Part of the reason I write so infrequently here, is because I write quite a bit here and here. Also, there’s work.
I know that work is not a good excuse, especially in light of the fact that during the busiest months in my entire life – in Singapore – I posted more frequently than ever.
But work has been busy. And I’m really enjoying it.
We just got a big write up on TechCrunch, and that’s raised the stakes a few notches. We now have upwards of a thousand people knocking on our door, asking to play with our beta.
In the latest version of mail.app in Leopard, some of the fields have moved. I had some trouble sending mail because I was used to the older version, and I couldn’t find the field for setting the SMTP port and authentication. Anyway, I have it up and running now, so I figured I’d post some screenshots.
First, in your Gmail settings, make sure you have either POP or IMAP enabled, depending on which you want to use. Then, open the Preferences for mail.app.
Click on “Accounts” in the top menu, then Account Information. Enter whatever you want into the Description field. Then enter the address you would like to use as your reply-to address into the Email Address field (probably your Gmail address). For your username, enter your Gmail username (without “@gmail.com”).
In the “Advanced” area, enter port 993, 995 or possibly 465.
Back in “Account Information,” click the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)” dropdown and select “Edit Server List.”
Enter a description if you want, and enter “smtp.gmail.com” as the server name. In the Advanced area, enter port 587, select “Password” in the Authentication menu and enter your Gmail username (again without “@gmail.com”) and password.
My friend Jonathan pointed me to The Fendertones – a project our old boss, Tony Rose, has been working on to reconstruct The Beach Boys original recordings in live performances. Here’s the description from The Fendertones website:
No details were spared to recreate the sounds of the original recordings. Using period correct instruments, the music featured everything from marimbas and accordians to horns and strings…the keyboardist even built what is most likely the only exact replica of Paul Tanner’s electro-Theremin that he played on the original “Good Vibrations”
As my friend Jonathan put it, “So if the recording has 5 beach boys singing 3 parts each they need 15 singers to do it live, and if a 1963 Fender guitar played 2 parts and was redoubled in the recording session they need 4 1963 Fender guitars. You get the picture.”
Just in time for the holidays, here are the Fendertones doing “Little Saint Nick.”
I spent several hours on Friday unsuccessfully trying to install Parallels and then Windows XP on my Macbook Pro. I was able to get it up and running over the weekend through some inelegant workarounds, and today I found myself fully in the Office Space world that is Windows.
10 minutes before the departure of the last #5 bus from the downtown depot, I shut down my computer. Well, I asked it to shut down. Windows chose this inopportune moment to notify me that it needed to install 81(!) updates. It warned me not to shut down, or face dire consequences.
15 minutes later, updates installed, I was allowed to leave.
Today on my way home from work, walking a couple of blocks in a bad part of town, I craned to see whether my bus was approaching. A SFPD cruiser pulled over to creep along beside me, and the officer rolled down the window.
“What are you looking for?” he asked me.
“What?”
“What are you looking for?”
Reflexively defensive, “Er… I was looking to see whether my bus… uh… I’m just transferring busses, and I was checking to see whether my bus was coming, to see if I need to hurry to the stop…”
“The 19 bus?”
“Yes.”
“Your stop is…”
And that’s where I turned away and just made for my bus stop. I think he was just trying to help, but I’m naturally on my guard in that part of town, and I assumed the officer was targeting me somehow.
In retrospect, I think he was just trying to help a guy who probably looked a bit out of place, and I feel a little bad for turning away from him while he was still talking.
