Forgot to mention — I used the fancy-pants new Eastlink ring road yesterday. I came down to town after SES training last night. How long did it take to get from the city end of the Eastern freeway (Clifton Hill) to turning the engine off in Mum and Dad’s driveway? Twenty six minutes. Sweet.
Lisa’s kick-ass new Dell workstation arrived this week. They originally gave the 9th of July as an estimated delivery date, but as usual, they delivered much earlier than they said they would. The machine has been setup and done some light duty (web surfing, etc) but this weekend we’ll be installing the development tools that Lisa needs to get started with our latest contract.
The machine is a bit of a beast: quad core processor, 3GB of memory, 500GB hard disk and two monitors (a 20″ and a 19″ LCD). It came in at a shade over AU$1500. Nice.
My Inspiron 9400 laptop has been doing duty as the house PC for a few months now, but with the arrival of the new machine I’m able to carry it around with me again.
Because it will always be with me I’m looking into client-side email applications. I’m a big advocate of web based mail (and in particular, web based mail that’s independent of your ISP) but the overall web email experience isn’t brilliant. Gmail works really well in the browser, but I really, really miss some things when I’m using it. The biggest of those is the ability to drop an image into an email message (as you can in Outlook). For development work that’s really important. I’m a heavy user of SnagIt for screen captures, because there’s nothing quite like grabbing a quick screenshot of something and firing it off in an email to explain something. Gmail just doesn’t let you do that. You’ve got to save the screenshot to an image file then manually attach that image to the message, and it’s just all too hard.
Right now I’m using Thunderbird as an IMAP client pointed at my Gmail account. It seems to work pretty well. I still get all the benefits of ISP independent email that’s web accessible, but I also get some of the things I miss from Outlook: dropping images inline into the body of email messages, decent outbound email signatures, etc.
Who said what?