An idle question

How long does it take something to become a Pet Hate?

My newest and current one is people looking at me with an amazed expression and saying "Shit, I never knew it was that serious!" when I talk about some aspect of my relationship with Kjersti or the pain of my separation.

[Sigh] Not a rant at anyone. Just happened yet again on the phone to a very very old friend who knows me extremely well, is all. Not his fault.

On a related note, did you know that you can download loads of Chumba's back catalogue from their website? It enabled me to get this peculiarly-meaningful old favourite. I love Alice Nutter's solo line in the chorus...

[Geek] A time of changes

I may be about to change my email program of choice for the first time in a decade.

Top alternative to my trusty copy of Ameol, the CIX offline reader - which I'll still use for CIX - is currently Mozilla Thunderbird. It's currently handling my OneTel account, my CIX spambucket and Usenet, and looking good. Even accepted my mail files from AOL Communicator without a hitch. (AOL Communicator is an AOL branded version of essentially the same thing, but developed interally at AOL. It's quite good and can handle AOL's proprietary variant of IMAP, but it's not very customisable, which eventually ruled it out for me.)

Thunderbird does mail and news, filtering, threading, safe HTML handling and integrated spam checking - and it's free. Worth a look. Only on version 0.4 but working well so far. Anyone else using this care to comment?

If you're using Outlook Express, you really should take a look at Thunderbird. It can't handle Hotmail, but otherwise, it does pretty much everything OE does, plus spam checking, and is immune to all Windows email viruses so far, to the best of my knowledge. It will even import your current OE settings and messages. It's easy, pretty, friendly, safer than MS email clients, it's free and it will catch spam for you. What more do you want?

It's also a damn sight faster than Mozilla itself for email, so far.

And now, off to the Croydon SF meet.