Hardware woes

Thought I'd go with two technology/computer posts in a row and get that out of my system for the next year.  Most of my work at home is done on a desktop upstairs connected to our main downstairs computer by a wireless network.  For the first several months, this computer used to lose the wireless signal all the time and I'd have to patiently sit through a network reset before continuing what I was doing.  I chalked this up to electronic interference from cordless phones, microwaves, etc., which I had read so many dire warnings about.  Turns out it was none of the above.  I simply bought a new wireless network card for this computer and haven't had a network signal dropped since.  Frustrating to think how much time was wasted over a malfunctioning part I did not even realize was not working.  So, much better, but then for the longest time webpages up here did not want to load in and I would have to reset the browser to get them to work.  Again, I figured probably not much I could do about it.  Then, my wireless router goes completely dead, I buy a new (cheaper, no less) one and all of a sudden, the internet works perfectly up here.  Again, I think of all the time I wasted when I could have just replaced a $30 part.  I'm not entirely sure what the moral of this story is, but it feels good to share.  And now, back to politics (and urinal technology).

My email woes

Turns out that I was about the only person left using Eudora for email.  I've been using this so long that I cannot remember when I started (presumably sometime in the mid 1990's at Ohio State).  I've been using this on borrowed time for quite a while, as Qualcomm stopped making and supporting Eudora.  Alas, I finally lost full functionality in my Eudora 6.2 which I should have lost a year ago and didn't.  Eudora 7 never worked with NCSU email servers and it turns out that Eudora 8 is not Eudora at all, but Mozilla Thunderbird.  So, my obsession the past three days has been to find a suitable replacement for Eudora.  Simple, you'd think.  But I spend more time on email than anything except web-browsing and it turns out I'm pretty particular with my email software– unlike the rest of my life .  So, I must have tried at least half a dozen email programs this weekend and they all seemed to have some fatal flaw (for my purposes, at least) as compared to Eudora.  In the end, I've decided to join the masses and use Thunderbird–largely so I can stop obsessing.  But I'm not happy about it.