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Wednesday, Aug 16, 2006 - 23:04 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Clearing a Virtual House

Going to hold the prepared philosophizing until after Friday's lecture, so before that let me indulge myself in some down-to-earth-unworthy-of-notice-mundane-business.

First off - tubs of ice-cream are your friend. The trick is not to go out of your way to buy them, or there'll be no end to it. Sure hope my grandpa restocks soon, though. Or that one of those Orchard Road vendors decides to branch out and dispense his frozen block-of-delight-between-waffles-or-bread in NUS.

Spent some quality time with my second-hand texts last night. Somehow, they seem to have a character of their own. Two of my all-time favourites, Frederick Forsyth's The Day of The Jackal and a 1995-96 Basketball Almanac were picks from a TCHS trip to Perth, though the former's whereabouts are unknown and the latter is in halves.

Speaking of Forsyth, on balance I reckon he is the author I most like to read. Depressingly, the best works of the writers I admire most look to be behind them. For thrillers Ludlum follows closely behind, and fortunately there are many books of his which I have not perused; How can one go wrong with gems of expression like, "The pig of the world!"?

With space being at a premium, my collections have regrettably been mercilessly winnowed (in my absence!), and whole shelves of Doraemon, for example, have dwindled to nothing - so gradually that I never actually realised. Old books are like old friends, and I hate to turn them out, though I am certainly partial to some Universal Book technology that can condense all wisdom (and much more nonsense) of the world into a single device, something like Project Gutenberg but on a far, far larger scale, containing every book (vanity self-publications excluded) ever written.

So this being the first Wednesday of my probable three-day school week (Tues, Thurs, Fri), I felt it a good time to cut some clutter. Email was at the top of my list - I have long since migrated to Gmail (like the first letter, eh?), but I had used my Pacific Internet account for nearly eight years, and occasionally old contacts still send stuff to it.

Not that I ever respond, because that particular email address is simply a spam jungle, thanks to a younger, stupider me proactively pushing it onto innumerable junk mailing lists and the like. Now, fully 99% of messages to it promise to make me a millionaire or extend/compress bits of my anatomy.

As if that were not enough, I still have an NUSNET mail account, the one they give all undergrads, and a School of Computing UNIX mail account, which the SoC appears to favour. Four mail clients is three too much. Ah yes, there are still the glys.com aliases, and probably several webmail services that I registered for in my first heady days encountering the Internet.

Solution - a Grand Unification. Forward everything from xxx@glys.com, xxx@pacific.net.sg, xxx@nus.edu.sg and xxx@comp.nus.edu.sg to xxx@gmail.com. Two-and-growing Gigs should be enough for some time, so no more puny mailboxes whining that they're over capacity because some well-meaning publicist decides that a few hundred kilobytes of images will brighten up my day.

The configuration was simple enough for the first three, as they all had web interfaces which offered the forwarding (and deleting) option. The UNIX mail was slightly trickier, but a quick peek at the PINE FAQs revealed that only a .forward file was needed in my root directory. All set there.

Wait! What about the mountains of spam?

Happily, Gmail has developed a pretty comprehensive automatic spam filter, which has so far been up to whatever the scourges of my Pacnet address have thrown at it. The digital miscreants go right into a Spam directory, to rot deservedly until I exercise my Final Great Delete on them.

With that all done, I had to face the last problem - of quick response. Never a fan of mailwaiting, I nevertheless looked about to see if, having gathered all my correspondence into one place, I could be alerted immediately on receipt so that I could ignore it until I felt like reading the lot.

Enter Gmail Notifier, a 292KB downloadable that nestles into my system tray, alerts me gently on any non-spam incoming mail, and opens Gmail in a new browser window on double-click. What more can I ask for?

There's another similar utility for Pandora. The free music has been nice and all, but a quarter of my taskbar was a bit too much to ask. Wouldn't it be great if it could be minimized to the tray, I thought. As it turns out, others have thought of that too, and thus was born Open Pandora (717KB). Valuable desktop real-estate reclaimed, and it also feeds song information to MSN Messenger like Windows Media Player.

Darn, as a Com Sci student I should be getting off my ass - erm okay, sitting on my ass - and programming more useful stuff like that.



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3 comments

wenhoo said...
as a Com Sci student you have a broken link to gmail to repair


August 17, 2006 - 22:47 SGT     
gilbert said...
the impaired repaired.

btw u actually check out a link to Gmail of all things?! Power!


August 19, 2006 - 01:49 SGT     
wenhoo said...
dunno leh, quite instinctive to hover the mouse over any link


August 20, 2006 - 10:52 SGT     

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