FIXED: Thunderbird re-downloaded all my Yahoo mail!

Thunderbird connected to my Yahoo email account and, rather than just giving me the new messages, proceeded to download ALL 14591 OF THEM!

The problem is somewhere in Yahoo’s server. Again and again, I am faced with tens of thousands of “new” emails from 2002. It’s really irritating!

The solution, while really only a Band-aid, was to put all the old messages in a new “folder” on the Yahoo mail website. As a result, Yahoo won’t offer those messages for download through the POP3 facility. Yay!

Problem solved!

I’m not liable for anything at all.

If you look at the Microsoft Windows XP Professional EULA (“End User Licence Agreement”), there’s a lot of text there. But how much is necessary?

Installing Windows: love, hate and mashed potatoes

I bought new hard drives, and installed Windows XP again. Ugh. They make it hard! I spent hours playing with nLite, trying to “slipstream” the right drivers for my mirrored disks (i.e. add the necessary files to the Windows CD and burn a new copy). Created two nice coasters. Well, they were fully functional Windows XP CDs, and they actually have my serial number embedded in them, which is not ideal I suppose, but most disappointingly they don’t have the drivers I needed.

Eventually, it worked. Getting the rest of my system set up now.

Some software makes it easy!

Maybe Blackle isn’t total garbage. According to Dan’s Data, there is as much as 10 watts of difference in power usage between an LCD screen showing all white and the same screen showing all black! However, you can save another 40 by turning down your brightness setting.

Now that’s an LCD screen. Think about many more watts a CRT sucks down, and imagine the difference between black and white for one of those chunky chaps.

So what does that tell us, from a practical perspective? It means you should turn down the brightness on your computer screen!

And if you feel like saving five cents a year on electricity, make Blackle your home page.

Check In With Clients To Avoid Problems: Internet circle of trackbacks and molten pancakes

Oh Lifehacker, sometimes you totally shit me, other times you rock my bocks. In this case, you hit something better than the middle.

It’s so important to stay in touch with clients! I know from experience at my company that letting clients go for months without any interaction leads to nothing. And you want something from your clients, not nothing!

iPhones are locked for a reason

Why are iPhones locked? Joshua Gans knows why they shouldn’t be.

So why are they locked? What’s the real story?

AT&T is really a branch of the US National Security Agency. Gay people are generally more trendy than straights, and thus more likely to use an iPhone. The government there wants all iPhone calls to go through its systems, so that it can monitor and oppress communications by minority groups. It’s all about the Republican agenda.

You just wait until the Latino Phone comes out. It, too, will be locked to a military industrial complex-controlled corporation. It’s all about the Republican agenda.

Drag and drop to upload! Firefox add-on

Let me show you a Firefox extension to upload files, simply by dragging files from your computer and dropping them into a file upload form.

Don’t pick up the soap… or the dog.

Check out one of these amusing sites about Dubya. This one has an interactive tool. Hours of fun!

‘George Says…’

Example:

Notes? False! Or true. Maybe…

Brad Isaacs writes at Lifehacker that as long as you keep notes, you can avoid a lot of problems with communication and expectations. For example, taking notes on your boss’ requests helps you “prove” your understanding of the request to them, when they expect something different a week later.

But notes are no more reliable than human memories, from the point of view of other people. There’s two issues: people record their mistaken beliefs (sometimes they just plain lie in their notes), and people forge notes.

Sure, you can accurately record that “On Monday 11 a.m., Wendy asked for a green TPS report to be finished by Wednesday at 3 p.m.”

However, so many things can go wrong. In one scenario, Wendy asked for a red TPS report, and you wrote it down wrong. In another scenario, Wendy needs the report by Tuesday; you deliberately wrote down Wednesday so that you can take your time. In another scenario, Wendy never asked for any report; you just wrote it down (on Thursday) to make it look like you did lots of work this week.

Having said that, notes can be really useful when appropriate. In my line of work, we take notes on our our work and our clients. Since our stakeholders are happy to assume that our computer systems are reliable, our notes are taken to have been written in accordance with the time stamp. Notes also help the organisation to give evidence, even when the individual who wrote the notes has moved on. In any case, the courts will only believe the notes to the extent that they trust the individuals who wrote them, and the organisation that produced them as “evidence”.

So yeah, notes are great for reminding yourself of things. But all they prove to other people is that you like to take notes. Even then it’s not conclusive proof.

Tools and the written word

For some reason, there are tools out there who think that just because something is written down, it is true. This is especially prevalent when it comes to things written on paper. It’s even stranger when some folks act as if electronic records are unreliable, but paper records cannot possibly lie. The truth is, not all written records are checked for accuracy by Jesus. If someone will lie verbally, they will lie on paper too.

I’ve found that in my office, there’s an irrational tendency to believe that anything written down on paper is automatically undeniably true, just because it is written down.

For example, one clever monkey wrote an email, making it look like it contained an email forwarded from a high-ranking executive, authorising something which the executive would never have actually authorised. But the people who saw the “authorisation notice” just looked at the time stamp and the fact that it looked like a forwarded email, and accepted it.

What a ridiculous belief to hold. Because of tools who think like this, we live in a world where you can print off a letter on your home PC, make it look like government letterhead, and successfully ask a bank to mail you a cheque from someone else’s account.