Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Allow me to follow up on my initial review of Thunderbird 3.

The new Thunderbird is growing on me. I’m getting used to the new position of buttons at about the same rate I adjust to the change in year. By April, or July if it’s a bad year, I should have it all figured out.

Since my last review, I installed Expression Search, which has made my email searching experience much more pleasant; in fact I like using this form of search far more than both the default Thunderbird and Google Desktop email searches. It appears that my quest for email search nirvana continues.

One bonus of the new Thunderbird is the ability to view email conversations. Sort of. From what I’ve observed, you can see all the participants and their initial remarks, but you can’t view the entire thing. Moreover, the format of the “conversation” in the reader pane is so devoid of contrast that I find it difficult, at least initially, to easily discern who is saying what to whom.

The most important improvement is the ability to open emails in tabs rather than in new windows. I like it for the same reason I liked the inclusion of tabs in the web browser. However, now that Thunderbird has tabs, I feel like there needs to be the option to incorporate Thunderbird directly into Firefox.

onsider this scenario I regularly encounter. In the morning, I awake to find dozens of new messages in my inbox. I triage them by opening the important or interesting ones in tabs. Once I make it through all the new messages, I attack the tabs. Frequently, the message in a tab is a Google News Alert, which, for the unfamiliar, includes possibly dozens of links of which there are a few worth clicking on.

As it happens now, those links open in new tabs in Firefox meaning I have to switch back and forth between the Firefox and Thunderbird windows. I would rather have those tabs open next to the email message I’m reading. There is a clunky extension for Thunderbird called ThunderBrowse, that accomplishes the task of opening web pages in Thunderbird. But it does not do so well. So rather than incorporating the browser into the email client, I think it needs to move in the other direction. It also needs to be more incorporated than the email/browser clients in SeaMonkey, where they’re basically separate programs where one can be used to open the other.

I would like to see the ability to create a dedicated Thunderbird tab, maybe that can be assigned a specific tab position, within Firefox. Then, email messages can be opened in tabs within FF and moved, sorted, maybe even bookmarked, in the same way that web pages are.

This really runs counter to the light, agile, browser concept. I accept that, which is why it should be an optional add on. But considering that 99.9% of the time I have Thunderbird and Firefox open anyway, I doubt there will be much of a change in system performance.

Last night I wrote — and somehow deleted — a review and warning about Philips compact fluorescent light bulbs.

With the original post gone and not feeling like writing it again. I will summarize briefly.

Philips CFBs are shitty. They take forever to warm up and then they can even start buzzing. That is great if your house happens to be a high school gymnasium. Since it probably isn’t, stick with GE bulbs. They’re worth it.

Speaking of being worth it, suck up your pride and go to Wal-Mart to get your GE CFBs. You’ll probably be able to buy 2 or 3 times as many bulbs for the money.

That may be the best way to describe the taste of Listerine Whitening® Pre-Brush Rinse.

Whether or not the product actually whitens, it has a major drawback: during use, it very quickly picks up the taste of all the stuff that you don’t want in your mouth anymore. Therefore you spend a minute rinsing and being uncomfortably aware of just how dirty your mouth is.

The emerging rule in my life is that the only things less reliable than my old American car and Windows PCs are my iPod and iTunes.

Today, the less-than-six-month-old iPod iPiece-of-shit has decided to crash. And I mean really crash. As in it has to be totally reformatted.

Whereas iTunes used to recognize my iPiece as “Nobrainer,” is is now once again just a corrupted “iPod.”

So how does one go about reformatting an iPod? Or even turning off a iPiece? Well I’m sure iTunes will help. (more…)

I’m very happy that Apple, which likes to pretend that it always gets things right the first time, releases upgrades to iPod firmware.

You see, my nano simply didn’t work right. I was supposed to be able to hold down the center button to add a song/album/artist to the on-the-go playlist. But it only worked for individual songs.

Now, months later, my problem is fixed. Woohoo.

All-in-all I think the iPod is ok. It’s a really cool little gadget, but I feel it adds between very little and absolutely zero value to my life. It is simple to operate, but I often find myself wishing I could perform simple operations such as deleting a song from a playlist. For as nice as it is to have a lot of music to carry with me in a tiny package, I find myself spending far too much time thinking about what I might want to listen to later on as well as updating artist and album info.

If I didn’t know that the people who got it for me would ask me how I liked it, and if it weren’t personalized with their company name, I would sell the damn thing. $150 in my IRA is worth much more to me than some little device which separates myself from my thoughts. $150 is not more important than upsetting my employer.

For reference, I spent >$200 on a 19″ LCD monitor for my desktop. It’s so worth it that I can’t wait to get a 2nd one hooked up. I also spent ~$200 on a universal remote, which I still consider to be a sound purchase.

And with the iPod came my switch from WinAmp to iTunes. WinAmp was kinda crappy but I was used to it. iTunes is better (than WinAmp and even the new WMP), but still I don’t find all that much to love.

The automatic download of podcasts is great. I really like that (although I’m sure there are similar other ways to do it without iTunes).

Other than that, I don’t particularly like the layout and I maintain hatred for the faux sleek styling. It’s not good at finding album artwork. More often than not, I find it to be sluggish and confusing. I’m not sure that any of it is particularly intuitive, and lot of it runs counter to my years of windows training. It is particularly bad at ctrl+click operations. But then again, I’ve hated QuickTime and iTunes since I first experienced them.

In brief summary, the value of the iPod is in its “wow,” and “I have one, too” factors. I’m still amazed that such a tiny thing has a color screen and holds eons of music. But that doesn’t mean it’s even remotely a necessity.