Tag: donate

Update on Mail Saga

After a week’s worth of effort I’m coming to conclude that Thunderbird is still the best thing on the Mac, which quite frankly is sad.  The Mac pioneered Multimeda, and yet any serious attempt to use Mail as a multimedia UI is met with an obstinate user interface.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, just difficult to use.

On the other hand, I’ve found a very uncomfortable yet okay approach to dealing with Thunderbird’s breakage: have the compose font set to be “Variable Width”.  I can’t stand the font, but it is what it is, and it doesn’t change in the middle of a paragraph.

A few people have asked me why I even bother with a mail UI, as opposed to Web Mail interfaces.  The answer is two-fold:

  • I want access to at least some of my mail off-line.
  • For work I would have to go through any number whoops essentially to establish a WebMail interface that I like that ran under a web server on my laptop.  It’s not an outrageous idea, but it is a lot of work, and it’s a lot of work I shouldn’t have to do.

And so I will get by with Thunderbird, but I do think, as one of my other friends pointed out, that there’s a potential business opportunity for someone who actually WANTS to send multimedia inline HTML.

It’s also time to make a donation to the Mozilla Foundation.  I paid absolutely nothing for the use of Thunderbird and Firefox, and both are still the best things going, in spite of their warts, and let’s face it: I’m a pretty demanding customer.  Are you?

Going to Dover a Photo Op? Who cares? Just donate.

The latest Fox blather has Rush Limbaugh claiming that President Obama went to Dover AFB to get a photo op, instead of to honor the fallen troops who arrived there.  To which I say: whatever. First of all, I had no problem with the President honoring the fallen by going to Dover.  Contrary to many liberal Democrats, I also had no problem with President Bush not going to Dover.  He chose instead to visit with the families of the dead soldiers instead.  I think it’s those families that matter, and not me in those circumstances.  What I had a problem with, was the Bush administration applying a blanket rule, outlawing press photographs of caskets.  It seems to me that it should, once again, be left to the families of those  involved.  As it was, it also seemed to me that President Bush was attempting to downplay the number of people who died in Iraq.  That number stands at 4,355, according to icasualties.org and antiwar.com.  Let’s also keep in mind the other 31,545 Americans who were injured, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  In looking for sites to donate to the benefit of soldiers and their families, Fisher House is one that people tend to mention, but I wonder what other people think.  Donating seems to me the appropriate way to comment on this otherwise rabid nonsense.  I also wonder how much Rush Limbaugh has donated.