This week I intend to switch from my beloved Eudora (which I've used for more years than I can count) to the OS X mail.app. In part for the spam filtering that mail provides, in larger part because it's hard for me to justify spending the $ on yet another Eudora upgrade when mail is free.
Spent yesterday cleaning out my various mailboxes (the inbox alone had nearly 3000 messages accumulated, and that doesn't count all the messages in the 15+ other mailboxes that things get filtered into). When I told Gerald what I was doing, he asked why I didn't just start fresh with the new mail program, and leave the old stuff archived in Eudora if I needed it.
Hmmm.
Why not, indeed? Why does the thought of that trouble me so? I think it's because I have such a sense of "living in" my computer. Switching the environment that I spend so much of my time "in" is a lot like moving. As an inveterate packrat, who's also quite mobile (or has been, anyway), I tend to see moving as my opportunity to clean house. Why keep what you're not willing to carry? I suppose I see the mail program the same way. If I'm not willing to transfer it to the new program, or archive it to a file, should I really be saving it at all?
So despite the appeal of starting up mail "clean," without the accumulated detritus of years of conversations, I'm sticking with plan A. Today will be cleaning day. And it's fun, actually, since I get to sift through all the messages that at some point I thought were worth keeping after I read them. Particularly enjoyable are the messages my mother has sent me after spending days with the boys--she writes beautifully (hey mom, why not start a grandmother blog, to keep all those anecdotes in?).
All in all, not a terrible way to spend a gray, damp, cold November day here in Rochester, while the kids are on school and I'm on vacation.
From Seb's site, a link to an interesting article called Academics on the Web: finding each other /ourselves.
There has been a recurring problem in academia concerning how people find each other rather than just the officially published work and how people find themselves or position themselves as part of a wider /global community. The Web and Internet technologies now provide opportunities to create presence 'out-there' of self and work but collectively we could also try to find ways to critically re-evaluate our work and debate and question the moral basis for what we find ourselves doing.
It's from a CPSR program called Shaping the Network Society: Patterns for Participation, Action and Change. As a part of that, they've created a system to store and share "pattern languages for living communication."
A related article on the site, Uncovering and Understanding Our Common Language by Doug Schuler, includes several of those patterns.
Guess I need to read up more on the whole concept of pattern languages. I understand it in a broad sense, but it's cropping up everywhere these days, and I think I need a better/deeper understanding of exactly what it is.
I've reskinned my links pages. XHTML compliant, all CSS, table-free. Still not quite right in IE for Windows, but seems to work properly in the other browsers I've tested. I used Albin.Net's "bullet-proof rounded corners", but I guess I broke something while I was customizing my pages and made it non-bulletproof.
Feedback is welcome and actively solicited--on content and organization, navigation, design, yada yada.
Because the content is generated from a mysql database, the old version can continue to exist peacefully with the new version. I'm working on cleaning up some interface aspects of the admin tools; once it's done, I'll make it available to anyone who wants it. It's a nice way of keeping track of links, since it not only provides nice hierarchical categorization (easily customizable), but also can be accessed from anywhere.
Over on AKMA's blog last week, I posted a comment about how comments were more than just "graffiti"--how they resulted in a conversation with the walls, in a way, since comments can cause the decor itself to change when you're dealing with "the living web."
A wonderful example of exactly that is at grumpygirl's site today, where she's got a new comic strip featuring a brand new character. Read down to the bottom to see the connection.
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