Sam's Insane Ravings

I ordered something online late on Friday and used the cheapest possible shipping (which was in fact free).

On Monday afternoon I had the item in my hands.

Now if only I could find some time to watch the damn DVD...

I needed to buy a plane a ticket in order to get to Chicago, and the date I wanted to fly was getting closer so I decided to do it before the prices went up this time.

At the travel web site I usually use to buy such things over here (because travelocity doesn't let you buy 'infant on lap' tickets, or at least doesn't let me) the ticket I wanted was $99 which was good enough for me.

But when I clicked the select button instead of making me fill out the seventeen thousand pages of forms usually required it returned me to the list with the annoying message We're sorry, the fare for that itinerary is no longer available. The fare for that trip is now $174. See below.

That's quite the price hike. There was another ticket for $101 but it was the same first leg and then instead of a 30 minute wait and no plane change for the next leg it was a 3 hour wait.

So, I did the step I usually do before clicking anyway - go to the airlines web site and see how much it is direct from them.

So off to airtran we go. The flight I wanted was $93 there so I bought it. And scarily enough, though I have no recollection of the airline, my email address was already in their member list...

Screw you middle man.

Of course, I'm still sad that Jetblue and their wonderful watch TV while flying goodness don't fly to Chicago.

I used Outlook for its calendar, and now I'm stuck wanting its mail interface.

I finally got around to installing linux on my new laptop (an entire four three days after I got it). And even used Ubuntu instead of my normal Debian, because my debian install wouldn't recognise the wireless or wired network interfaces and I didn't have time to screw around with it.

So I have some wierd Gnome desktop instead of my normal ion window manager, but I'm pretty sure that will change because these damn overlapping windows are driving me mad.

However, I now want a mail interface like Outlook. And Evolution doesn't seem to do it. See the screen shots at this visual comparison site. Just the mail ones - ignore the rest.

See that big blank space in the Outlook screen shot. Maybe I'm just dumb, but it would seem to me that taking screen shots of mail readers actually displaying email would be more useful than displaying empty folders. So that big blank space on the right would usually contain the text of an email.

My laptop has a tiny little screen (it's a laptop, and one designed to be small and light) and that tiny screen is widescreen. That means I have much more horizontal space than vertical space available. Being able to display the message beside the folder content listing rather than under it makes an amazing usability difference.

Notice that those mail interfaces use tiled windows... Overlapping windows just make no sense - at least individual applications are noticing this slowly. Tiled windows with tabs - it's all you need for everything. Tiles and tabs I say.

Evolution

How informative. Was there even an error?

The server name has been gimped out, you can never be too paranoid...