For a while I have been using Gmail to manage my "alternate" email address. That is... the one I use to sign up for crap, accounts, etc. My main account I host on my server and retrieve with the Mail application on my Mac. Unfortunately, I can't access my mail server from Blue Sky due to firewall and security issues (not uncommon), so I have been getting my personal mail for a long time using Horde's IMP webmail application.

I have come to realize however, that I enjoy checking my junk mail through Gmail more than my personal mail through IMP. And recently I found myself composing personal emails though Gmail rather than my IMP installation. IMP has become too slow and clunky compared to Gmail's mostly reliable, fast, and slick interface. My main gripe is the fact I have to open a new window every time I want to compose a new message. But Gmail has a lot of other easy time savers too (like address auto-completion, and of course the endless archiving).

I spent some time fooling around with Roundcube which provided an encouraging alternative with clean interface, drag-and-drop, and just a nicer user experience. But ultimately, it was too buggy, and still disappointed me. I had problems with messages caching and then disappearing (!) and found myself often unsure of where my mail was and in what state. Granted, it was an early beta release. I think they have a good potential when they get to a solid release but... I'm impatient.

So now, I am bouncing my personal email to a new Gmail account. I can manage my email on my server and on Gmail, assured that wherever I am, I'll have quick and easy access to my mail. The only challenge is staying logged in to both accounts at the same time, so for now I'm using the Gmail Manager Firefox extension to manage both of my accounts. We'll see how it goes for the next week or two.

There is another option for people to manage 2 Gmail accounts in the IE Tab Firefox Extension, but I'm on a Mac and otherwise hate IE anyway so that one isn't really an option. I may end up forwarding email from 1 Gmail account to the other and use filters to sort them, but then we're getting a little ridiulous aren't we? I'm open to ideas if anyone has them.

Thanks to Vicki (don't know who she is...) I won another movie ticket on Blingo. Seriously dude... if you haven't signed up... it's like free crap handed out to you.

Surfing this evening, Firefox kindly notified me of the 1.5.03 update it had downloaded. I finished what i was doing and allowed it to install and restart Firefox. I like the auto-update feature of Firefox alot. Not that I would ever miss any sort of sub-sub-sub release as someone will always create a Digg entry with many exclamations and try to incorporate the words AJAX and Web 2.0 in it. But I digress...When Firefox restarted, my extensions were missing. My bookmarks were still there, my search engine plugins are still there, and my other settings are all in tact, but my extensions were all gone. I realized that I hadn't even seen the familiar extension compatibility and update wizard did not appear. So I went into my extensions and they were all gone (except for the default talkback and dom inspector).I should mention I am running OS X 10.4.6 on a non-Intel Powerbook G4. So I opened the Finder and looked for my profile folder which had been located in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox as documented in the Firefox Release Notes. My profile was no longer there. Instead it had been relocated to ~/Library/Firefox (which is where Thunderbird stores its profile information). Needless to say... strangeness is going on.I haven't tested my other machines yet, but have searched around on the Mozillazine Forums without uncovering a known issue. I moved my Profile forlder back to the expected location and all seemed to work fine.I wonder if anyone else experienced this issue? Fixed! : With Firefox not running, I removed the file ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/default/xxxxxxxx.slt/extensions.rdf (where xxxxxxxx.slt is the name of the profile affected). I launched Firefox again and it re-created the extensions.rdf file with my extensions and loaded them without issue.

So this one kind of puzzles me. Right now if you do a Google search for 'ice age' or 'ice age movie', the first site that comes up is www.titanicmovie.com with the title "Ice Age 2" and decription from the Ice Age 2 movie site. Now the Titanic movie site is also a Fox website and I thought maybe they copied files from the Ice Age 2 website as a template and accidentally left meta tags and stuff in there. But that doesn't appear to be the case. As I am writing this, I think I have figured out the problem. Both websites are built in Flash. It seems highly likely that the Titanic site was created from a template that the Ice Age 2 website was created with. With Flash 8 you can embed meta tag information in your swf movie files that will be indexed by search engines; information like page title and description.What is really bad about this though is that our official site doesn't even show up in Google's index. Interesting to see how this one turns out. Anyone have any further thoughts on this one?  

