UPD: Gmail Account Maintenance

It’s been 5 days now, and still no Gmail. I’ve tried logging in with different browsers, on different computers, in different countries. Scratch that last one (I tried, but as luck would have it, the internet crashed in Pakistan).

Although since Monday I’ve been recieving a new error message:

Server Error
Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

I’ve read some other reports of people having this happen to them in the past and they didn’t lose any incoming emails, so when this does finally work again I’m expecting to have a whole crap load of email waiting for me.

Joy!

-----

Watch This

One

-----

Napoleon Dynamite Soundboard

Yessssss’

Napoleon Dynamite Soundboard

-----

Gmail Account Maintenance

I went to check my gmail this morning (as all obsessive-compulsive internet-born geeks do first thing in the morning) and I was treated with this:

We’re currently performing some unexpected maintenance on your account. While we can’t predict exactly how long it will take, we’re working as quickly as we can to restore access to your email’apologies for the inconvenience.

If you have questions, please contact us at gmail-maintenance@google.com.

Hmm, that’s not happiness. So I figure I’ll send them an email (luckily I have 5 other email accounts) and see what the problem is. Unfortunately all I get in reply is this nice automated email message.

Hello,

Your Gmail account has been disabled due to a technical issue. Our engineers are working diligently to find a solution so that you can regain access to your account. Unfortunately, we cannot offer an exact timeframe of when your account will be re-enabled. Please try logging in to your Gmail account again in a few days.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we thank you for your patience during our limited test of Gmail.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

Please try logging into my Gmail account in a few days?! Have the Gmail staff even used email lately? Maybe I’m just an obsessive exception, but not having access to my email for a few days is like not having access to oxygen for a few hours.

And I’m very disappointed in their lame excuse of ‘our limited test of Gmail.’ Is that why it still says Beta after being available to the public for over a year? So they can lean on that anytime something goes wrong? Shameful.

Mixed Up Feeds

I goofed. For those of you that don’t know, I started a side-project called Faith Creative. It is a blog devoted to discovering creativity in the church. Unfortunately, I just now realized that I had the rss feed link on Faith Creative linking to my Echo Faith feed.

So it’s fixed now.

• Echo Faith Feed


• Faith Creative Feed


• What are feeds?

-----

A Unique Three Percent

I was inspired by Terry Storch to re-take the classic Myers-Briggs personality test. I’ve always been a big fan of psychology and classifying personalities so I’ve taken the test at least once every couple of years since junior high. It’s been cool to see my results shift over so slightly as I changed.

ENFP

• 22% - Extroverted


• 62% - iNtuitive


• 75% - Feeling


• 33% - Perceiving

ENFPs are both “idea"-people and “people"-people, who see everyone and everything as part of an often bizarre cosmic whole. They want to both help (at least, their own definition of “help") and be liked and admired by other people, on both an individual and a humanitarian level. They are interested in new ideas on principle, but ultimately discard most of them for one reason or another.

When I first took this test in Junior High I scored as an INFP. By the time I was about out of high school it was XNFP (the X means I scored exactly halfway between I and E). I’ve often told friends about how shy I used to be in high school compared to how I am now, and this test proves it! =)

Here’s some other info on ENFP that I found pretty accurate.

ENFPs have what some call a “silly switch.” They can be intellectual, serious, all business for a while, but whenever they get the chance, they flip that switch and become CAPTAIN WILDCHILD, the scourge of the swimming pool, ticklers par excellence. Sometimes they may even appear intoxicated when the “switch” is flipped. One study has shown that ENFPs are significantly overrepresented in psychodrama. Most have a natural propensity for role-playing and acting.

You can read more about the ENFP at Typelogic or Keirsey.

Take your own test… and let me know your results!

By the way, only 3% of the U.S. population is ENFP, hence the title.

iPod Smart Playlists

I get asked how I organize my iPod playlists quite a bit so I thought I’d write a mini guide.

The Apple iPod has one of the best features ever. The smart playlist. I picked up my 4G iPod (40gb) about a year ago and I’ve been tweaking these things ever since.

The smart playlist is simply a list of instructions/details that create a playlist on the fly based on the conditions you set. To create my list I use a sequence of Smart Playlists that land in one central playlist.

Step One

You must rate all most of your songs. It’s a good idea to go through and rate all the albums you know pretty well first to get them quickly out of the way, I have a system for rating the other stuff as you’ll see later.

Step Two

Start creating the playlists! My naming technique is personal choice so you can change it for what works best for you. The _ is so that it will appear at the top of your playlists.

The first playlist to create is _NewSongs with the following conditions:

• Playlist is newSongs


• Limit to 25 songs select by least recently played


• Live updating

newSongs is a static playlist where I dump all my newly added music’ after I’ve heard it enough and have rated it I delete it form that playlist.

