Now in my Flickr photostream: Senior Week, Commencement, and my first new friend in Cambridge! Check them out (and click through the photostream to see them all).

I had a craving tonight for chocolate chip cookies (this desert habit is becoming unhealthy! ;)) so I went out in search of them. The convenience store up the block does not carry cookie dough (and the man was very confused about what the heck I was talking about) so my hopes were dashed. But as I crossed the street to head home I realized there is a second convenience store right across the street, so I checked there, and sure enough, cookie dough was to be had at $4 a tube. But it’s worth it! 😛

I’ve spent the last week using Gmail, and I’m switching back to trusty IMAP (i.e. a system that will work in any mail program). Gmail bugs me, and I don’t really see what the fuss is about anymore.

The user interface is nice and pretty, and I like how everything is all interactive, names auto-complete as I type them, messages expand and you can respond from the same page, etc. It is all very slick and well done. However, it is not as slick as a real program. And as someone who generally has my laptop with me or am checking email on my desktop, I’d rather use a faster, more responsive, slicker “real” program.

Gmail has issues with Safari. Sometimes when I try to login it just gets into an infinite loop, redirecting me to different pages and never actually getting me to my inbox. Sometimes I try to delete something or view a message and it just won’t work. Things don’t always behave as they should.

Gmail’s “labels” functionality doesn’t seem any different than normal folders. Unlike tags in Flickr and on other services, you can only give an email a single label, which makes them a lot less useful. If I could tag my emails with multiple keywords and such that I could define as I go, that’d be great. Having to go create labels and then applying one label per message gives me really no benefit compared to normal folders.

Gmail only lets you have 20 “filters” to control your mail, and it makes it difficult to do anything sophisticated, like filter based on email headers. I have a whole bunch of procmail rules that dump emails I don’t need. It is not easy to replicate this behavior in Gmail, and the 20 rule limit is silly and arbitrary. If you can give me 2GB of storage, you can give me more than 20 filters.

I’ve found that Gmail provides a nice, slick, powerful web-based email client that is probably great for normal people. For power emailers, however, I don’t see much benefit to it. I haven’t gotten enough email into it to check the search capabilities, but Spotlight in Apple Mail works pretty well for me and is pretty darn fast. I have no use for the Gmail conversation view and see it as more of a gimmick, I don’t like that it is hard to see sender’s full names (it defaults to only first times, what happens if I have two friends named Adam?) and I find it is just too much of a hassle compared to having my own email on my own computer to handle my own way. Gmail just doesn’t work right for me, it doesn’t feel right, it is annoying to have to go to a web page to read my email, it just doesn’t fit how I do things.

Bye bye, Gmail. I’m going back to what works.

On the ride home tonight I was listening to The Connection and the guest was Steven Johnson, talking about his new book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. I read an article somewhere last week adapted from the book, and while I won’t get into all the details the gist of it is that today’s new media landscape is far more rich, varied, and complex than at any time in our history, and, as a result, we are becoming a smarter society. Shows like The West Wing and ER are fast-paced, highly specialized, and carry dozens of plotlines simultaneously, yet people have no problem keeping up. Video games offer rich virtual worlds that require complex problem solving and observation and include entire interactive stories. IQ scores are up and crime is down over the past ten years, and Johnson says new media is an important factor in this change.

Continue reading “Bad things, good things”