization software (like Parallels or VMware Fusion) that will allow me to run familiar Windows applications in the OS X environment. Thank God for that, because I hear that Entourage is crap compared to Outlook. I’m even wondering if I can take my current Windows Vista installation and plop it into VMware Fusion on the iMac. That would be HOT.
And if I totally hate it, I’ll just use Boot Camp to install Vista (if that’s even supported yet) and be on my merry way. But at least I’ll have tried!
UPDATE: I can take my current Vista installation, turn it into a VM, and use it in VMware Fusion. Totally hot.
It looks as though Gmail finally got IMAP! This should drastically improve my email situation. Word.
The LGBT Center at the University of Pennsylvania just launched a blog! Actually, they took their periodic newsletter, OUTlines, and repackaged it as a blog. And who programmed said blog? Yours truly, that’s who! I still have some work to do on it, but it’s there and it’s functional.
The launch of the OUTlines blog coincides with a soft launch of MyLGBTC, which is a portion of the web site where people can log in and update their information in the Center’s database. When logged in, a person can also post a comment to a blog article. It’s a humble beginning, but I’m pretty happy with it.
Off-and-on for a while now, I’ve been trying to find a good place to host my email. See, I’m pretty darn happy with my web host as far as web hosting is concerned, but their email offerings leave much to be desired. Their IMAP implementation doesn’t seem to jive with Windows Mobile Outlook (messages I delete on my phone pop up again the next time it synchronizes), their webmail client is pretty archaic-looking, and the only way to access the junk mail folder is through said webmail client.
Fortunately, a number of sites are offering email hosting, and sometimes other services, if you BYOD (that’s Bring Your Own Domain, silly!).
The first one I tried was Google Apps, which is by far the most user-friendly and pleasing on the eyes. In addition to email, it offers Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. You can have all the users at your domain share the same address book, which is pretty cool. However, I don’t like/get the Gmail interface (so much for user-friendliness!), and they only offer POP access. POP? Hello? What year is this? Even AOL offers IMAP access! Get on the ball, Google!
Next I took Windows Live Custom Domains for a spin. This showed a lot of promise, but ultimately annoyed me. You can only access your email through Windows Live Mail Beta, not through POP or IMAP. I would have been okay with this if there was a cool little Windows Mobile app I could download for my phone to read my email there, but no such luck, at least not that I found. The best I could do from my phone was read it using the web browser. Yuck! You had to pay if you wanted POP/IMAP access, and you had to pay PER ACCOUNT! Double yuck!
Most recently, I tried out AOL My eAddress. I know, I know… I shriek every time I see "AOL" too. But their IMAP access is pretty zippy, so I thought it was worth a shot. Everything seemed to be going well, until I couldn’t get my actual name to show up in the display name of messages I sent. Instead, it would just show my email address. It might seem minor, but it’s darn annoying. It wouldn’t show my name whether I sent email through webmail (even after entering my name in the Display Name field) or through Outlook. WTF, AOL?
*sigh*
So, I suppose my quest continues. Unlike Google, Microsoft, and AOL, Yahoo! doesn’t offer a free service, but what they do offer is pretty cheap. I think I can afford $9.95/year to try it out. But if Yahoo! doesn’t give me what I want, then I think I’ve exhausted all the big players. I hate being so picky and particular!
UPDATE: It looks as though Yahoo! doesn’t offer just email hosting. Instead, you have to have them host your entire domain. Yuck.
About a month ago, I posted about blogging from Word 2007. At the time, it seemed pretty cool. I quickly discovered, though, that blogging from Word was pretty limited. If your post consisted of anything more than text and pictures, you were pretty much out of luck. It seemed that there was no way of embedding Flash video, for example, because there was no way to get to the raw HTML code of your post.
Then Joe told me about Windows Live Writer, which is what I’m using right now! In fact, I’ve used it to create the last three or so posts. And I have just three words to say about it:
It. Is. Hot.
On its surface, it’s a WYSIWYG editor, similar to Word 2007. But the WYSIWYG environment is uber-enhanced by the fact that it pulls down the stylesheet from your blog, and uses it to render the editor, making it much more what-you-see-is-what-you-get than Word 2007. Lo and behold, there is also an HTML Code view, making it easy as pie to plop down code to embed a Flash video.
I haven’t tinkered around with any of the other features, but there are hyperlinks to insert maps, tags, and video. You can also extend Windows Live Writer with plug-ins.
It’s still in beta, but really, what isn’t in beta these days? Check it out!
I finally received my XPS M1330 laptop from Dell on Thursday of this week, and I rebuilt it while at work on Friday. This morning, I installed the last bit of software I use: Adobe Web Standard CS3. After installing it, I opened up Dreamweaver and prepared to activate the software, as I have done successfully a few times on my old laptop. (This software is also installed and activated on my desktop at work.) This time, though, it told me that I had no activations left!
Gasp! Horror!
Fortunately, it also told me that I could deactivate the software on another computer, and then activate on my new laptop. So I booted up my ThinkPad T43, launched Dreamweaver, and deactivated the software there. Then I was able to activate it on my M1330 without a problem.
So why am I so impressed by this whole process? Well, at first I assumed that I had a limited number of activations (say, 5) which I had blown through each time I rebuilt my old laptop, and it was simply bad timing that I ran out just as I tried to install it on my new laptop. But then I got to thinking… what if activation is smart enough to actually tie the software not to something at the OS level, but to the hardware itself? Then it would make perfect sense that I wasn’t able to activate it on my new laptop, because that would be the third unique piece of hardware on which this activation has been used. (Adobe typically allows you to install a copy of their software on up to two different computers.)
As it turns out, that’s exactly what Adobe does! So you can rebuild your computer ad nauseum, and activation should work each and every time. But install it on more than two unique hardware configurations, and that’s when you have to start deactivating in order to activate some more.
What’s the moral of the story? If you’re parting with a computer that had an activated copy of Adobe software on it, you should make sure you deactivate it first. Otherwise, you have to call up Adobe, and who wants to deal with an actual person?
I think this is the most elegant solution to software activation I’ve seen. It makes it very easy for people who follow the rules to use their software as they see fit (even freaks like me who frequently rebuild their systems).
Anyone know if Vista has a similar ‘deactivate’ feature?
This post on the How-To Geek inspired me to try out blogging from Word 2007. So far, so good! Word seems to have successfully connected to my blog, and now I’m typing away. The moment of truth will be when I try to publish this. If you’re reading this (and you are!), then apparently everything worked out!