About a year or so ago I changed my personal email address because I was just getting slaughtered by spam. Not a huge change, one that people could logically remember and it worked like a charm. Spam... gone. The situation had gotten worse and worse over the years because I was once not very wise (and at the time nobody was truly aware you had to be) and I posted my real email address on newsgroup messages, websites, etc. Like a bullseye... my email was a target for spammer bots scouring web pages for email addresses to use in their spam blasts.

Now I am much more careful. As most web-savvy people do, I have a seperate email for account sign-ups and the like. My personal email is just that... personal. I post it publicly nowhere. Yet a couple of months ago I started to get hit by 'Doctor' offering me the best in pharmaceutical products (many I have never heard of). This particular email now arrives in my inbox twice daily. At all three of my email addresses, all at different domains.

It bothers me of course... but with the help of danimal, we are using Spam Assassin to help filter much of the garbage. My spam is almost exclusively from 'Doctor' with the same message. Each time the message from another spoofed email address. Each time almost exactly the same message. It's pretty well documented that this guy is hitting a zillion people (a Google search will show that). I just wanted to vent and have you join me in wishing this guy a long-lasting time in a pound-you-in-the-ass prison and perhaps eventually, a horrible fiery death.

happy monday.

So I was watching The Office about a week ago and Dwight was talking to Pam about some Russian website that sold mp3s for like $0.10 each. Turns out, it wasn't made up.

allofmp3.com sells digital music for an average of $0.10/song, or a little over $1/album. The actual cost varies slightly based on the length of the songs and what encoding you choose. Yes... you choose the encoding type. They offer the choice of MPEG-1 Layer 3 - MP3, Windows Media Audio - WMA, Ogg Vorbis - OGG, MusePack - MPC, MPEG-4 AAC, and choice of bitrate as well. Most of the newer selections also offer you a choice of lossless encoding as well giving you larger filesizes but audio quality that matched the original CD. Lossless encoding is not available for many older releases.

The selection, while not rivaling iTunes, is certainly impressive. Browsing various genres, I was able to find 9 of 10 artists I was looking for without trying to be too obscure (from DJ Sasha to Dave Matthews to Fela Kuti even some single releases and remixes) and no, they aren't all in Russian...

So there you have it. Searching for "Kraftwerk" this morning I stared at my browser and thought... "why is this taking so long?". I clicked to another tab to do something and then back and saw a big message saying "You Won!"

I already have an iPod Shuffle, so I opted for the $100 Visa giftcard instead (which was cool they let you do). I like this game. Wanna play? You can play too. Here is my original post about Blingo

01/17/06: I just won an iPod Shuffle! check it out
Okay, at first this seems like one of those annoying ad-infused search engines from the 2000 era where they promised they were giving away $1 million if you searched using their crap-ass website. But I came across it today via Komodo Media and decided to try it out.

• The search is powered by Google
  
• There's an easy Firefox search plugin
  
• You can see who you're connected to that has won
  
• They're not selling your email or spamming
  
• When one of your friends wins, you win

Want to join up? Click here to try it out. No spam. Just good clean fun. Rogie has already won twice.

Looks like one of my client's sites (www.adirondackcamp.com) has been knocked out by Hurricane Wilma. At least, that would be my first theory.

We host their site at Verio which I have long since known is a shit company. They have given me headache after headache with terible support, high prices, and endless problems with having ties with spam and low standards of spam prevention. I think this server is hosted at their Boca Raton center and it went down this morning. When I tried to call their tech support line, I got a busy signal and a message saying that my call couldn't go through. Emails have gone unanswered.

Most of my other clients sites are hosted through Rackspace which rocks and had a contingency plan in place and information emails out to their customers prior to the Katrina and Rita hurricanes.

No word from Verio. I won't be shocked when I hear about the reason for this outtage whether it's because of lack of preparation for the hurricane, or just some lame ass unreleated problem.

Update: Looks like I was right. And the best part of their explanation follows...
backup generators, which were tested just four days ago and found to be working properly, are not operational at this time.
Uh... well thanks for that.

10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris