Jeff’s Austin Blues

I have been using the junk controls in Thunderbird. It catches some but not enough. The spammers have learned out to get around it, e.g., the message is in images with different backgrounds and random text after the image. There are several ads I have seen dozens of times and Thunderbirds still hasn’t learned they are spam, so I suspect it won’t ever.

In the past I never saw theses ads. Either this is a new tactic that coincided with my change in e-mail programs or the program I was using, DSPAM, was catching them. I am going to install DSPAM and see how it works.

After we moved into our hotel room and my wife saw how crowded it was, she decided not to have her own computer.  So I am scrambling to get her needed apps set up on my laptop.  It is a dual boot SuSE Linux, Windows XP machine, so this should be possible.

The highest priority is e-mail.  This turned out to be easier than I expected.  Over the years, AOL has moved away from proprietary protocols.  AOL e-mail can now be accessed by standard IMAP clients.  So I created an account for her within Thunderbird.  She can read her e-mail without having to reboot into Windows.

The next two items are Quicken and Word Perfect 5.1.  Running them under Windows will be easy to set up, but requires rebooting to switch operating systems, a time consuming hassle.  After they are installed on the FAT partition shared between both OSes, I may try Wine or the trial version of Crossover Office.  It would be nice to not have to switch OSes.

Some of you may suggest just suspending to disk/hibernating and resuming in the other OS.  It is a perfectly reasonable idea.  And it doesn’t work.  I had to reinstall WinXP four times (2+ hours) and clean up filesystem damage in Linux twice before I quit doing this.  Since I’ve stopped doing this and always shutdown and rebooted into the other OS, there hasn’t been any problem.

My wife hasn’t gotten the hang of the Thinkpoint mouse substitute.  I have a USB mouse for her.

We are figuring this out.

My wife and I are moving out of our house and into an extended stay hotel for several months. We had five computers at home with a Web server, e-mail server, etc. Now we have my laptop and her desktop. This category is about how we are making that work.

Our first major decision is do we try to get by on my dual boot laptop. We moved to separate personal computers ten years ago. A moderate space constraint is not enough reason to reverse that decision. Sunday or Monday we buy a computer cart for her desktop.

Details as they develop.