What does one do whilst waiting for said updates? Hack around on the desktop PC, of course. I now have a (pretty much pointless) installation of Horde on my domain, and a copy of PINE on pip, the SRCF’s linux box, appropriately set up to read my Google Apps email account via IMAP.

This will probably now solve all possible need-to-check-email scenarios; I fully intend to never be too far from my USB stick with Portable PuTTY, if I think I might not have access to a terminal of some description. Of course, in the majority of places, Firefox will do nicely, Thank You Very Much: the web interface is, for me, far superior to PINE (which doesn’t support things like starring messages, and deals awkwardly with labels, and the general “never delete a message” philosophy). But for those situations when bandwidth/memory/time are really short, PINE is a good thing!

Oh, and Napoleon Dynamite is, to be completely honest, not as fantastic a film as I’d been led to believe. The famous dance sequence is hilarious, but other than that, it’s pretty forgettable, and takes forever to get going (arguably, never getting beyond first gear, but then subtlety-of-plot is a valid artistic idea). Just not my kind of humour, I suppose.

I’ve stopped using Gmail specifically as a GTD tool, and rely solely on my PDA as “trusted system”. I am just starting to star emails that contain action items, mainly things that would just get an @email context anyway, so I can look through my emails without getting out the PDA, and still accomplish things. This kinda-sorta goes against the bucket-philosophy of GTD, but it works for me. I have really gotten on top of the InboxZero strategy: once I’ve got used to starring, I will always be able to process my inbox to empty every time I check. As it is, I normally leave one or two emails in the inbox that don’t fit into one of my vaguely project-esque labels, but they never stay there for more than a few days.

An interesting development that the geekier among my readers will have heard of is that Gmail has now released IMAP support on all accounts, including Apps. I debated for a while switching back to Thunderbird, which can be customised into a very nice Gmail client; I initially moved to Gmail because I needed a long-term email solution, and because of that, I waved goodbye (with a tear in my eye) to TB. However, now I’ve got used to The Gmail Way, and their web interface, I can’t see any reason to bother with TB: it’s just another application to have open, and my desktop only has so much RAM (even more of a concern on my ancient ubuntu/fluxbox-based laptop, which I struggled to read mail on via TB all summer). I don’t want to know every 5 seconds if I have a new message or not, so having to consciously browse to my Apps account is a good thing; and I get the exact-same interface here (my room) or on one of the departmental computers, or indeed anywhere else, which means I can productively check email away from my desk. This helps in many other ways – on a shared computer I have much fewer distractions, so concentrate on processing all my mail, and then actually getting on with tasks.