Monica

Dear LJ brain trust,

Can anybody suggest an email client that runs on Windows 7 that satisfies all of the following requirements?

• Can talk to an Exchange server. (I don't know what version; let me know if that matters.)
  
• Is not Outlook 2003 (no longer supported by the IT department), nor Outlook 2007 (supported but unworkable).¹
  
• Allows the setting of font size for all views (headers, reading messages, composing messages, folder names...).
  
• Can be set to render all email in plain text, but allows some escape hatch for when you really do need the HTML/rich-text formatting to make sense of something (like when somebody formats a message with tables or different font colors or something).
  
• Either uses system colors (text, background) or supports this configuration directly.
  
• Supports saving to folders.
  
• Has some migration path for my ~5GB of email in Outlook PST files. (Since this is a one-time operation it can be a separate tool; there just has to be a way to get there.)
  
• Isn't from a known-suspicious source (it has to get past corporate IT).

I'll also need something in the way of a calendar (send/receive meeting invitations and that sort of stuff), which is probably part of the email client but I'm ok with a separate solution there if one exists.

¹ One big problem with Outlook 2007 is that it puts this huge bright-light-blue border around everything, which for someone in a reverse-video scheme is sort of like being out for a late-night walk far from city lights when somebody comes along and shines a full-power Coleman lantern in your eyes. Outlook 2010 does improve on this: you can make it a huge-bright-light-gray border instead. Near as I can tell, everything rooted in the Windows "Aero" theme is pure evil, and this is.

Thanks!

There was a Halloween pot-luck at work today. Late last week we had a spectacular fridge purge -- things years past their expiration dates and quite a few "science experiments" and containers of green fuzzy...something. These ideas seemed like they should go together, so in a then-locked entry (to maintain the surprise) I asked for suggestions. Thanks to everybody who helped! That entry is now public.

I opted for "cottage-cheese salad way past its sell-by date" as closest to the fridge theme, though several other suggestions nicely fit a "green and/or fuzzy" theme in other ways. (I went for this one because it is clearly abnormal in its green-ness, unlike, say, gaucamole or kiwi.) You can't see it in the picture below, but I altered the sell-by date on the container from 2011 to 2001 -- turning the "1" into a "0" was the only thing I could do after failing to remove the existing ink with chemicals I had on hand. We have a rule that things in the fridge need to be labeled, so this morning I browsed our alumni wiki page to decide on a long-gone coworker to implicate. Ex-coworker, if you're out there, it was all in fun. :-)

The treatment was...evocative, so much so that for a while nobody else ate it. Eventually people got brave. Other offerings included cake with "glass shards" (made from sugar), a couple variations on fingers, a fruit salad with eyeballs, a greenish brain with red highlights (labeled as zombie food), and several comparatively-normal items. I consider it a success.

There is a post-script. A coworker pointed out that the person I implicated didn't work there in 2001. I knew that, but any food actually from 2001 would not have survived the office move in 2005. I was one of the people who prepared the fridges for that move; I know. So I had to choose among inaccuracies -- I could support a 2001 fridge deposit or a fridge deposit that could have occurred in our current location, and opted for the latter. If I'd been able to edit the date more effectively I could have done both. I don't think anybody was there in 2001, still there after the move, and gone soon after. Yes, I did over-think this. :-)

( photo )

The word came down from on high at work: Office 2007 is being pushed to our machines, no opt-out. (Yes, we're slow adopters. Big companies are often like that.) We've known this for months, so since I have to customize my environment for vision reasons, I asked a coworker who already had it to give my Windows theme a spin. The result was pretty terrible, so I sought help from the IT folks. Uncharacteristically for large-company IT departments, I got routed to someone who both cares and has a clue, so he's been experimenting for a while on my behalf. He had to consult Microsoft, but he finally sent me a screen shot asking if this was acceptable. It was, so I accepted the push at a time that he'd be available to talk me through the re-configuration.

( reality wasn't so straightforward )

I've had a lot of discussions with the IT guy about how to fix this. He agrees that this is unacceptable, but there seems to be no way to make Windows, Office 2007, and my accessibility settings play well together. So tomorrow morning we will restore Office 2003 (with luck the fact that I received 2007 once will keep the auto-push from coming around again), and he will begin the approval process to get me set up with a virtual machine. In which I will run Office 2007, because sometimes I'm going to need that. Using a different theme, probably, because I won't have to live in it, just visit it from time to time, so it's allowed to kind of suck. Eventually maybe we'll figure out the right juju to make things work for real, but meanwhile, I'll keep using Outlook 2003 (the Office application I use the most and really need to work) outside the VM and, as needed, Office 2007 inside it.

