July 2004 Archives

I am experimenting with Outlook for an email client at work. Hithertofore, I have resisted this, but due to shared calendaring it seems prudent to switch. I have always avoided Outlook up until this point for the following reasons.

• pst files are propietary, and I like open formats
• searching was far too slow, and didn't have many options, unlike mutt + grepmail
• can't archive / prune email as easily as I can with mutt and some cron jobs
• prefer fetchmail/procmail/spamassassin stack on linux for sorting and processing
• email virus issues

While Outlook 2003 has better spam filtering, I found much better results with spambayes.

Then today I found the product that used to be offered by a ISV, Lookout. It's an indexer/search interface for Outlook, which seems very slick. Download it from the msn sandbox and try it yourself.

I have been looking at the API's for Outlook to convert to mbox format for archives. If I can get that all working, I'll have a working solution that allows me the luxury of shared calendaring.

I was just off for a week visiting Lake Vermillion with my wife, two children, sister-in-law, niece, nephew and father-in-law. It was a very nice trip with a lot of fun activities, but I am officially exhausted.

I finally broke my fishing losing streak. I went two years on the lake without catching a lousy fish. This time I caught a 22 inch northern on Lake Vermillion. I also got six smallmouth on Trout Lake in the BWCAW. I am sure I would have gotten more if my spinning jig lure wouldn't have gotten snagged.

I'm really not a bad fisherman, it's just I haven't tried very hard since having kids and am often tasked with dealing with the kid's snags.

I was comtemplating a trip down the St. Croix tommorow followed by a Twins v. Red Sox game, but I may throw in the towel and just go to the game. The big question mark is whether staying home will be more or less tiring.

I saw the most amazing Northern Lights the evening of July 24th. It was about 10:30 and I headed out to the dock to take a look around. I saw some glimpses of light in the sky so I started staring at the sky to see more. Then the lights started coming thick and fast. I have seen morer colorful displays. I had even seen brighter displays, but I never saw anything that moved across the sky in such interesting patterns. It really looked like a symphony written in light in the sky.

A entire web site dedicated to Oxymorons.

Reminds me of a book on my wishlist, "Oxymoronica: Paradoxical Wit & Wisdom From History's Greatest Wordsmiths", by Mardy Grothe. This book speaks not so much to short phrases as appear on the aforementioned web site, but seems geared towards longer phrases. One of my favorite examples would be "Time wounds all heals." One of my high school teachers was especially fond of that phrase when he was lacerating some U.S. patriot for his foibles. He had a way of teaching history that occasionally made it seem less like history and more like the hollywood gossip segment of the evening news. "Next up, here about Aaron Bur's private peccadillos."

Link courtesy of the Scout Report.

I discovered a new fun itunes pastime, searching for cover tunes of famous standards. For instance you may be familiar with Jose Feleciao's "Light My Fire", but there are a lot more covers than that, in a wide variety of styles and pacings. It's fascinating.

My first iMix.

This wierds me out. Apparently AGA ranges are always on, so that you don't have to pre-heat the oven. According to the FAQ, it's not going to make the kitchen any hotter than adding "ten to twelve 100 watt light bulbs" to your kitchen. This "... invites people to congregate near it as they would the hearth of a fire." I'm not in a rush to buy one, but this is fascinating.

Link courtesy of funfurde.

Ran across this plate, on a site mentioned on mocoloco. It amuses me. The lamp is pretty cool as well.

Former co-worker Todd Madson, competed in a triathalon yestersay. Check out his account.

I have too many books going on at the same time.

• The Race: The First Nonstop, Round-the-World, No-Holds-Barred Sailing Competition by Tim Zimmermann
• Pacific Edge (Three Californias) by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Gold Coast (Three Californias) by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner

I'm not sure how I can finish all these in the next few weeks. Some are due back at the library and can't be renewed again.

In response to the comment from Jennie.

An earlier entry about Kim Stanley Robinson.

I read, "Years of Rice and Salt" first. I hated this book so much. I forced myself to finish it, believing that perhaps I would like it by the end. Unfortunately, I never liked it. It had a really interesting premise, but I hated how it was implemented.

-Then for some unknown reason I picked up "Red Mars" and absolutely loved it. I read through the trilogy as quickly as I could. Sci-fi that I like has enough technology and science to move the story along and allow the suspension of disbelief, but not so much that you get distracted from engaging with the people, the plot and how the concept of humanity is re- invented or lived out. The story had a lot of really interesting social ideas sprinkled in as well. (My favorite idea, BTW, was selecting participants for the lower house of government in the form of a lottery, much like we select juries today. It is a fabulous idea, that could take money out of politics.)

