Allan McRae

What many people do not realize is that my archlinux.org email address is really just an alias for a Hotmail account. That’s right… I do my Linux development with a Hotmail address! Deal with it… I am not changing.

Recently I got annoyed at the Webmail extension for Thunderbird as it breaks every time the Hotmail site makes a change or a new version of Thunderbird is released (so generally not the extension authors fault). The final straw was when attachments were only being partially downloaded, which I only noticed when some photos I was sent had black bars on them. Then I checked my WordPress backups that are automatically emailed to me and, sure enough, I could not open the zip file because it was corrupt.

Fortunately, your Hotmail emails can be retrieved by POP3 and this had become an option for me as my work no longer blocks that port. Unfortunately, that only downloads emails in your Inbox and not your Junk folder. That should be easy to work around… Just turn of Hotmail’s junk filtering. Right? Well, no… Hotmail has two junk email settings – “Standard” and “Exclusive” – and neither of these is equivalent to “Off”. The “Standard” filter manages to catch about half of the spam I receive and a bunch of valid emails from mailing lists I am subscribed to. I could log into Hotmail every so often and flag the valid emails as not junk (annoying), but Hotmail will delete anything in your Junk folder after ten days (really annoying…).

How to work around this crap? I found in Hotmail’s options there is a item to set up “Rules for sorting new messages”. It appears if an email matches one of these rules, the rule is enacted without running the spam filter. So the spam filter can be disabled by adding the following rule: Move messages to Inbox if sender’s address contains “@”.

That means I am now receiving all of my emails. So, if you send me an email and I do not respond, it is now definitely because I am ignoring you.

I got around to signing up for a Google+ account today. That is a big step for someone who never had a Facebook (or Diaspora) account. But then I did not know what to do with it. There was just this circle staring at me saying “Friends: 0″. Great… Google even knows I have no friends! And if Google tells you something, then it must be true. So I deleted that circle out of spite.

One thing I did like was the ability to link my other email addresses to my account. I signed up using my Gmail account because I was already logged into Google when I clicked on the invite link. But I do not actually use that account for anything (it forwards to my Hotmail account – yes, seriously… so does my archlinux.org address). So I was slightly concerned that I would be stuck using an e-mail address that no-one knew about, which would make it difficult for my zero friends to find me. Turns out Facebook has this feature too, so no real win for Google+ there, but I am always pleasantly surprised when things have the features I want. This is the joy of constantly low expectations about the world.

Here goes my profile page. Feel free to add me. If I do not like you then you can go into my “People I have added to a circle be polite but really will ignore from here on out” circle and you will never know… (Actually, I have no circle by that name because there is a limit on circle name length.)

And if they are less than 140 characters long, you will find them on my freshly created identi.ca account. So everyone rush there and subscribe so I can regale you with my witty banter…

Today’s Ctrl+Alt+Del comic has brought it all flooding back to me… I can accept that perhaps “after midnight” ends at sunrise the next day, but it never seemed biologically plausible that such an occurrence was so oddly specific to a given time. Do the Mogwai’s bodies have some internal clock that will detect midnight with great accuracy? Can it correct for daylight savings time? What if I feed the Mogwai in one timezone after 11pm and then take it across to the adjacent timezone where that feeding now occurred past midnight?

I have been noticing that sometimes Google fails at selecting an appropriate image for its news articles.

I know carrying and giving birth to twins is difficult, but even then…

That is not Miss Australia… (and yes I checked out the NSFW pictures and the were not all they were advertised to be).

The stress of the situation appears to have taken its toll on that teenage boy.

I’m fairly sure that “man in the middle” is Australia’s first female Prime Minister.

Ever been to McDonald’s right after they stopped serving the breakfast menu and been really disappointed at their lack of flexibility in menu change timings? Nor have I… but I am told the conversation goes something like this:

   ”No sir, we can not give a hashbrown as we stopped serving breakfast about 15 seconds ago.”
   ”What about that leftover hashbrown sitting right there?”
   ”We stop serving breakfast at 10:30am. That hashbrown is dead to us.”

But do they make any exceptions? I think we may soon find out. Someone is in the process of threatening to blow themselves up in Brisbane, forcing a closure of part of the CBD including some ferry terminals. Apparently he has made a request for a Bacon and Egg McMuffin, which is a good choice as they have less fat content than the similar Sausage and Egg McMuffin. That and bacon is awesome. However, despite this request being made after the 10:30am cut-off for McDonald’s breakfast, the police are still trying to fulfill it.

Things just got interesting… If McDonald’s folds and provides the McMuffin then we have a baseline for how much pressure must be exerted before they serve breakfast after 10:30am. Then we just need to bisect the pressure scale to determine the “caving threshold” above which we can obtain post 10:30am McDonald’s breakfast. If McDonald’s does not provide the McMuffin, I suggest we do not escalate this further and just call an end to this highly scientific experiment.

This is a good summary of the build-up to the Australian election:

The world needs more animated news. For people unfamiliar with Australian politics, there is barely any exaggeration in that clip. Also, the Sex Party was actually a reasonably good choice if you look at their policies.

Not that I get to vote in any of this… I am proudly not an Australian citizen!

Guess which team was the only one to be undefeated at the “Soccer” World Cup? That’s right… New Zealand!

(We did not win a game either but that is not the point.)

Saw an infomercial for Australia’s biggest ISP (Telstra BigPond) today and learnt something amazing. The “expert” talking to the presenter said something like:

People do a lot of things on-line these days. Watching movies, checking emails, browsing…

I was a bit taken back… People use the internet for checking emails? I have been doing it wrong all these years!