Monday's Revenge or 19 Steps to a Crappy Tuesday

Note to Self: Never, ever blog about bad things that happen to you.  It just makes more bad things happen to you.  To wit:

1. 9:47 am.  All power goes out.  Not fuse blowing.  I mean all power goes out in the whole house.
2. Race downstairs to check the panel
3. Hear basement door close behind me and go "click".  Stupid lock is still on automatic lock.  2nd note to self: Do Not Get Angry.
4. Check panel.  All breakers are fine.
5. Check meter outside.  Meter is STOPPED!!!  In the U.S. this means that power was turned off at the street level.
6. I didn't get angry about the basement locking behind me since I know that I left the front door partially ajar since I was expecting company today.
7. Go around to the front to angrily call the electric company. 
8. Pull the screen door open and realize "OH NO -- suction!!!".  That's right I pulled it too quick and the suction created by the door opening closed the partially ajar front door relocking it. 
9. Assess situation
• Keys: None
• Tools: None
• Shoes: None
• Wallet: None
• Change: None
• Clothing: thin shirt & shorts
• Doors Open: Basement
10. So I naturally go around to the back door which I broke into yesterday and break a fingernail prying the glass back out.
11. I reach in and turn the knob. 
12. And nothing.  Smart guy that I am I pushed the upper deadbolt last night.
13. Reach up and feel for it.  My arm is like 3 inches too short.
14. Find tree branch.  Break it to appropriate length.  Use it to extend my arm and fiddle with the deadbolt.  Hear click.  Ah HA!  I'm in.
15. Realize that I have a promising career as a thief.  No, no, no.  Scratch that.  Don't go there.
16. Call electric company and realize that although power was on when I moved in, that was the last tenant's power.  Create account and get told "We have to send someone out.  No we can't tell you how long".
17. Realize that being without power is like not having air (at least for someone who work's from home).  It's even worse than not having Internet acesss.
18. Find every power strip and extension cord in the house.  Go down to basement and plug into downstairs neighbor's power (hope she's not a blog reader) and run a mixture of extension cords and power strips up two flights of stairs and power up all computers.
19. Replace pane of glass in back door.  Cut right index finger driving in the glazing points.  Pray hard for wednesday to arrive soon.

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A Great Review of Inbox Buddy !!!

Wow.  Our very first review of Inbox Buddy.  John of Inluminent fame wrote it and I'm going to happily quote:

Inbox Buddy is a tremendous upgrade to the default Microsoft Outlook 2000 installation. It does a lot of things I wanted Outlook to do, and a lot that I didn't even know I'd like Outlook to do, but now wonder how I got along without these features.

After a quick training session (took less than 15 minutes) upon the first installation, Inbox Buddy started working, and the coolest thing about it was that it just worked.

I can't really explain how much I like having Inbox Buddy working for me in the background, scanning new email for spam and organizing my email, filing away old email, pushing the important email up to the top of my Inbox and unimportant stuff to the bottom... but I can tell you that I like it.

It's still beta, but its truly once of the most advanced pieces of beta software I've ever used. If you're interested, download it now to get a feel for what its like. When it actually ships, I'll mention it again so that you know its ready for prime-time.

I like it a lot.

I'm hooked and I'm ready to pay for it once it's a shipping product. [ Go ]

Finding out about this was actually the only good thing about my Monday.  And it made up for everything else.  As our lead developer said "So Cool". 

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Inbox Buddy .908 Is Up

We just put up Inbox Buddy .908.  New stuff is

• Enhanced Spam Filter
• We fixed the how Microsoft Word is used as your email editor when you use it from Inbox Buddy
• We fixed Signatures being inserted when you use our New Email feature

I have to definitely thank Tommy who pushed us on the Microsoft Word stuff and made sure we fixed it.  Very cool and totally appreciated.

Do I Need to Install .908?

That's really up to you.  The .906 / .907 versions work very, very well.  There's not a real need to upgrade unless the changes described above are of interest to you.

How do I install .908?

Just run the Install program and install over your previous installation.  All settings and training data will be preserved.

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Oh My Dear God: 1 / 7 of the Rest of My Life Will Be Spent on Mondays ...

