hello, hellm

They need to be replaced in my UPS every 3-5 years, or my uninterruptable power supply is, well, interruptable. I discovered this on Monday, when the power flickered and my office went deadly silent. For a moment I was stunned: “I have a UPS; this can’t be happening!”, when the I-am-totally-out-of-juice alarm started screaming on the UPS. My battery was as old as the UPS, about 6 years, so it was due to be replaced, but I’d never thought twice about it, lo these 6 years it’s been saving me from abrupt system power-downs. After 10 minutes of testing and prodding, it looks like it’s totally dead. I ordered a new battery right away, and it came today. Fortunately, I wasn’t in the middle of anything important, and my drives survived unscathed, but the value of saving and shutting down in the event of a power outage (or skipping blissfully over a flicker) can’t be overstated.

This is completely obvious, but I just had to trek into my basement and find an old PS/2 keyboard because my wireless keyboard exhausted its batteries, and I didn’t have any extras charged. Then I waited as the computer restarted - to recognize the presence of the PS/2 keyboard. A good question is: why depend on wireless input devices? (I don’t recall Logitech giving me a choice.) The batteries are in their charger, and I’m typing on a non-ergonomic keyboard for now. Ick.

I’m not a fan of webmail, so I’ve used a mail client ever since I stopped using PINE back in 1998. My mail client of choice is still Thunderbird, though I realize it’s not perfect. (For example, I would love Thunderbird to include a gmail-like conversation view.)

It’s improved my email life a lot to adopt an Inbox Zero process. I’ve created a Responded folder for mail I’ve dealt with, but don’t want to delete. Once every couple weeks, I spend 15 minutes pulling relevant messages into a hierarchical folder structure. The rest, I just leave in the Responded folder. When there are thousands of old messages in there, I’ll move them into the DMZ folder with all the other old messages I’ll never do anything with. (These folders are actually named 1_Responded and 2_DMZ, so they sort at the top of my IMAP folders list.)

Now for the improvements:

1. It was still tedious to drag messages to the Responded folder. Sometimes my avoidance of that tedium caused me to put off emptying my inbox for an entire day. No good. So I searched for a solution. I found the Thunderbird extension Nostalgy. I haven’t plumbed the depths of its features yet, but it does the one thing I need most: move messages to the Responded folder quickly using the keyboard. This alone is completely awesome.

2. Even when my Inbox is empty, some folders still have a lot of messages. The default Thunderbird pane layout only allowed me to see 25 messages at a time in the list pane, and I noticed that dealing with such a short list was inefficient for scanning visually. “Buy a bigger monitor?”, I thought. One is always looking for excuses to buy a bigger monitor. Instead, I made better use of the horizontal space on my widescreen monitor: View > Layout > Vertical. Now I see 50+ messages in the list pane, and the preview pane is still quite wide enough for most messages. Why didn’t I do this years ago?