Lincoln, Nebraska

January 29, 2007 — Aaron Fulkerson

On the road to California the food is bad, the cold is worse, and Ashby is cool as ever. Tara, Ashby, and I got on the road late this morning. The temperature, with wind chill, was well below zero. Re-packing the car was a chore in the bitter cold. I don’t know how I could have ever fit everything were it not for the Yakima Skybox. That thing rules! Here’s a shot of our vehicle that was taken later in the day in Iowa.

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Notice the "Baby on Board" sign and UNC ram that was supplied by Roy. Tara got the "Baby on Board" sign to deter people from road raging around her. I’m not sure the sign effective is with road ragers. However, It’s been my experience that there are a couple signs you can place on your vehicle that will deter police from ticketing you, no not the UNC ram, but:: 1). "I love Jesus" 2). "Baby on Board". Don’t ask me why, but both have worked for me.

We got on the road at 10:34 AM CST. We made it to Iowa about an hour and a half later. Tara and I stopped for lunch about an hour out of Des Moines at a fancy roadside diner and gas station. It was so bloody cold I had to pry the car’s gas tank flap open with my knife. Although we didn’t eat the buffet, I did shoot a photo of it. Fabulous. The highlight of our meal was when Tara asked the waitress (photo below) if she enjoyed the salads the diner served. Something tells me this server mostly enjoyed the buffet.

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Kansas may be flatter than a pancake, but Nebraska, I suspect, is at least as flat as one.

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I’m currently writing this from a hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska. I’ve driven by Lincoln several times before, but I’ve never actually been in the town, until now. It’s clean. And what little I’ve seen of the city it seems strangely new. Lincoln is the capital of Nebraska and has a population of 250,000, the main industry is insurance. Odd, insurance. We’ll hit the road very early in the morning and will make Denver, Colorado tomorrow.

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Microsoft Outlook is an Amazing Piece of Crap

January 3, 2007 — Aaron Fulkerson

I’ve been using Thunderbird for a while now. I’m a Windows user on my laptop. I wish I could use Suse (as I have in the past) or Ubuntu (as I have in the past), but it’s hard to dogfood when you’re using Linux, and Linux support on laptops, in my experience, isn’t the greatest; especially when you have newer hardware. Anyway, Mozilla Thunderbird is wonderful. Use it. Outlook is a piece of shit. I was using Outlook 2003 until last July when, right before OSCON, my laptop hard drive failed on me. I was so fed up with it and how hard it is to backup I gave it up (again). Now I feel forced to use Outlook again because I don’t have a calendaring solution and synching addresses with my blackberry is just too damn hard. Without my calendar in my hand, I tend to miss appointments. For my final justification I really need to dogfood our own software and we have an Outlook plugin.

Iamporting/exporting in Outlook is a joke. How anyone on the Outlook team thinks they should release software that is (intentionally undoubtedly) that shitty on something so fundamental should be fired. No, being fired isn’t good enough, they should be…I don’t know…publically flogged or something. I’m not even going to bother outlining all the ways that Outlook is a piece of shit. It would take me too long. Let me say the following: with a Core 2 Duo and 2 Gigs of RAM no application should drag your laptop to a grounding halt. With Outlook running I get out of system resources errors! It takes me an hour to export only 5 months of email and 30-45 minutes to import it. Thunderbird stores your emails on the file system and not in some bullshit proprietary file, backing it up is as simple as synchronizing that folder with your NAS. Thunderbird has useful junk mail filters. Outlook doesn’t. Thunderbird can actually handle IMAP elegantly Outlook does not.

Like I said Outlook is shit. As soon as I went back to Outlook 2003 I get this problem where it will not retain my network password for my email account (POP3). I scoured the Internet for a fix including Microsoft’s useless knoledge base. The only thing I found was this fix that required deleting a registry entry. It didn’t help at all. So, I tried installing Outlook 2007 on the off chance this would resolve the issue. It didn’t. Now I have Outlook 2007, which is even a bigger, crappier, resource hog than Outlook 2003, but this one has big obnoxious shiny bubbly buttons! W00T! Ridiculous…I want Evolution and the ability to synch! If Mozilla could provide the ability to synch Thunderbird and Sunbird I would be in heaven. I researched this as well, all to no avail. I can’t be alone in this camp. There has to be a sizable minority of Outlook users out there who only use it for synching with their Treos or Blackberries.

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