Just sit right back and I'll tell you a tale
A tale of a fateful day,
That started on this Monday
with this tiny geek
(my apologies to Gilligan's Island)

You know I've heard people use this as a polite curse "May 1/7 of your life be spent on Monday" but I don't think it really hit me how true that is until yesterday.  Monday.  A dreadful Monday.  The day started nicely enough, I:

• Rose early
• Showered without falling down in the shower (a classic Monday-ism although it only ever happened once to me and on a Thursday)
• Ate donuts
• Caffeinated well
• Wrote code
• Wrote more code
• Wrote even more code

And then I started to hit problems.  First it was handling some php imap_XYZ functions and dealing with returned objects, not returned arrays.  I had this code:

$mbox = imap_open ("\{$mailserver}INBOX", $login, $password, CL_EXPUNGE );
$headers = imap_headers ($mbox); 
# if test based on $headers omitted


$header = imap_header ($mbox, $message_id );
$from = $header->from;

And then I passed $from to a routine and tried to extract it's value.  Nope.  Didn't work.  Tried different syntax options.  Nope.  Then I used the most excellent var_dump($from) to make sure that the data was indeed getting passed to me.  It was.  Hmmmm.... Thankfully Kjartan was online so I IM'd him and he quickly figured it out.  The $from is an object so I need a foreach loop to retrieve it's value or:

  foreach ($from as $id => $object) {
    $from_name = $object->personal;
    $from_address = $object->mailbox . "@" . $object->host;
  }

Of course this is nowhere in the php.net docs.  Nowhere.  It's obvious if you really read the return values closely (they state it's an object) but it's not clear how to do it.  So I added it to php.net here.  Ooops.  Monday is continuing since I can't even find it.  Sigh. 

So, anyway, I got my code working and then I started to deal with mime encoded attachments.  Ack !!! Foo!!!!   If you haven't done it, I strongly recommend you steal the code from somewhere else so I needed my copy of PHP and MySQL Web Programming which I thought would cover it.  I thought this was in my car so I grabbed my keys and headed outside.  Since I was being very, very smart I figured I'll go out thru the basement and carry some boxes down to storage.  No problem.

Bad, bad, bad, bad call.  I'm now living in a new place and not really used to the locks here yet.  Needless to say the basement door closed behind me.  No problem I thought -- I have my keys.  Well this was now 4 pm and I'd been coding all day long and hadn't left the house at all.  So this means that the door was still locked from the night before with the deadbolt.  The deadbolt which can be opened from the outside -- IF THEY GIVE YOU A DAMN KEY FOR IT !!!  And, of course, they didn't.  This led to my heading back to the basement door only to find that the lock for that was one for which I didn't have a key either. 

Oh and did I mention that I was wearing shorts, a T shirt and no shoes?  And:

• No cell phone
• No wallet
• No ID
• Don't even know my landlord's name or #
• Don't know the property manager's name or #
• My only neighbor I know, who happily lives downstairs from me, is out for the 1st time in days

Hmmm.....  So time to take stock of the situation.  I have:

• House and car keys
• Minimal clothing
• No pocket knife
• A car filled with miscellaneous oddments including some tools.  Eureka !!!
• A back door I haven't thought to try yet

Of course I rushed over to the back door pleased as punch that I remembered it.  IT WOULDN'T OPEN.  The lock turned.  The frame bowed at the top and the bottom which indicated to me that there wasn't a deadbolt but the damn door knob wouldn't turn.  Sigh.  I start to realize "It must be Monday".  I head back to the car and round up a small flat blade screw driver and a hammer.  I start by trying to tighten the door knob screw since maybe that's a problem.  Of course screws aren't supposed to spin forever.  Sigh Sigh Sigh.  When that didn't work I manage to pull the knob off and use the hammer's claws to try and turn the spindle.  Nope.  Didn't work.  Next up is removing the lock face plate entirely.  Still can't get it in.

I start to contemplate the pure satisfaction of breaking the glass but I figure "I'll probably cut myself and bleed copiously".  So I took the screwdriver and removed all the window glazing putty and then got the pane of glass out.  From the other side of the door the handle turned fine and then I was in.  It turns out there is a lock setting on the door jam that I hadn't ever been told about which makes it so you can't open the door from the outside.  Needless to say I changed that setting.  And then I replaced the glass (still need to glaze it but that's not a big deal).

So my day resumed and I found out that John's having a similarly bad day.  I went back to coding and created then solved several errors. 

My day ended by taking myself out to dinner.  And, on the way, a car ran a red light and hit me.  My actions?  I went home to bed.

8:53:53 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This