Archive for August, 2008

In 1995 I started using Eudora as my main email program. Before that I used PINE on a terminal client. All of my email from 1989 to 1995 fit on one floppy, so a text based terminal program was fine.

Today I get more than a “floppy full” of email every day and Eudora has served me well until last Thursday.  That morning I tweaked one of my filters and Eudora didn’t like it.  While I was away from the computer, Eudora collected one message 528,000 times.  It corrupted my IN.MBX file in Eudora.

I have a backup.  I didn’t really lose anything, but the hassle was the last straw.  The real problem is the program.  Qualcomm stopped updating Eudora in 2006.  That same year, the base code was turned over to the Mozilla foundation.  The program was “Thunderbird-ized” and renamed Penelope.  I switched to Penelope on my laptop.  The basic operation of Penelope was drastically different than Eudora.  If I was going to do something different, it had to be worth the pain of switching.  Penelope wasn’t.

I have six email accounts that I have to check regularly.  Eudora did all of them.  Every night I backed up my EMAIL folder and that was all there was to it.  I can switch to a new computer and take 13 years of email with me just by copying that folder.  That’s right… I have 13 years of email.  Many times that has been handy.

After looking at several options I decided to give Gmail a try.  I have had an account for years, but only use it for my calendar.  Now it POPs all my mail from those other accounts and gives me one web-based interface from any computer with a browser.  The learning curve was about one day.  On Monday I sifted through about 2000 messages.  I learned the short-cut keys and added Greasemonkey’s Gmail Macros.

So far, so good.  I have about three months of email that made it to Gmail.  Those messages consumed just two percent of the space Gmail allotted me.  I should be good for eight to ten years given the 6GB limit.  I’ll keep you posted on how it works out.  Just in case, I have one machine still running Eudora as a backup.

Trusty's at Cedar Point

With my brother’s family in town, we decided to brave the lines at Cedar Point.  The picture above demonstrates how advanced our communications have become.  I stood under the Cork Screw and waited for my wife to call me from the loading platform.  Somehow our crew managed to get the first ten seats and I photographed them as they went by.  Those two empty seats aren’t empty.  If you look closely, you can see some “little kid” hair.

On the Skyhawk we had eight seats together.  My wife snapped the picture below when we were 125 feet above where she was standing.  We don’t know those two people on the far left, but everyone else was in our group.

The Skyhawk

And then there’s my mom on the Wildcat.

Grandma on the Wildcat

You can see the whole set here.

One cool technology addition to the Raptor was the “ride cam.”  Behind each pair of seats is a camera that records you during the entire ride.  When you exit the ride, you can purchase a DVD of you riding the Raptor.  There are actually two cameras that cover four seats.  When you sit down in the ride, check between the seats in front of you.

We didn’t see cameras on the other coasters, but it’s only a matter of time.