Category: Geekery

Time to give up, or really give up?

I’m what you would call the last of the hold-outs. Until a year or so ago, I read my email almost exclusively with the command line/curses client “mutt”. I’d been using mutt since transitioning from the previous reigning command line/curses mail client “elm” around 1998 or so. I stubbornly continued using mutt for several reasons, not least of which was that I could ssh home and read my email on my own account on my own server, and have the same user experience whether I was home or at work. A year or so ago, work cut off my ability to ssh home.

I settled on a bizarre combination to replace it: I have a GMail account I can access at work. My home email is accessable through IMAP, and I read it at home with Thunderbird on my laptop, and on the go with SnapperMail on my Treo. I subscribed to all my high traffic mailing lists using my GMail account so I can read them when I’m at work. But because I’m stubborn, I’ve refused to unsubscribe them at home, and so-far have insisted on reading them with Thunderbird. Which leads to vast amounts of wibbling about trying to keep the two accounts synchronized – mostly by using my Treo to mark as read and deleted all the articles that I’d already read on my GMail account and the like.

But this is starting to drive me crazy. So as of today, I’m reluctantly giving up and unsubscribing my xcski.com accont from the mailing lists. I’m going to read them on GMail whether I’m home or at work. All that remains to be seen is:

  • Should I forward my non-mailing list traffic from xcski.com to GMail?
  • Or should I just give up running my own mail server entirely and sign up for “GMail For My Domain” or whatever the hell they call it?

If I take the last option, it would be sad to shut down my mail server. I’ve been doing mail service for a long long time and I was proud of how well it worked and how well the spam protection worked. Plus I’m not sure how the various daemons on my system that send email will work with GMail. Oh well, at least my mailing list mail server will continue to run.

That was relatively painless

I did the taxes today. It was a lot easier than I expected. Mostly because TurboTax did a good job of importing stuff from the previous year, and I took the tack that if I didn’t get a deduction for it last year, it’s probably not worth going through the form this year. Got a nice refund coming too.

Now that the most important time-sensitive use for this laptop is done, I can contemplate sending it in to get this heat-related Airport cut-out problem fixed. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but the fix I got at the Apple Store last weekend was only a temporary fix and it’s happening still, mostly when it gets really hot.

And because I know you’re all breathlessly waiting for another update on this…

I went to the Apple store today and the guy opened the laptop and said that the Airport card was just a tiny bit out of its socket – which he didn’t believe was enough to cause a problem, but I figure that the fact that the problem mostly happened when the laptop was warmed up and moving, makes perfect sense. He also said he put some insulating tape over the card as well so it wouldn’t make contact with the frame.

It’s been several hours and it hasn’t happened since. Woo hoo!

It’s definitely the hardware!

I booted my laptop with the install DVD, started up the Airport, and fired up Network Utility. I used Network Utility to continuously ping my Linux box, and put it down. Then Vicki and I went out to dinner. When I came back, it was still happily pinging, but as soon as I picked it up it the Airport died. I guess that proves once and for all that it’s not Parallels or something else in my installation.

You know, it would be a real shame if it was so broken that they had to give me one of the new glass screen MBPs, wouldn’t it?

More fascinating facts about my Airport problems

It seems to happen more when I’m holding the laptop or moving it around, which would lead me to think that it could be flexing and dislodging something lose. It happened once today while I was at work and it was on my desk, but my home office is so cold I wouldn’t rule out thermal flexing. It failed tonight while I was standing there holding it in the Apple Store waiting for it to finish booting, it failed again while I was carrying it to the dinner table, and it failed just now when I picked up my computer from the floor.

It happened when I was logged on as Guest, which was something the Apple Store Genius suggested I try.

Whenever I reboot it because of this, Spotlight is busy indexing and can’t be used for a few minutes after it comes up. This is slightly annoying, because I use Spotlight more than the Dock to start up programs. But more than annoying, it’s worrisome because I don’t remember that happening before.

Tomorrow I’m going to try booting it from the install disk and seeing if it fails while it’s running off the DVD.