I don't understand the design intent of the various settings in Windows. If I had a model for what things are intended to do maybe I could find a path to a workable color theme, but I haven't been able to derive that model despite years of using Windows. This business with layered themes with the "superseded" one still having unpredictable results completely confuses me. I find myself wondering whether Microsoft employs anyone with my kind of vision problems and, if so, how I could arrange to have a conversation with that person to learn how he gets around.

A few months ago I was talking with my ophthamologist about the difficulties of sitting at a computer all day (eye-strain headaches, which I could mitigate somewhat by doing ergonomically-bad things and getting neck/shoulder/wrist aches instead). She said that's because I need computer glasses rather than trying to use one pair of glasses for everything. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my employer would even pay for this -- cool!

The nice thing about this is that the glasses can be focused at a more-normal distance, which means I was able to push my monitor back on my desk instead of keeping it at about 8-10". It's now at about 20", give or take. (I did have to change some font settings and some apps, like Outlook, don't respect all the settings, but that's managable. And I'm used to the software world not fully supporting the visually-impaired.) That, in turn, meant that I could finally support a second monitor -- commonly available in my company, but I could never get that much screen in visual range before. But now...

My second 22" monitor arrived yesterday. My plan had been to set it up in portrait mode (which would allow me to have more than 45 lines of text visible in an emacs buffer), but my graphics card's default driver doesn't support that. There is a newer driver, but it has other issues.

But, my computer is coming up on the end of its lease, which means I'm going to have to move off of it in a few months anyway. So, worst case I wait a few months to be able to rotate my monitor, or best case maybe I'll be allowed to switch early. Moving to a new computer is a pain in the butt, especially with all the security exemptions and stuff (to install non-standard software), so I never would have expected to find myself saying "I hope I can replace my computer soon". :-) (Holy cow, I just realized this will be computer #5 for me... maybe I can safely delete the archives from #2.)

I wonder if I can get a trackball or similar pointing device, too. Not to replace the mouse -- to augment it. This is a lot of screen to move across, and I'd like to spare my mouse hand the broad traversals. (I've never been any good at fine control with a trackball or touchpad, but if I could have both that and the mouse... I assume I can plug in two USB pointing devices and they'd both work, and that trackballs etc come USB these days. Something to check.)

A conversation with a coworker today prompted a memory that I realized I never actually wrote about.

A few years ago, my cat Erik had to have surgery, which had complicated after-care -- feedings were on a 6-hour cycle while some drugs were on an 8-hour one, both inflexible. I work full-time. Clearly this wasn't going to work.

We had just moved into new office space and parts of it were not complete. Specifically, we have a shower that was still missing some of its plumbing, so not usable as a shower. My manager arranged for me to be able to use that room for a week, stashing Erik in there and just going in when I needed to do stuff to him. This was neither a secret nor widely-known; people who saw me walk into the building would have seen the carrier, but it's not like there was an announcement. (Though a couple people who knew about it made visits to the room too.) I put a sign on the door saying "please don't open; find me if this is a problem" and signed it.

My company was, at the time, in its first year of having been acquired. Large companies are not always as casual as the small companies they buy. We had, fairly recently, had a manager from the mothership transfer to us, perhaps to help steer us in the right direction in the larger world.

I only heard about this incident some weeks after it happened: this manager and one of our software developers were walking down the hall past this room when Erik meowed. The manager stopped, looked at the door, and said "you have a cat in there". The developer looked at the sign, said "must be Monica's", and continued walking, having given this fact all the attention he felt it deserved. Apparently the look on the manager's face was special.

At the time the manager had no reason to know who I was. Now that he does, I infer that he's forgotten all about the cat in the office. Or, if he hasn't, he has declined to bring it up. :-)

Not long ago someone at my company listed his Meyers-Briggs type on his wiki page. And then someone else did, and, well, once three people do it it's a movement, so while I was on vacation someone created a page listing people by type (when known).

Of 35 people currently listed, 8 are INTJs -- seven software developers (including one of my favorite colleagues) and a hard-core designer. Yeah, these are my people. :-) According to Wikipedia, INTJs are about 2% of the general (US) population.

