Asymptomatic

You may ask "Why?" so I'm going to tell you straight out.

When I first started working at Kruse, I mentioned in my interview that I had used more than one monitor hooked to a computer. And I had.

I used my main monitor for the computer, and I hooked a Wyse terminal to my serial port. The serial port, used with vt100 output, would output debug information while I used the computer to write programs. A pretty sweet setup for the time....

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we'll be discontinuing the old email-based
Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will
have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

Having been a paying member of Flickr for longer than many people, I enjoy the fact that my login name is the same login that I use for most sites. Apparently, that advantage is now being taken away from me due to Yahoo's purchase of Flickr.

You know, I have a Yahoo account, but it's an ugly, ugly screen name. When Flickr introduced custom photosite URLs back in the day, they made a mistake by letting people register URLs that were being used by other people as screen names. Why would I not want my screen name as my URL? There should have been some way to automatically reserve these, because some dude who doesn't even use his Flickr account is using the URL at my screen name. And now here I am getting screwed out of my screen name again.

And for what? Nothing. Flickr hasn't added a feature in a year, as has been useful to me. The fancy little new menus don't do much for me to rave about that a real upgraded desktop Uploadr would. But how old is that piece of crap software? It doesn't even re-orient photos as well as my poor shipped-with-XP tools do, and that's sad. You can't tag before you upload, or assign photos to batches before you upload unless all of the photos are the same. What a crappy application....

In late November, seeing a need for portable computing capability, I placed an order for a new notebook.

Basically, work was ramping up. Working at home is great, but sometimes you've just got to get out of the house. If you put in enough hours working and then don't go out in the evening, you can run a whole week without stepping foot out of the house. As a matter of fact, I haven't put gas in my car in a month. (Although I will admit that we usually take Berta's car out when we go out for family trips.)

In any case, my desire was to take a PC to the Starbucks or some other WiFi-enabled location, turn on, and work for an hour or two in a different locale. I looked over my notebook options....

It's pretty late, but I'm riled about Thunderbird. There are oh, so many annoyances that I just can't take it any more. I'm about ready to try anything.

I am tired of Thunderbird marking just anything that comes in as spam. The "adaptive filters" are a joke. I reset the filters, and in three days it's marking everything as spam. It can't tell the difference between incoming mail from mailing lists that I'm on and the ones that look like they're from a mailing list but are just an embedded gif advertising Vi4gr4.

I am tired of it ignoring the SpamAssassin headers that come from my email server even though I have toggled the option to honor them. These controls need to be more fine-grained. I should be able to say "Use SpamAssassin Rules ONLY" and have it do nothing but obey the SpamAssassin headers....

I've been talking to some clients who ask some interesting questions. They're akin to this analogy:

I need to make my car go faster. This can be done by making it more aerodynamic. Can you tell me the best way to remove the windshields from my car so that air flows through better?

They've got spirit, but I guess it's just knowledge that they're lacking; knowledge that I shouldn't assume that they already have.

So I have foolishly said to them, "What you need is nitrous. This will make your car go faster."...