Concern

As I’ve written about before, Lotus Notes is the email client I’m stuck with at work, and it’s a huge pain to get things done with it. I was inspired by Merlin Mann’s presentation on Inbox Zero at Google to try and do something about it.

This is what I’m trying:

First, I’ve created five folders into which all email will go, before I respond or even read them:

• Archived. This is for old stuff, things that aren’t important (corporate wafflegrams, Perforce notifications, etc.) and so on. Most things that make it to a different folder first go here once they are done.
• Do. This is for messages containing tasks I need to complete.
• Done. This is for messages for tasks that I’ve completed. The point of this is to keep a short archive of things I’ve done recently, and to give myself a nice psychological boost as I watch that list grow.
• Respond. These are messages that I need to respond to, but don’t otherwise involve me doing a task.
• Waiting. This is for things I’ve responded to, but am waiting for more info or another reply.

I’ve also taken the hint of not checking email very often. I’ve set the refresh time to 30 minutes, and turned off sound notifications when new mail arrives. I also am going to use Growl to pop up a notification every half hour, using this script:

notify-check-mail.sh
#!/bin/sh

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

function destroy()
{
    rm -f /Users/csm/.being-notified
}

trap destroy 2

logger "notifying you to check mail..."

if test ! -f /Users/csm/.being-notified; then
    touch /Users/csm/.being-notified
    logger "Running notification..."
    growlnotify --wait --sticky --iconpath /Applications/Notes.app --message "" "Check Your Mail"
    rm -f /Users/csm/.being-notified
else
    logger "I'm already bothering you."
fi

logger "Bye now."

And I put this in my crontab:

0,30 * * * *    /Users/csm/bin/notify-check-mail.sh

And I added this to launchd:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>private.csm.mailnotify</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/Users/csm/bin/notify-check-mail.sh</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartInterval</key>
        <integer>1800</integer>
</dict>
</plist>


So every half hour, a Growl notification will pop up (but only if one isn’t already up) telling me to check my mail, and the notification will stay there until dismissed. Then I’ll filter any email that’s arrived into it’s its folder, and then process the things that have come in as I need to. We’ll see how this works. Already it’s satisfying to have a completely empty inbox, instead of one with thousands of unthreaded messages.

I wish that Growl had a sticky version of the Music Video notification, because that one is more prominent than any others, which bury themselves in the visual nowhere in the upper right hand corner.

#include <stdint.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <sys/time.h>

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  struct timeval tv;
  tv.tv_sec = 1185410974;
  tv.tv_usec = 0;
  std::cout << tv.tv_sec << std::endl;
  std::cout << (tv.tv_sec * 1000) << std::endl;
  std::cout << ((uint64_t) (tv.tv_sec * 1000)) << std::endl;
  std::cout << ((uint64_t) tv.tv_sec * 1000) << std::endl;
}

I recently bought a new turntable, which has a USB output in addition to the standard RCA jacks. I’ve been using it to convert my modest vinyl collection to AAC, and have bought new albums on vinyl instead of on CD whenever I can.

This is remarkably painless, and I’m even doing this only using free software. Audacity works nicely for editing tracks when it’s easiest to look at the waveform; gramofile works on OS X, and for some records, it does an admirable job of splitting tracks (though, on many it’s completely hopeless). The results are, mostly, rather good. You do get surface noise, and for some reason the turntable I bought starts getting really distorted, and it has to be powered down (unplugging the USB cable, too, of course). Some albums produce a lot of cracking, though, even on the first play out of the sleeve (I’m guessing this is static electricity, perhaps? Because vinyl records do build up quite the charge).

The other cool part is that a lot of labels will include either a full CD along with the album (Interpol’s Our Love to Admire does, and Squarepusher’s Hello Everything can be bought with both) or they include a coupon so you can download the entire album as MP3 (Interpol’s Antics and Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire — although the latter is 192Kbps MP3, not the 256Kbps my ears seem to like so much better, so I may go ahead and record it off vinyl anyway).

The multi-day rant about top-posting on Daring Fireball made me immediately think of Lotus Notes, the Retarded Stepchild of email clients.

Notes is one of those email clients that encourages, to an extreme degree, top-posting. It isn’t just that you get a blank line with your cursor above the whole quoted message, you instead get some mystery-meat document as the quotation, which includes various irrelevant headers, the person you’re quoting’s phone number and avatar picture, and has a disclosure triangle so you can collapse it. So an email thread exists as the entire conversation (no one ever deletes messages, because I don’t think anyone knows how to) in the wrong order. The cognitive flow is (no kidding) something like this:

Dood, STFU!

> Subject: RE: how to write email	From: Joe Briefcase
	To: Albert Luser

Because people read left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

> Subject: how to write email	From: Albert Luser
	To: Joe Briefcase

Why should I begin my reply at the bottom of a message?

Except in most cases the thread has grown to around 10 or 20 messages, and any and all attachments anyone has ever made to a message are preserved. I suppose having the entire thread quoted is kind of a plus, since Notes doesn’t yet have the advanced futuristic feature of organizing messages by thread, and it’s searching function is terrible, but at least it’s slow. It does, at least, let you quote the message with an “Internet-style reply” (wowee, that wild Intarweb I’ve been hearing about!) and write an email like a human being. I’ve recently been protesting Notes in my own little way, by always using Internet-style reply.

(This just reflects my own interaction with Notes. I’m sure it’s awesome for writing schemas and doing database shit with your email, or whatever, so this is from my own perspective as someone trying to sanely read email.)

One of the neat things about Mac programming is that you can create some very powerful applications rather quickly, if you do something Apple has built into simple controls.

Here is WebDesk, a preference pane that lets you set your desktop background to a web page. It took me a little time Friday, and Saturday afternoon to put this together. It’s also the first program I’m releasing as free software under the GPLv3.

(I know there’s someone else that did this already, but that isn’t free software, and I for one am not going to wait for the little shithead to charge $20 for such a trivial program, which a lot of Mac “programmers” like to do)