Granted, most of these types are being obtained by test toys found on the internet, but I don't imagine that would bias the results in a particular way, especially as people are using different tests. A few people have had more real tests in the past.

(Next-biggest group is ISTJ at 6, but that's a big group in the general population so not surprising. Ours apparently took some flack for alphabetizing the names within each section of the page; it's an ISTJ thing to do, apparently. :-) )

I just noticed something odd in the groupings. There are 16 types, grouped into four groups: NT, NF, SJ, and SP. Given the first two, I expected the other two to be ST and SF, but they're not. (That is, the first two suggested the pattern of "middle letters dominate".) I wonder what that means. (The I/E dimension gets no primary grouping at all?)

My mother-in-law's seder has some singing, but mostly in Yiddish. This year (finally) I seem to have earned enough points with the family; I asked if we could add some Hebrew songs, offering to do the work (compiling and copying), and she said (via Dani) to bring a few. Yay. I'm going to make one double-sided sheet (including sheet music for some), on the theory that there's no sense wasting paper and this way there's a choice. Tiny steps... (At this seder I enjoy spending time with the people and I dislike the haggadah. At my father-in-law's seder, the haggadah is fine but the people aren't interested in doing most of it.)

At work we're about to get some expansion space, and they just published the new seating chart. People were given the option to stay put or take their chances. One of our neighborhoods (oh, did I mention that we have designated neighborhoods? that turns out to be fun, actually) is unpopular due to the way the space is set up. Every person there save one moved out. No one moved in. So the seating chart shows Beth amidst a sea of numbered spaces. There was some talk today of renaming the neighborhood; an early proposal was something like "Beth's Fiefdom" but I suspect that the latest will stick: "Bethlehem". If it weren't so close to Pesach I'd bring her a loaf of bread. :-) ("Bethlehem" is an anglicization of "Beit Lechem", which is literally "house of bread".)

San Francisco is about to ban plastic bags from grocery stores, saying that this will cut down on 1400 tons annually sent to landfills. I wonder how they came up with that figure. Do they catalog the landfills? Are they simply assuming that all bags produced go to landfills and wouldn't otherwise? Have they considered that some of those bags are recycled and, when not available freely, will just be replaced by other plastic bags in landfills? For example, I use them when scooping out the litter box, dog owners use them for a similar purpose on walks, and I know people who use them in bathroom trash cans instead of buying small bags for that purpose. I am not (in this entry) arguing against the policy; I'm merely questioning their data analysis. How do they know how much, if any, reduction there will be in landfills?

This article on Roth IRAs (link from patrissimo) seems to suggest that a simple money-laundering exercise lets one bypass the restrictions on using Roth IRAs. How odd. If that's true, it would be a way for people in higher income brackets to hedge their bets, which seems counter to the intent of the Roth. (Traditional IRAs are tax-free on the way in and subject to income tax on the way out, which makes sense if you think you'll be in a lower tax bracket when you retire. If you don't trust that tax rates won't go up, though, a Roth IRA is insurance -- you pay the income tax on the way in and nothing when it comes out.)

This morning a coworker sent mail saying she brought in home-baked cookies and put them next to the cookies that were already on the kitchen table. Then a few minutes later another coworker walked past me, kitchenward, with a box. Then this afternoon the landlord sent up cupcakes. Baked goods are normative for December, but the temporal distribution needs some work. :-) (That said, also this afternoon QA sent out a message announcing their second annual "bite me" spread for the whole company on Friday. At least it wasn't today.)

Unrelated short takes:

Class tonight was very good. The ranty student has dropped out (good) and so has his wife (ungood). The new instructor did an excellent job, as I suspected he would.

A friend's vet suggested to her that for an under-eating cat, a few drops of olive oil on the food would entice the cat, add a little weight, and do no harm. Erik has had a couple fussy moments lately, so I tried this out. He loved it. Who knew?

Pachelbel Rant (video), from ian_gunn.

I never power down my machine at work; I log in on Monday morning and reboot on my way out on Friday. But I was going to be away for almost two weeks, and I know that sometimes IT departments get cranky about leaving machines on and unattended, so I did the responsible thing and shut down before leaving for Pennsic. I know, I know -- I'll never do it again.

This morning I went in, pushed the button -- and nothing happened. Hmm, I said -- is that button merely a "soft" reboot, and for this I need to do something more drastic? After a hard power cycle there was still no activity, so off I went to find an IT person. (I have no idea what happened. Minimal diagnostics implicated the motherboard.)

