One of *those* nights

[gerisullivan]

The Panix mail server is down. Has been for nearly 5 hours now, which is unprecedented in my experience with them. It's the third consecutive night they've had problems, and this is by far the longest service interruption.

Review documents for 5 projects are sitting in my Eudora Out box, waiting for Panix to be back up and running. The client for most of them is surely asleep, but the colleague needing to review another is in Australia and it would be truly useful to get it into her hands while she's awake.

I have the option of using Gmail, well, I would if the hard drive on the desktop computer weren't showing up as bright red in the Disk Utility window and showing the "This drive is failing and unrepairable" S.M.A.R.T message. The only part of this that's news is the actual error message; the drive has clearly been on the edge for long enough that fivemack advised me on it an entire month ago.

Anyway, I'm up to date on Time Machine, but online reading tonight tells me it's not bootable. SuperDuper is, but sometime back I stopped it's regular updates from that computer for some reason I don't remember now. My hindbrain is telling me there's some sort of error with it, perhaps related to the failing drive, but I'm at least giving it a shot at making a current backup tonight. So I'm leaving the ailing computer alone to do whatever it can in that regard.

Ordinarily, a smart thing to do under these circumstances would be to simply go to bed and tackle everything again after some more sleep than I've had of late.

But tonight I'm staying up not only because of the 13 PROmote projects currently on my plate, some of them extremely time sensitive, I'm staying up to see if the bat comes flying about indoors again.

Yep...no email...actively dying hard drive...and a bat. A pretty bat, and one that may well have flown out on its own when I gave it the opportunity for about 90 minutes 7 hours ago. batwrangler was ever so helpful on the phone, and with some email follow-up before Panix went down. It's only the second time I've had a bat in the house, and the last time was a good 5 years ago, I think. Long enough ago for me to have forgotten the basics beyond "don't panic."

So, yeah. One of those nights. Still not panicking. But, yeah, still on Eudora despite all of my various good intentions and determination to move to Mac Mail so as to start using more modern Mac operating systems.

Then again, pieces of Creative Suite aren't working on the newer laptop, either.

Just call me doomed.

Doomed and too experienced in all things computer to think anything other than the fact that this will all work out.

And while I know better than to be certain, I think it's most likely the bat has taken its leave, too.

Onward.

Comments

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Sorry you didn't have a better night. Best wishes on overcoming your spate of adversity!

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Sympathies.

My college living unit got bats from tiem to time. I remember how pitiful they sounded & then, when trapped in a blanket for release, looked. So fragile!

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Yikes! Hope your troubles both electronic and animal are resolved in a positive way soon!

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

I'm looking for Eudora alternatives so; I tried Mac Mail once and concluded it was a pale shadow, missing features I use all the time.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Common wisdom says there isn't an alternative to Eudora that's anything better than the pale shadow you found in Mac Mail. I've stuck with outdated Max OS versions for years to keep Eudora. Last I knew, Bruce Schneier was still running Eudora; I think he mentioned that earlier this year.

Karen Cooper blogged about her nightmare moving from Eudora to Mac Mail. When she was here in May, I had her coach me through some of the steps. I was determined to complete the move before the end of that month, yet here it is September and I have two nearly-dead computers...and a newer laptop that won't run Eudora. I simply must move to a current email solution and I must do it much sooner than Real Soon Now. If I don't do the first part of the transfer while I still have a computer that runs Eudora, I'll lose access a little over 3 gigs of text email messages.

I've even toyed with that idea, with starting clean. Then I kept track of just how much information in those emails I find myself referring to, oh, most every day. Nevermind. I can't afford to lose that access.

It's been a couple of years since Karen moved from Eudora (she's Mac-based, too). She still misses it with a deep and abiding passion and profound sense of loss.

I know my limits. I'm not switching platforms in order to keep using Eudora. But this is one piece of the future I don't love living in. I want a future with Eudora doing everything it's so very competent at doing!

[carbonel]

I am still using Eudora, but it's an orphan product, and it's having more and more problems with different sort of formatting that's standard in mail. Some change in Gmail a few months ago causes mail from there to show up with stray characters that look like capital A's. Applying a particular plugin can fix that, but it removes other formatting.

I think Thunderbird is the next-best option for offline readers, but I'm dreading having to deal with it. I've been using Eudora since last century.

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

Eudora OSE (based on Thunderbird) might be a step closer. There are a few others out there that were supposed to come close but never materialized.