Health Annoyances

I am trying my absolute best in my Personal Health and Wellness course, but for the past 3 weeks I have scored 99 out of a possible 100 on my weekly test. I am happy the scores are high,but am slightly pissed at myself because I can’t manage to push them over the 100 mark… and it doesn’t make me feel any better that I have 38 points of extra credit…. the extra credit in my world is supposed to be an extra cushion that will let me have a worry-free final exam session, not make up for mistakes during the semester. I guess if I am going to keep this stress-free I’m going to have to chill a bit.

Why 10 email accounts?

I now have 10 email accounts in Thunderbird. Why? I don’t know. I don’t do enough shit to need that many accounts!

curtis.kularski.net
This is the oldest account in Thunderbird. I have had this email account for many years. This account now seems to be where a lot of crap I don’t care about ends up landing. I don’t read most of the mail that lands there. There is a bit of SPAM that goes to the box, but its a manageable amount. There is a wild-card address system associated wit the account that doesn’t really meet my needs anymore. With just throwing a few things around I can probably easily cut down the amount of "real" email that goes to this box and remove it from Thunderbird, checking it by web when I really need to.

 

studboi.net
I hardly get any mail on this account, but when I do it is personal or important, so I think I want to keep it in Thunderbird.  Kind of a fun domain name too, which always gets votes for keeping an account.

 

j———-s.net
Email provided for me by a friend. Mostly for dealing with stuff from his website, usually of an erotic nature. I don’t really use this account anymore, and it is highly spammed, mostly because it has been so public for so long. I don’t really think I need to keep this in Thunderbird… or in some cases, at all. I get some email there, but only for things like Yahoo Groups, which I can easily move.

 

s———-h.net
Another erotic purpose address. This one is probably a keeper, its kind of a cute address and I like it, so no need to remove it from Thunderbird, but it is further reason to remove the previous account from Thunderbird.

 

claymentality.net
When I thought I was going to be a ceramic artist, this was a good address.  It gave me a foundation for creating a ceramic business. I’m not sure I want to do ceramics like that right now in my life, and I certainly don’t give out an email address on the domain to many people. I think I should kill the account and make it an alias account to go to one of my other remaining accounts, that will also remove it from Thunderbird. Maybe one day… if things change, I will reinstate it, but for now, I don’t need the excess bloat.

 

kularski.org
Well isn’t it obvious? Its my personal email on my family domain! I’ve got to keep it…. don’t I? Ok, heres the deal with this one. This is an email address I use all the time and keep up with, but I don’t ever read it in Thunderbird, honestly I think checking it with Thunderbird is fucking (WLW has flagged "fucking" as being misspelled) obnoxious. I almost always do this one with the Google GMail interface. Account will stay, but it doesn’t need to be in Thunderbird.

 

x.pcfire.net
Designated junkmail collector! I have filtered, tagged and flagged this account really well in GMail, so its a really nice replacement for the above mentioned curtis.kularski.net address. I just added this one to Thunderbird this morning. I love using this box, but I can’t see myself ever checking it during the day regularly enough for it to matter. My voicemail goes there, my notifications for things go there, its like an all-in-one collector. It needs to be in Thunderbird.

 

ncsu.edu, uncc.edu, and unc.edu
These three encompass my academic email world, but honestly, they don’t need to be in Thunderbird all year round. I would love to find a way to consolidate all of these actually. I don’t mean find a way to get a NorthCarolina.edu address (would be UNC System Email), but more or less, pick a school to be my home and keep all of my email on one mail server. Only problem is, spacing isn’t allowed the same on all of them, so I don’t know what to do. I suppose I should pray and come back to these. It seems like every time I enroll in a class somebody wants to give me a free email address.

 

That leaves me with 6 addresses still to consider in Thunderbird. I guess baby steps are key here.

 

I should also confess… This isn’t all of my addresses, there are about 5 more that don’t even get considered in Thunderbird. I really don’t need all of the email addresses I have been given.

Windows Live Writer

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am writing some of my blog entries in "Windows Live Writer" now. It is a little simpler than logging into Movable Type every time I want to make a post, but there are a lot of problems with it as well. First of all, It doesn’t understand the multi-level category concept, therefore all of my categories are in a flat list, which in some situations makes very little sense. Also, I can only select one category at a time, bummer.

Windows Live Writer is a more comfortable writing environment for me, its more like writing in Word, including the auto-save functions. I am not constantly being careful of what I do in my browser so that I don’t crash mid-edit. MovableType offers some protection, but not enough to make me happy.  WLW allows me to set a publish date, the same as MT does, but for "in the moment" posts, it posts the actual publication time, not the time that I first thought about writing, which is often a few hours before I even get started on anything. There is also the benefit of Microsoft’s wonderful spell checking engine, I am not relying on A-Spell or the OpenOffice spelling kit to give me bad suggestions.

The coolest thing about WLW is that it offers some really neat plugins that help me do what I want to do. For example, I can now link in Flickr content without having to either publish from Flickr or create my own little linked thumbnail set. Some of the plugins are a little lame though, most of them are for programmers (makes sense, programmers wrote them), things like "code snippets" and "insert from console". Neat features, just not useful to most people (but they are useful to me sometimes). There also some more blog-traditional plugins, like the "currently listening" and "tags" plugins. I’m looking forward to using the Amazon.com functionality at some point, it looks really cool.

