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July 2, 2004

Because You Never Know

Posted by Mike on July 2, 2004 9:56 PM

No small amount of happiness to note that gmail is finally allowing address book imports from Safari. There were rumors among the Mac people that older (pre 0.8) versions of Camino would let you import a CSV file, and there's even an Applescript to make this happen using the OS X address book, but there was no such option from Safari, newer Caminos, or Firefox until I checked back tonight.

It promptly crashed Safari, but not before uploading all my contacts.

Because the first thing I did when I brought "Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator" home for my Commdore 64 was see if it was true that the program was realistic enough to make a mach 2 nosedive from 90,000 feet cause the screen to go black from the "stress" on the player, it also seemed sensible to try to import my contacts twice, which is something Yahoo! mail has allowed from my Palm on a few occasions. God bless the gnomes of Google, they were on the lookout for that and it wouldn't let me.

So now, as I pointed out to Ed, who is flatly disinterested in this rationale, if I'm ever knocked over the head, loaded into a plane, and dropped onto the streets of Cairo, I'll be able to check my mail (because everything that comes in across the server gets cloned by procmail and squirted over to gmail) without having to worry about yet another Squirrelmail security issue.

It's another reason to dig VoodooPad, too, which provides a way to make sure my Brain pad is available in the same basic way I use it at home from anywhere, including a dusty 'net cafe in Cairo.

And that's pretty much the overriding consideration for everything. I think it's the only reason I bother to maintain my own server at all: You never know when you're going to get knocked over the head and dumped somewhere, and when the chips are down you'll want to be able to find a browser... any browser... and get at stuff like the contact information for your travel agent, who'll get you a ticket home. Or a link to that really cool site with all the funny animations so you can pass the time waiting for your travel agent to get through to you.