Flick's Writing - January 19th, 2014

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January 19th, 2014

Gardening

♥Jan. 19th, 2014 // 04:14 pm
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[xpost |http://flickgc.livejournal.com/950696.html]

The Baby seems to have something against his feed buckets. They get mangled very quickly, but he managed to be very impressive today:

(It may be that he just doesn't like pink, or maybe he just gets really annoyed with them when they're empty and don't magically fill back up.)

I took GB out for a hack, so that Mike could have the school to himself. It was all rather marred by having to negotiate the gates across the road: the one outside our house was ok, although it would be better with a one-handed mechanism, but the one at the far end of the road, which was a bit pathetic-looking even before a tree fell on it over Christmas, is downright dangerous. It's not so much the way that you have to drag it, screaming, across the road. It's more the fact that the mechanism's bust, so it's held closed with a loop of rope that just about fits over the gate post and, when not hooked over it, hangs down to about two foot off the ground. So I was having to hang off the side of the horse, with all of our eyes about three inches away from some barbed wire, flailing around to grab the rope and then trying to force it back over the post and hoping that, say, a cyclist wouldn't come down the hill and make GB jump into the wire.... As it happened, I saw the farmer as I was coming back and told him (nicely) that he had to get it fixed. I'll be saying the same thing to TWWOTV next time I see her: I'm not going to close it again from on the horse, so they can either fix it or they can have the sheep get out! I've had a look online and not found anything, but logic says that if the landowner installs a gate on a public road (I suspect it was grandfathered in when the road was adopted, in fact, but not sure) then the landowner has to make sure that it's fit for purpose! ([personal profile] raven - don't suppose you came across anything similar in the old job, did you?)

It's been a lovely day today:


Plus, the days are getting enough longer that we're not going straight from walking the dog to bringing the boys in. Today, therefore, we committed Gardening in the extra hour of daylight. I proved to be absolutely brilliant at instantly sorting plants into "weed", "not a weed" and "no idea", whilst randomly chopping bits off some smaller plants, and Mike did an excellent job of hacking branches off some of the bigger ones. I fail to understand why people do this for fun, and am now plotting ways of making the field bigger by giving the boys some of the garden. (And, it must be admitted, simultaneously working on turning a patch of waste ground into an orchard. I'd probably actually rather turn, eg, the whole back garden into one, but there's a lot less stuff to get rid of on a patch of waste ground.) *And* some bastard plant corroded my arms, though my fleece. Bah.

I filmed the birds today, and got a few inadvertent gardening action shots. I think I need to avoid it on days where there's a mix of sun and cloud, though, as it is a bit strobe-like in places (and that's after I cut out the morning stuff!)


I don't know what this is (other than "a plant"), but I walked past it in the garden and thought it smelled nice as well as looking pretty, so now I have a minimalist flower arrangement in the hall.

It actually matches some of my test patches of paint quite well....
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♥Jan. 19th, 2014 // 07:27 pm
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[xpost |http://flickgc.livejournal.com/951013.html]

(I don't know what that plant was earlier, but my hands and arms are still unpleasantly sore and tingly. Bah.)

So, Mike did some digging around and found an article that suggested that Mail could be sped up by disabling the option in Gmail to make All Mail available on IMAP. I've tried it out (Mail is now, um, apparently re-downloading everything, again.), but am mostly grateful for the fact that I've now learnt that Mail's behaviour on the delete key has changed: it used to put deleted items into a folder label (sigh) called "Deleted Messages", but now puts them into Gmail's Trash folder, which autodeletes after thirty days. This may be useful information for other people, I can't be the only person who doesn't actually want to delete the trash automagically.

I've now tried / looked at Sparrow (seemed lovely, even if it is dying, until I realised that it's not possible to turn off conversations) and Mailplane (looks like it's just a cut down Safari-type-thing, that only opens the gmail web interface. In which case, why not use the...?). I've also had Thunderbird suggested; although I'm a bit wary, as it was shite when I last used it (shortly after it came out), I suspect that it *could* do exactly what I want, if I were to spend six hours configuring it.

In case anyone has any better suggestions, here's a list of things I want:
- a screen composed of three parts: a list of folders, a list of emails (from, subject, date, maybe other things like attachments) in chronological order with the newest at the bottom, a preview pane
- the ability to have multiple email accounts accessible, with a single inbox and the ability to choose the from address using a drop-down of some sort. Auto-selecting to reply using the same address the email came into, rather than the default, is useful. Some of those multiple accounts will only be used to send mail, and may not even have an incoming mail server, so don't demand one that works
- never ever ever delete an email without my telling it to, even from the trash
- keyboard shortcuts like up arrow and down arrow to scroll through messages, and delete key to move to trash, or somewhere similar (which is never, ever emptied without my explicitly doing it)
- when a message is deleted moved to trash or similar, always move down to the next message in time, not to the nearest unread message
- syncing with gmail in a non-bandwidth-eating way. I have grown used to gmail's spam treatment, and am quite happy to check it once a day or so to make sure there's nothing that shouldn't be in there.

And things I explicitly don't want:
- conversations, or threading, or anything that stops emails appearing in chronological order and being treated as completely separate things when, for example, one moves them from one folder to another. Mail has a behaviour where it highlights emails that it considers to be related to the one you're currently looking at, which is not completely unbearable and occasionally even slightly useful
- deleting any email without being explicitly told to; when updating to a new version, randomly changing setting back to the default of automatically deleting emails without being told to

So, basically, I want the penultimate version of Eudora, or Mail c 5 years ago. Anyone have any suggestions before Mike is driven mad by my whinging?

On, I suppose, the plus side, Feedly (which I've been using since Google RSS Reeder stopped working on my Mac) has now changed the behaviour on the 'click to mark all as read' button so that it only takes a second or so, even on our connection, rather than chugging away for a minute. Which is progress, right?)
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