Some problems I have run into are that it won’t install on Windows Server at all, which nocks out 2 of my primary systems from being able to run it, restricting it to my laptop and to only one OS of my desktop (Vista). The other thing that pisses me off is that there is only 1 ink-blogging tool available and it is for TabletPC users only. I want to write from my tablet too damn it!

I wish WLW were more of a "full service" blog tool, but I’ll take what I can get. It would be neat to manage comments and be able to respond to them from here, but I cant. I never thought I would use a WYSIWYG blog application, but I am and I kind of like it.

WLW is part of the Microsoft Windows Live Desktop Pack if you wish to give it a try. You can get it at http://get.live.com/ (felt great not having to do that link by hand).

The Internet Is For Porn

This morning I opened my Google Analytics account and not shockingly…. my site about my erotic interests (not even really considered porn) gets about 60 hits per day now, that’s up from like 40 in January. DisturbingThoughts is still sitting reliably at about 15 hits per day. The sites clearly have very different audiences. Oddly enough, not everyone who visits either site do I know personally. There are a few repeat visitors to DT, and a lot to SB, but I don’t know these people personally (Thanks for spreading my seed Google!). The funniest thing though, the hits to both sites from Greensboro, NC stay almost exactly even and the same on both sites… almost like I’m being stalked. At about 111 hits per month from Greensboro, I think something is going on there 😉 Maybe my peanut gallery of friends might want to chime in with some ideas there?

 

Even though Disturbing Thoughts has been around way longer and has more high quality levels of misguided thought processes than SB, SB is the one that appeals to the erotic side of people and therefore it gets more hits. Maybe I’m wrong though, maybe there just aren’t enough good sites for porn?

 

ok, I was going to link to this video, but since Windows Live Writer has taken it upon itself to reinterpret my wishes (Thanks Microsoft!), I’m going to leave this here for posterity. OK, so I add YouTube to the list of places I can’t directly paste links from (Flickr, Amazon, Picasa Web and eBay are some others). 

My State

Just to let everyone know. I am ok and doing fine. I have had a lot on my mind this week, some stuff I’ve been dealing with. Nothing to be concerned about, I just need to get myself to use the weekend to chill and get back in the groove of things.
Most readers/friends seem to know that the more I post the happier I am as a person. The less I post, the more depressed I am. Well… i’ve posted a lot this month, but not so much in the last few days. The last few days have actually been happy for me. Fairly uneventful, but still… very happy. Next week I’m hoping for eventful and happy.

I am NOT an Internet Addict

According to the Internet Addiction Activity in my Health/Wellness course… I am not an Internet addict. I scored 28 on the following survey.
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Score the following on a scale of 1 – 5 (1 is rarely/never and 5 is always).
1. How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended?
2. How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online?
3. How often do you prefer the excitement of the Internet to intimacy with your partner?
4. How often do you form new relationships with fellow online users?
5. How often do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend online?
6. How often do your grades or school work suffer because of the amount of time you spend online?
7. How often do you check your e-mail before something else that you need to do?
8. How often does your job performance or productivity suffer because of the Internet?
9. How often do you become defensive or secretive when anyone else asks you what you do online?
10. How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts about the Internet?
11. How often do you find yourself anticipating when you will go online again?
12. How often do you fear that life without the Internet would be boring, empty, and joyless?
13. How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are online?
14. How often do you lose sleep to late-night log-ons?
15. How often do you feel preoccupied with the Internet when off-line, or fantasize about being online?
16. How often do you find yourself saying “just a few more minutes” when online?
17. How often do you try to cut down the amount of time you spend online and fail?
18. How often do you try to hide how long you’ve been online?
19. How often do you choose to spend more time online over going out with others?
20. How often do you feel depressed, moody, or nervous when you are off-line, which goes away once you are back online?
The higher your score, the greater your level of addiction and the problems your Internet usage causes.
20-49 points: You are an average Internet user. You may surf the Web a bit too long at times, but you have control over your usage.
50-79 points: You are experiencing occasional or frequent problems because of the Internet. You should consider the Internet’s full impact on your life.
80-100 points: Your Internet usage is causing significant problems in your life. You should evaluate the impact of the Internet on your life and address the problems directly caused by your Internet usage.
to take action.

Onyen Annoyance

In a few days my UNC Onyen password expires, and it will continue to expire every 90 days after that. The typical semester is more like 120 days, so why does UNC force a password change so soon? I am as much for security as anyone, but UNCC seems to have a better system, they force a password change once every 180 days. I sort of think that password expiration should be based on the strength of the password. I don’t feel like my password is at all compromised…. I never write it down, and even if I were to say it out loud, no one would remember what it is. I do appreciate the fact that UNC wants us to keep things secure by not reusing the same password all the time, but damn this is annoying.

Forgetting Father’s Day

My father and I aren’t particularly close and he doesn’t show emotion at all (I guess thats why most gay guys associate most with their mothers), but today I got the impression that he was upset by the fact that I ignored/forgot father’s day this year. On Mother’s day he glared in a very mean way and acted as though the gift I gave her (a Hamilton Beach BrewStation, she loves coffee) somehow interfered with his life. In addition, he has always hated opening gifts… so why would I trouble him with something like father’s day? Today he seemed bothered that I didn’t acknowledge it in any way… I guess even the most annoying emotionless rocks need to be told that they are loved occasionally.