A Day in Paradise

Cheney refuses probe into his oriface … it’s going to be a long day

This is something that really bothers people in the business world when switching to Thunderbird from Outlook. In my opinion Thunderbird should make the dash-dash-space sigblock separator optional, or at least have a config option to turn it off.

The reason is that many people do not use a “signature” as a random block of information meant for the bottom of the page, but rather a real “signature”, something like.

Yours truly,

John Doe
CEO, ACME INC

This obviously looks very bad when it has — before it.

There are a couple plugins that allow you to drop arbitrary text into your document, but none that do this automatically when starting a new email message.

What you have to do is:

• Install TemplateLoader
• Follow the steps to create the template which includes your sigblock
• Choose that template as the default for your identity

And you are good to go. You will notice that there is a slight lag when starting a new email, but that is the price you pay

Some other links on the topic.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signatures_(Thunderbird)
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=535118#535118
http://mailformat.dan.info/trailers/sigblocks.html

I haven’t heard anything but pain from users of 8100s and 8800s. One of the guys I work with had to send his back 3 times before he got one that worked. The other guy is on his 2nd phone.

Stella has the 8100 ‘Pearl’ and I just got off of an 1 hour and 12 minute call with t-mobile and RIM. Basically it was crashing during its boot up and not getting to the point where you could even reload the OS software. I went through a million steps, including disabling the power on my USB hub from my system control panel.

One interesting “feature” was a strip located near the battery which turns red if it gets wet, nice way to determine if there was water damage to the phone.

Anyway, I am 100% happy with my 8700… I have kicked it across parking lots, had it fall out of my pocket on several occasions, and dropped on a concrete floor by an over-ambitious colleague. It still runs great!

I am tired and rambling, so I’ll stop. When is the google mobile wifi device coming out anyway?

• Barracuda Bay Water Park a little bit of a drive, but good fun for the kids – and free
• Crazy Buffet find it here.
• And surej recommends India Bazaar

I met Bertrand ‘toggg’ Gugger at LinuxTag 2005, and have chatted with him frequently on IRC since then. Yesterday I heard that toggg passed away on June 17th from a heart attack.

Toggg was a funny guy, he loved programming and being involved with the communities to which he contributed code. His grasp of written English was such that it gave way to both great comedy, and the occasional flamewar on the mailing list. He was passionate about what he worked on, and held a great grip on regular expressions.

He will be missed.

More information about the projects he was involved in here.

With all the projects we have in the works, it’s seldom we find time to work on our own projects. This morning we launched the new version of the HedgeCo Networks corporate site. It was a quick launch, and we are still waiting for a couple components and images to be completed, but at least its up there.

This interesting post describes one or the reasons why PEAR/PECL doesn’t allow (L)GPL code in the repositories

The problem that I’ve stumbled upon is that Ruby’s Gem repository is full of randomly licensed code, including lots of GPL stuff. At the very least, this information ought to be very visible so that it’s possible to weed out any GPL’ed libraries. At best, the Ruby guys would only accept MIT/BSD licensed code for the standard repository.

I am of the opinion that small snippets of code serve everyone best when released into the public domain.

I realize this is a serious issue… but the following paragraph threw me

Drug treatment centers in Dallas say teen “cheese” addicts are now as common as those seeking help for a marijuana addiction. “It is the first drug to have even come close in my experience here,” says Michelle Hemm, director of Phoenix House in Dallas.

Firstly, there is no evidence that marijuana is addictive, and secondly this paragraph makes it sound like kids are lining up outside clinics for help with ‘marijuana addiction’.

Kids doing “cheese” is just the symptom of a much worse problem within the society. Telling kids not to do drugs is about as futile as promoting abstinence.

Must be a slow year for products when Apple announces an awful port of a mediocre browser to another platform. Yes, I am a bit pissed at apple… they are the worst bundlers ever. I need quicktime to watch .mov files, it sucks, but I deal with it. Now when they do their update of quicktime it prompts me to install iTunes as well. I finally succumbed and installed itunes (which I now use and am fairly satisfied with). Will safari take the same route?

I don’t see how people get such a big kick out of text rendering in Safari…

If you ask me, safari is a train wreck on windows. It’s even slower and less responsive than itunes (which I am actually using on my vista machine at work). I have no idea how this (beta) product got past QA … unless it sucks as much on Mac.

No shadow, silly window handling, yuk…

some Germans aren’t that bright either…

A 43-year-old German man was taken to hospital in critical condition after he fell off a second storey balcony during a spitting contest with his 12-year-old son, police said Friday.

A spokesman for the police in the eastern town of Cottbus said the man in Forst had apparently lost his balance after thrusting too far forward in his attempt to outspit his son.

• Turtle Walk
• Ballet
• Science Museum (been there, bought the year passes)
• American Orchid Society (ooooh 17th of June dads get in free!!! 50% savings!!!
• Playmobile Fun Park We are going here tomorrow!!!