I recently because frustrated with Thunderbird’s lack of a task list feature, occasional bugginess, and most importantly – lack of a calendar. So I bit the bullet and spent an astonishing 6 hours migrating my email from Thunderbird to Outlook. The outlook calendar does indeed seem to work pretty well, and the task list has been useful. I also like the *idea* of the vcf calendar cards, though no one seems to be using them. I also like the spell checking. The problems, however, keep mounting….

1) Junk mail filters are a disgrace. Utterly useless. I don’t even want to start explaining other than to say that I have outlook 2002, and that’s probably the main problem, but I’m certainly not going to pay for an upgrade given the following.
2) Zero support except the god-awful paperclip creature from hell. Thunderbird has amazing community support – for free!
3) SMTP (Outgoing Server) problems are even worse than with Thunderbird, You have to change them in multiple places instead of just one (if you have more than one account) and if they fail, your messages do not remain in the outbox, but rather fall into an ether from which it is extremely difficult to retrieve them. At Denver airport I paid $8 to send a bunch of emails. I played with the settings for 20 minutes until the last call for boarding all to no avail.
4) Just as buggy as Thunderbird, Outlook has crashed twice recently and took over 20 minutes and multiple restarts to fix. Sometimes takes 5-10 minutes to start up.
5) Does not have nifty “junk button” to toss unwanted emails without a click-drop down menu
7) Email look up is incredibly slow, and often “lies” to you, claiming someone is in the contacts list when they are actually not, and you have to go digging around for their email. Thunderbird, unfortunately, has the habit of remembering too much and giving you loads of bunk addresses. So this is a toss up.
8) Won’t show image attachments in the email so you have to open them in another application
9) For some asinine reason, uses Microsoft Word to edit emails, as if I wanted to open a word doc! This is slow and repeatedly crashes. Then word “recovers my documents”
10) Labeling is no good. Thunderbird lets you label things with various colors easily
11) Send/Recieve with Outlook takes 5 to 10 times as long as with Thunderbird, especially at start up.

The Junk Mail and the Outgoing Server problems are really the only two that are destroying my affection for this program. The question is… do I bite the bullet and invest MORE time in outlook to try and solve those problems, or go back to Thunderbird and continues using post it notes for my calendar?

True, Thunderbird is a massive memory hog. And it lacks a Calendar. This is a horrid, horrid flaw. But I'm not sure how much longer I can take the added agony that Outlook has given me. What to do?

I have recently become aware of a disturbing medical phenomenon. Occasionally the nerves in my right thigh vibrate slightly for no reason. My friend Jason S calls it "The Phantom Vibration"... it's the feeling that you have an incomming phone call when the phone is not actually ringing. Sometimes the damn thing isn't even in my pocket, but my leg actually twitches.

The Phantom Vibration seems to be triggered just by *thinking* about getting a phone call. Or maybe it's triggered by a slight movement in the pocket which makes you jump to the conclusion that "Oh my God! Someone's Calling Me!" which causes the sudden need to reach for the phone. Could it be a physical manifestation of unhealthy obsession with connectedness? I have deliberatedly switched the pocket in which my phone sits in order to try to mitigate this somewhat.

What does it take to become a luger? I mean, there's certainly some skill involved... you need to run really fast, and stay stiff and straight and know when to adjust the steering and brakes, but how long does it really take to get good at it? To qualify for the olympics? And for that matter, what about a member of a bobsled team? Especially the guys who just run then jump in the middle and sit there, heads down?

I'm sure there's something involved, but if I had a bit of savings and could pay for a trainer and take a year or so off work to hang out in Park City, for example, could I become a bobsledder? How many contenders for the US olympic bobsled/luge/skeleton teams are there? I may have to investigate this....