Sometimes Software Updates Suck

 It was working fine.

a month ago Windows Outlook updated and broke its ability to sync with OutlookDOTcom mail (well played Microsoft)

Two weeks ago I found an update that fixed the outlook web mail issue, but in doing so it cocked up my work email. Didn't break it, just made it a mess - jacked up all my folders (yes, I use folders, sue me, it was working swell).

Today, in an effort to clear up the work email we upgraded to Office 365 Outlook. That:

1. didn't clean up the folders (although I think I can now do it manually without fear of wasting time).

2. BROKE the outlook webmail again (you apparently can't use outlook and Google Workspace concurrently in a single Outlook instance. Microsoft apparently knows this and their workaround is to use two separate profiles - which precludes sharing a folder structure which is the whole point of using Outlook for me.

3. BROKE the connection to my ages old AOL account. This is apparently AOL's fault and not Microsoft, as AOL has apparently (and according to many online likely purposefully) kneecapped the ability to check email from a third party app.

So if you are keeping score, this morning I had four working accounts with one behaving badly and this evening, after an entire day of work, I have two working accounts with one still behaving badly.

Our IT folks badly want me to drop Outlook anyway. This might be enough to do so (really missing Thunderbird this evening).

I've had my AOL for like 25 years. This might be enough to make me drop it.

My Inbox is a Disaster

I don't want to admit it, but my email has gotten out of hand.  For years now I have been a fairly aggressive Inbox Zero practitioner - although I kind of break one rule.  Each day I would process my inbox to zero: acting, filing, or deferring whatever was there two or three times each day so that there was nothing in my inbox.  I have historically been a little dysfunctional about it, with the notification icon on my phone being a small source of irritation.

Of course doing things this way is all very five years ago.  Inbox Zero is a folders mentality and I have a directory tree with many, many branches.  The Google Inbox is supposed to break that mold and have you keep everything right where you find it but assign things tags and find them by searching rather than by looking in the correct folder.  For a little while I have been doing a hybrid.  I have my folders and for things that are fairly recent I stay in Outlook and check the correct place.  For things that are older I bring up the Gmail web interface and search.

I don't know if I was trying to bring myself around to the Google Inbox idea or if it was something else but this fall I really stopped the processing behavior.  One of my folders, the rule breaking one "ToDo" just declared war and conquered my Inbox and so instead of being nice and empty it was always choked with slowly rotting messages.

Partially I think this coincided with making an effort to accept assignments electronically.  I've been taking work as pdf files attached to emails.  A combination of that and the sabbatical my ToDo folder is on really produced a boom.  Without the ToDo weigh-station and not wanting to file emails with pending assignment attachments there was nothing to do but let things pile up in the Inbox.  Recently I have been putting new document folders on my desktop, moving the attachments to those and then filing the emails, but the students defeat that when instead of attaching a pdf they share a Google Doc.  Then my new solution is no solution.

I miss my ToDo folder and my FollowUp folder.  But at the end of last summer I declared folder bankruptcy and dumped everything that was remaining in there into my Inbox with the hope of chipping away at it until I could get through it all.  Some messages had languished in the ToDo folder so long that it seemed downright irresponsible.

So I started the year with a backlog - never a good thing.  Then the assignment emails started piling up.  And then we had a pandemic and everything went online.

The days between the announcement we were going online and the first day we were online were probably the heaviest email days in memory.  We were getting instructions and surveys from three different university administration levels and many of those generated helpful contributions from other colleagues in response to the originals and it all just piled up.  There's stuff in there I just don't want to process because I really do think I should read it.  But it has been nearly a month now and I haven't.

There are only three weeks of classes left in the semester.  I think this year's end of semester tying of loose ends is going to have to include an Inbox cleanout.  Even if it means doing a cntrl-A & delete.

I Wonder...

.sig War

So today I got an email from this guy:

Michael M. Chemers, MFA, PhD
Director of Dramaturgy Program
Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature
330 Purnell Center for the Arts
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-2399

I work with him and we like the fun, you know, and email is boring and everything, so when I replied to the email I sorta did this to his .sig at the end:

Michael M. Chemers, MFA, PhD, Total Douche
Director of Dramaturgy Program
Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature
330 Purnell Center for the Arts
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-2399

And then at the end of his reply I got this:

.___ .........._... _.. ___
|...\ __ ___ _(_)__| | | _ ) ___ ._____ _____ _ _ ___
| |) / _` \ V / / _` | | _ \/ _ \/ -_) V / -_) '_(_-<
|___/\__,_|\_/|_\__,_| |___/\___/\___|\_/\___|_| /__/
Oh Look at Me Everyone I Can Do ASCII pics which were cool maybe in the 80's
Option Coordinator Associate Professor of Drama - Technical Director
Carnegie Mellon University - Purnell Center for the Arts
http://www.cmu.edu/cfa/drama 412-268-2146 dboevers@cmu.edu
http://cmuptm.blogspot.com/

I had to add in the dots because I can't figure out how to make blogger add in the spaces in HTML - which is a good reason I should change my .sig because in most email readers it now looks like poop. Anyway, I continue to escalate and I send an email appended with this:

Michael M. Chemers, MFA, PhD
Director of Dramaturgy Program
Al Qaeda Squirrel Hill Chapter President
Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature
330 Purnell Center for the Arts
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-2399

Which then precipitated this:

.___ .........._... _.. ___
|...\ __ ___ _(_)__| | | _ ) ___ ._____ _____ _ _ ___
| |) / _` \ V / / _` | | _ \/ _ \/ -_) V / -_) '_(_-<
|___/\__,_|\_/|_\__,_| |___/\___/\___|\_/\___|_| /__/
Third Runner Up, All-State David Boevers Lookalike Contest
Carnegie Mellon University - Purnell Center for the Arts 412-268-2146
http://www.cmu.edu/cfa/drama dboevers@cmu.edu http://cmuptm.blogspot.com/
ETCP Certified Rigger

Prompting this:

Michael M. Chemers, MFA, PhD
Director of Dramaturgy Program
Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature
But Really I Want To Direct
330 Purnell Center for the Arts
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-2399

Culminating with this:

.___ .........._... _.. ___
|...\ __ ___ _(_)__| | | _ ) ___ ._____ _____ _ _ ___
| |) / _` \ V / / _` | | _ \/ _ \/ -_) V / -_) '_(_-<
|___/\__,_|\_/|_\__,_| |___/\___/\___|\_/\___|_| /__/
Third Runner Up, All-State David Boevers Lookalike Contest
Voted "Most Likely To Die of Unnatural Causes," Yale University 1997
Carnegie Mellon University - Purnell Center for the Arts 412-268-2146
http://www.cmu.edu/cfa/drama dboevers@cmu.edu http://cmuptm.blogspot.com/
ETCP Certified Pirate (Up Yours)

And then we got bored and stopped.

Well, it was funny to me.

Zen Master Email Application

I downloaded and installed Thunderbird at home today. How will it come out? The old Zen Master says: "We'll see."

Now I have to re-create all my rules, and my .sig, and god know what else.

And after all that Thunderbird doesn't do the "This message has been blind copied to you" thing that Mulberry did. I REALLY liked that feature.