fjellstad.org

One of the problems of organizing your email is how to do it. I don’t really like deleting old email. Mostly because I like to go back and read some of the older email. One problem with that is since the outgoing email (from me) got stored in the Sent folder, I didn’t do a really good job at storing those email. So the threads and context are often broken, especially if people didn’t quote the whole email (and people who used email back before 2000 did a much better job at trimming quotes). Another problem was, how do I file it the email? I used to file everything job related into a job, anything academic into school, anything from friends into letters. Of course, then I start getting email from coworkers not job related. Do they go into jobs or friends? Same with fellow students…

Last summer I read two brilliant (related) posts on email handling: one from Scott Yang and the other one from Aristotle Pagaltzis. Basically, stop filing your email. Just archive everything (similar to the Gmail model). Don’t worry about categorizing. Trust your email client (or search functions) to retrieve your email.

I’ve been using this scheme since last summer, and so far, it has worked brilliantly. I keep all my email conversations in my inbox until the conversation is finished. Then I archive it, without thinking about where to file a specific thread. Mailing lists are special in that they go automatically into their own folders, but then again I don’t really subscribe to many mailing lists anymore (mostly security related). Otherwise, I just get them through the gmane service. One thing I did modify was that I set up my system to automatically archive the archive by year. So that December 31 at 23:59 (or so), everything in archive gets moved to archive.YEAR.

I do miss some of the features that Google introduced with gmail, though. The labeling facility is gmail is pretty brilliant. So, you can manually give an email a given label, and you can then search on that label. I miss that functionality. You can use search folders (in kmail, that I use and probably other email clients), but it’s not the same. One problem is that some people change their email, and then you need to update the search parameter. It would be much easier if you could just click on a button that said tag this as that. One problem would be that the tag wouldn’t work across email client unless there was a unified way for email client to read the tags, say x-tag or x-label. Of course, this mean that the email itself would have to be modified by the client, although some clients already do this.

In any case, currently the new email handling scheme works fine, and certainly makes me more efficient.

I recently watched The Pursuit of Happyness on one of those pay channels on a hotel I stayed at. It was a really good movie. Since I had the book at home, but never had time to read it, I decided to go back and read the book. The book is just as excellent as the movie.

The difference between the movie and the book is that the movie focuses on the six months (one year in the book) where Chris Gardner was homeless. The book actually deals with Gardner’s childhood leading up to his situation in the movie, and what happens next. It also explain much better why it was so important for Gardner that his son knew who he was and the sacrifices he had to make.

Some people has complained that the movie is about feel good Hollywood movie about the greatness of the capitalism. I didn’t get that at all. I think the lesson from both the book and the movie was that you have to have goal in life and pursue it. And although life might put obstacles into your path, you need to rough it out. Don’t lose sight of what’s important, but don’t settle for less either. Good lessons to learn.

This was a book I really enjoyed and would highly recommend it.

Almost finished integrating the Gallery into the website. Not very happy with it. The problem is that the way the Gallery theme work is that everything is set up as tables. This is a huge problem if you want to change the layout of the site. Instead of editing the css file, you need to actually change the template. Really silly way to write a webpage in 2007.

Although I changed the code enough to make it integrate somewhat into the site, the code is really ugly, and I have basically decided to write my own theme without the table layout. Shouldn’t be that difficult, just a little too much work.

It’s been awhile since I updated this site. I have done lots of changes, and more to come. I wasn’t happy with the blogging functionality, and was considering writing a more automated system for archiving the blog. Since I was moving the website to a new hosting company, I decided to install WordPress instead. I also installed Gallery2 to take care of my photo managing needs. Took me awhile to figure out the theming for WordPress, and I still need to figure how to change the theme for Gallery2. More to come later…