Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Do It Yourself mayhem

I don't have a good Do It Yourself personality. I seldom measure twice before cutting once and have been known to drill a few unnecessary holes in the wall and ceiling after a rushed once-over with the stud finder.

I don't have a good Do It Yourself personality. I seldom measure twice before cutting once and have been known to drill a few unnecessary holes in the wall and ceiling after a rushed once-over with the stud finder. I eventually settle down and find what I'm looking for, but in the process I create new projects for myself in filling and repainting over all those holes.

I'm the guy who jumps two steps ahead in his Ikea instructions and then has to work backwards, and either finishes with two extra screws or two screws short.

Perfection takes time, which is not something I have a lot of these days and so I tend to settle for "good enough." "Done" is always easier than "done right."

Which brings me to Monday morning and an e-mail Inbox that was frozen with approximately 79,369 new messages. This was my fault.

I was booked in for a surgery on Oct. 13 and before I left the office the day before I set the automatic "Out Of Office" reply function in my mail client to let people know that I would be away from my desk for the next week. With over 100 legitimate messages a day I didn't want to return to the office with a stack of a thousand e-mails to plow through.

However, in my haste I neglected to consider how that might impact our e-mail servers, or how it would interact with spam the way I set it up.

Ever try to reply to a spam e-mail? It doesn't work, you just get an auto-reply from your mail server telling you that the account does not exist.

So in a nutshell my mail client would receive a spam, send out an auto-reply to a non-existent site and receive an auto-reply in return from the server - essentially a new e-mail that my mail client would then promptly auto-reply to once again, receiving the same auto-reply in response. Basically I created an infinite feedback loop and a huge hassle for myself that took hours to resolve with much deleting of unread messages.

(In other words if you've sent me any important e-mails since Oct. 12 you'll need to send them again because the solution was to save my important e-mails from the last few weeks and months and then wipe the slate clean.)

This is something I probably could have anticipated if I reasoned it out beforehand but I was in a hurry. I could have called our IT guy for help, but I'm a do-it-yourself guy and I (thought) I knew what I was doing.

Which brings me to the real lesson here, and that is computers are dumb. They can only do what we program them to do, there's no thought process or reasoning or logic outside of the general logic parameters we build into the software. In that sense the auto reply function worked perfectly, as did the auto reply function at our mail server - they just weren't programmed to see the pattern of e-mail going back and forth and halt the process.

The other big lesson is that not all computers and systems are equal. I get "Out of Office" reply e-mails all the time without any issues, but that's because the senders' mail servers are set up to make it easy. Some e-mail servers are also programmed to prevent the kind of feedback loop that I stumbled on, and some are not.

A little research would have saved me a lot of hassle in this case, and a lot of lost e-mails.

Back to the drawing board...

 

The Magic Mouse

It's hard to tell exactly when computer users started to take Apple seriously but a few have pointed to the gradual movement to the two-button mouse. For years Apple's one button approach was derided by the PC crew as inefficient, offering far less capability to users than PC mice that came equipped with anywhere from two to four buttons, clickable scroll wheels and other features that gave more power to the user. In comparison, the one-button Apple mouse seemed like a toy, the simpleton's way around complex technology.

I tended to agree. Even before Apple introduced its own two-button "Mighty Mouse" most of the people I know were using third party devices that included a second button and scroll wheel.

The Mighty Mouse, Apple's first two-button entry, also kind of sucked. The buttons were built into the device to be invisible and never worked right, while the invisible side buttons were finicky. The multi-directional scroll ball gummed up pretty quickly and would only go one way. Yet this was the Apple standard for a few generations and probably sold a lot of third party mice.

It was time for a change however, and that came this week as Apple announced its next generation of iMac all-in-one desktops. The (not so) Mighty Mouse has given way to the Magic Mouse.

There are no visible buttons anywhere and no scroll wheel or scroll ball. You can configure it for one button or two, and it still clicks with a hidden button so that tactile response is preserved.

The real selling feature is the gesture recognition capability, which is similar to the iPhone and iPod touch - move one finger on the surface of the mouse to scroll in any direction, two finger swipes to go forwards and backwards in applications, control iTunes, one finger gestures to zoom, and so on.

It's cool looking and it's wireless, but I wonder how well it works. It couldn't have been worse than the Mighty.