Step Three

Next we create _3_Stars with these settings:

• Match all of the following conditions:
• My Rating is ***
• Last Played is not in the last 1 days
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 15 songs selected by random
• Live updating

Follow by creating these 2 playlists:

_4_stars

• My Rating is ****
• Last Played is not in the last 1 days
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 45 songs selected by random
• Live updating

_5_Stars

• My Rating is *****
• Last Played is not in the last 1 days
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 80 songs selected by random
• Live updating

Step Four

Now we should have 5 playlists ‘ _NewSongs, newSongs, _3_Stars, 4_Stars, and _5_Stars.

Here we should create _NotRecent to catch all the songs that we love, but haven’t heard in a long time. The rules for this playlist are:

• Match all of the following conditions:
• My Rating is *****
• Playlist is not _5_Stars
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 15 songs selected by least recently played
• Live updating

Step Five

Almost done! Now we’re going to create _Recent0. This is how I fix the fact that I haven’t rated all my music yet. Let’s be honest’ I haven’t rated more than half of my music yet. This playlist pulls up some songs with no rating and will keep them in rotation until I rate them. The hope is that hearing the same song over and over again will inspire me to get tired of it and rate it just so that it will leave my list. =)

The settings for _Recent0 are:

• Match all of the following conditions:
• My Rating is (0 stars)
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 20 songs selected by most recently played
• Live updating

Step Six

Now we create the list that wraps them all together, __Main. which has two underscores to keep it at the top of the list. This playlist basically just wraps everything into one. The settings:

• Match any of the following conditions:
• Playlist is _NewSongs
• Playlist is _3_Stars
• Playlist is _4_Stars
• Playlist is _5_Stars
• Playlist is _NotRecent
• Playlist is _Recent0
• Live updating

And now you should have a playlist with a good mix of 200 songs for your listening pleasure.

Step Seven

There is no step seven! Well actually there sort of is.

To keep these up to date, any time you add new music to your iPod drop a copy of it to your NewSongs static playlist, and when you’re tired of your NewMusic delete it from the playlist.

And rate your songs!

-----

Content

As I’m catching up with movie reviews that I haven’t done in a while, I’m thinking… this takes a lot of time to write these short sentence reviews, and in a good 6 month when I have like 100 of them written… who’s going to take the time to read all of them?

So now I’m debating whether or not to reduce my reviews into just a star rating, if I do decide to do that then I’ll probably be able to get some more album and book reviews in. =)

Moleskine Suggestions

Adam Machado posts a quick list of Moleskine Suggestions. Good stuff, although I would suggest looking into the Fisher Space Pen as an alternative to the Pilot (The Fisher’s ink doesn’t need time to dry, but the Pilot’s does). Here they are:

• Don’t try to fill your Moleskine up deliberately, just use it casually
  Prevents ‘crap’ from being written down and saves pages
• You can read out of your Moleskine, but don’t let others read through your it
  Some material may be personal
• Take it everywhere
  Just in case something comes up or is worth noting
• Don’t rip out pages
  It’s respectful and it saves pages
• Draw at your own risk
  Mess ups do happen and pen is hard to erase
• Save your Moleskine(s)
  Makes for a good read later on
• Stickers are OK
  Having your own personality is encouraged
• Use the Pilot G2 pen
  .7mm or lower, they wont smear or go through the pages
• Recruit those who you think are worthy of using Moleskines
  Not everyone is worthy
• Tabs
  Good for organizing sections
• Enjoy

More Internet Explorer Woes

Wow, it’s bad enough that the current version of Internet Explorer can’t get it right, now it looks like the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 release is goofing it up too. Specifically with its solution for tabbed browsing.

Apparently, in order to support most current 3rd party and because of old code, they’ve decided that 3rd party attachments (Google taskbar, etc) will be placed individually in each tab, rather then inside the application itself. So if you have a browser with 5 tabs open and you have Google Taskbar running, rather than just having the one google taskbar attached to your browser, you have 5 individual google taskbars - one for each tab. So much for placing the toolbar wherever you want (perhaps the top right corner next to the address bar? Not in IE7), and who knows what kind of memory killer this will be if you (like me) often have more than 10 tabs open.

To see a better visual representation of this check out Adam Stiles screenshot mock. In the comments, Bruuce Morgan (Dev Manager for IE7 Tabbed Browsing Feature Team) confims that screenshot is roughly how the Google taskbar will function:

Our testing showed that if we went with a single thread for all tabs in a window, we would encounter many more UI stalls and jerkiness - too many things both in our code and common 3rd party code block on various things like network activity.

I smell a lousy excuse. Firefox seems to do it just fine, and you’d think Microsoft would have a more abundant source of resources to throw at this to get it right.

As Judi Sohn of A View From Home says:

I can see it now, IE 7 is a huge flop and MS can say, “See?!? We told you that tabbed browsing wasn’t a good idea but we tried to make it work for you anyway and it didn’t. So now we’re going to scrap tabbed browsing before Longhorn and stick with what already works for us.”

Thanks for nuthin’, Microsoft.

-----