Then I read "Antarctica." I was dissapointed as it seemed like a rehash of some of the environmental themes in the Mars trilogy and just a little too preachy.

The "Three California" series is less preachy (so far anyway) but a lot less engaging than Mars. We'll see after I get through all three books.

I have been listening to "Poetry and Airplanes" by Teitur. Although he seems to have one of the world's worst web sites (It's so bad, I won't link to it), the music is nice. It is kind of a cross between pop and folky-easy listening. The lyrics are interesting, but it's the kind of music you can play without preventing conversations.

I saw "I, Robot and "Anchorman : The Legend of Ron Burgundy" this weeekend.

I, Robot was pretty good. It played a little more like an action movie than sci-fi which is pretty much par for the course for a summer movie starring "The Fresh Prince of Belair." Still it waas a though provoking movie. I wish the plot had been a little more complicated and that perhaps it wouldn't have wrapped up so neatly at the end. My biggest complaint was that it looked too much like "Minority Report." I kept waiting for Tom Cruise to be seen sneaking around the corner looking for someone to poke his eyes out. I paid full price, and still liked this movie.

Anchorman was terrible. The only good part of the movie was the air conditioning. It seemed like an SNL skit that should have been cut at ten minutes. There was a funny concept buried in the movie where they were parodying the sports legends type of show seen on ESPN2. If that note had been carried more effectively and the movie would have contained a funny plot, and I paid $1.00 I might have like the movie. I paid matinee prices for this movie and still hated it.

I have used both MusicMatch and iTunes software to both RIP music as well as to buy music online.

The iTunes folks have really intrigued me by displaying celebrity playlists. Ordinarily, I don't engage in a lot of celebrity curiosity. I don't read people magazine, or collect autographs. I don't have any curiosity about how Martin Sheen feels about Iraq or what Will Smith thinks about nanotechnology. But what music they listen to, for some reason, that seems interesting to me. Of course I have this niggling feeling that the playlist may have created by their publicist or perhaps the studio overlords who also happen to own a music catalog.

How do I like buying music online? For the most part I like it. I still have this little voice in the back of the room whispering that the software will change and your rights to your purchase will be taken away or restricted over time. When I have the CD, I feel I can prevent the music industry from busting down my door to get back my latest purchase. I still wish that I could buy the right to check-out a fixed number of titles at a time and then return them when I am done. I like listening to samples before I buy.

What am I listening to now ... "Be My Yoko Ono" by the Barenaked Ladies.

I'm probably the last to discover this gem, but you can make your own paper cd case online. Very cool and very simple.

While we're on the topic of art, check out http://www.robertsabuda.com for instructions on making your own pop-up books / paper crafts. I have his book "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and it's simply amazing.

Although I really don't own any modern furniture, I really like looking at it. Here are some links of interest.

• http://www.sumolounge.com
• http://funfurde.blogspot.com/
• http://www.soma-sofa.com
• http://mocoloco.com , very cool stuff!
• http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfcek2/text/modernlinks.html

There are a lot of really interesting ideas in those links.

On an unrelated topic, I tried to bring blogging to work as a way for people to post internal information. No one understood the idea. I presented it well, but people have blogging == editorial stuck in their head. I think blogging == publishing. It's a really slick way to publish information, useful or otherwise. No one got it. Even Microsoft gets the concept of blogging ... my co-workers were kind of mystified. This idea isn't dead yet.

I am often amazed at my ignorance.

For instance, just today I learned all of Maine is south of the northermost border of Minnesota. In fact when I am in Ely,MN I am north of everyone in Maine. If you are having trouble figuring this out, remember the earth is a sphere.

It has also been claimed that 1/ 3 of all Canadians live south of Minneapolis. I can neither prove nor disprove this fact yet, though I am determined to.

• Alternate Handwriting Systems
• Census Demographic Info

I have been a Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox user for a very long time. I have to say these browsers keep getting better. The latest Firefox is especially good. I really like some of the extensions, including one that will synchronize bookmarks and another that will open a link in IE, for those IE only web sites. Adding search engines is also very cool. Now if only people would stop development of web sites that only work in IE.

Redirecting Standard Error and Standard Out on Windows

> command > file 2>&1

Works on XP.