Our corporate overlords have a policy of not maintaining our pre-existing machines (and maybe not even their own; I can't tell). When a machine breaks, their answer is to replace it. Ok, said I, do we have a buffer -- a machine I can take now? Well no, we don't order until there's a specific need, and it takes a couple weeks. (We don't even have loaner laptops any more.)

Think about that for a moment. A 70,000-person company has a policy of idling their employees for significant periods of time. At least officially; clearly it was time to use unofficial means to solve this problem.

"Fortunately" (and I never thought I'd use that word in the context of this event), two developers just left; their last day was Friday. Clearly I should appropriate one of their machines, either temporarily (while waiting for a new machine) or permanently (forget the new box; this'll be fine). It took me a while to get everyone who might have a stake in those machines to say ok, but finally I got permission to take one.

I was not looking forward to the process of clobbering the old environment and setting up my own. Configuring a clean machine takes a couple days (at least) to get everything right; tweaking an existing machine takes longer unless you start by wiping the disk, and I no longer have access to OS disks.

But this is where Murphy blinked. Our friendly support guy (contrator, not actual overlord) -- who did me a favor he didn't have to do here -- popped my disk in as a secondary drive, but it didn't work on the first try (probably missed some jumper settings). When he opened it back up, I asked if he could swap the drives and just boot from mine. That should work, I said, modulo some device drivers, right? He said "maybe" and gave it a shot. He had the bright idea of moving the graphics and network cards at the same time (which reminded me that I had a "good" graphics card, an upgrade from the standard issue, and keeping that would be helpful). Voila -- that worked. I haven't tried to do anything with the CD drive, and I didn't notice whether it's a burner or just a reader, but that can wait. The important thing is that I don't have to re-configure everything. Instead of costing me days, this cost me hours, due largely to a contractor willing to go beyond the rules and a conveniently-timed departure.

I did send off mail to the head of our group suggesting that we really, really need to keep a spare machine or two around for such emergencies. A former co-worker limped along on a failing machine for three months before his departure because that was just easier than dealing with getting a new one. That sort of thing shouldn't be necessary. Hardware is cheap compared to developers.

A past employer got this sort of thing right. They settled on a standard hardware configuration and gave everyone removable hard drives (that is, you didn't even have to pop the case). If your machine died, you took your drive to a spare and were up and running again in 10 minutes. Smart.

LiveJournal is now blocked at work. It's full of porn, you know. Or not, but reason rarely enters the blockage decisions.

Quote of the day: "If you ask an engineer at KFC to describe their product, he'll tell you they make deep-fried dead chicken parts. If you ask a marketing person, he'll tell you it's finger-licking good." (Anonymous marketing person, to Dani.)

Today I learned that the company I work for gives employees small gifts on (certain) anniversaries. I learned this when my manager walked up to me with a framed certificate and a catalogue of stuff from which I can choose one item. That was a surprise. On the one hand, I've never made it to five years anywhere else (nature of the industry); on the other hand, I don't think I've ever worked in a place that would have given me loot for doing so.

I think Erik's fever broke; his nose doesn't feel hot today like it did last night. His appetite is picking up (though not quite at normal levels yet).

Once a year there is a local ulpan for teaching conversational Hebrew -- five 3-hour sessions in a bit over a week. This morning I hunted down the coordinator of the program (after finding an unsatisfying web site) and signed up. (It's in early June.) She asked me what level and I said that was a good question. After I described my background she suggested a level but said it would be easy to move to a different class if we discover on the first day that it's a bad fit. (I'm mildly surprised that this conversation occurred entirely in English; I figured she'd try to talk to me in Hebrew and see what happened.) Then five minutes later she called to invite me to the last few sessions of a currently-running (weekly) class. I can do that, and then maybe we'll have a better idea of placement for the ulpan.

Tonight/tomorrow is the last day of Pesach, which, like the first, is a holiday.

Starting tomorrow, I will not be able to access personal email at work. Many web sites are blocked (including all known to offer email); LJ access is unknown. You should assume delays in responding to, or even seeing, email, interesting web sites, national news... If you have my cell-phone number, you can use that to reach me if it's time-sensitive. If you think you should have my cell-phone number and you don't, send me email (which will, err, be delayed, so don't wait until you need it).