back from sunny san diego
there really isn’t enough time in the day for me to do all the things i want to do. that’s why this blog is called justinsomnia. because all too often i find myself squeezing just another hour out of the day (at the expense of getting 8ish hours of sleep) to read blogs or write for my own.
back to work today after 6 days away. dove headlong into the email that had built up while i was in san diego. pine, it turns out, has become something of a liability when traveling. it’s my preferred email client, but due to the nature of the ssh connection i was using it over, checking my unc email using pine remotely is almost impossible. and i hesitate to use a local mail client like thunderbird because of the security issues of sending my password over the wireless network in plain text in a room full of some of the brightest minds in hackerdom. does anyone know a simple way to use an email client like thunderbird more securely? and unc’s webmail doesn’t filter out the spam like i’ve configured pine to do–though there’s probably a way to do that as well. suffice it to say, i let some emails lay fallow.
the virtues of idleness and getting things done have been fighting it out in my mind lately. i just want to be less distracted. and more focused. so i dove headlong into work today, hacking away at code even though i felt nowhere near flow. i think flow is overrated. i mean, i love feeling totally in the groove of something i’m doing, but usually it’s to the detriment of everything else.
i caught up with alice for dinner and heard all about her news, which is cool. chatted with the parents on the way over to jane’s apartment. distracted jane from her homework which was distracting her from her masters paper. now i’m home. and it’s after midnight.
i have a wordpress feature request. i wish assigning posts to categories was more like these folksonomy tagging systems that are all the rage (e.g. del.icio.us, technorati, flickr). i don’t want to figure out the categories in advance. i just want to categorize them on the fly right now, and sort things out later.
Boy do I hear you about flow… as evidenced by the fact that I am writing this at 2:30 am after finally getting in The Zone at 11 pm (as I so often do).
But it’s worth it.
ETech was good, no? Had a great time. I wonder if we met…
Re remote email, use POP3s, IMAPs and SMTPs and you have secure email with secure passwords even over public Wifi. It was just annoying that SMTPs was blocked at ETech. No idea why.
unfortunately, unc does not support secure imap (see help.unc.edu), but you may be able to tunnel normal imap through ssh (not sure how to do this in windows).
also, check mail.unc.edu/spam to enable spamassassin on your unc email.
sounds like etech was worth the trip :) i’m still bummed that i wasn’t able to go.
ruby, the npoblogs url doesn’t appear to be working…
julian, perhaps we met–or more likely, crossed paths, as there were so many people there.
jackson, damn. secure imap would be just the ticket. why doesn’t unc get on that?
oh, p.s. i have had spam tagging set up for some time on my unc account, though i didn’t realize it was spamassassin–and i had long since forgotten the url to get back to it (thanks!). but yeah, i just have pine filter all the tagged messages into another folder. i assume there’s a way to do the same with webmail?
i’ve never really used the unc webmail so i’m not sure if it supports filtering. it’s easy to do in thunderbird though. and no, i have no idea why unc doesn’t support secure imap.
also, check out the technorati tags plugin for wordpress.
Damnit Jackson…you got to the Technorati Tags link seconds before I did. :-) Justin: I would think that it’s certainly possible to replace the “category” functions of WordPress with a more folksonomic way of doing things. Looks like the guys a Laughingmeme tried something, but it’s not really clear from the description how to make it work for yourself.
Oops, the URL in my first comment should have been: NPOblogs.net.
And on folksonomy tip: Justin, check out Scuttle http://www.tecknik.net/poke/post.php/92 a “host it yourself” del.icio.us. Perhaps some code there that you can adopt to your purposes.
ruby thanks, can’t believe i didn’t catch that. it’s fixed.
it would be nice to avoid hacking the source (as in the laughingmeme approach). implementing tags on the front end should be easy (either using post metadata or the category system), the problem will be supporting search and browsing (for instance, in delicious you can do newyork+travel).
Ah HA!
WordPress Tags!