Blessed by the Potato

I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client for a while now, and it does pretty much everything I could want an email client to do, and does it pretty well at that.

One thing I’ve really wanted is the ability to redo the subject lines of emails other people send me. Is there any email client out there that will let me do that, or an add-on to Thunderbird? I know it’s open source, but I’d hate to have to try to figure out the programming on that myself. Plus, it is a little unkosher to edit emails other people send you, but I have several very good reasons:

1. Our email server appends a {Spam X.X} score to suspected spam, we can then set a threshold for sorting… but that tag still stays there. I’d kind of prefer to remove it on one or two important emails to make them easier to find (my eyes are trained to skip over messages with spam at the beginning).
2. I have about 50 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “to do”.
3. I have about 100 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “fyi”.
4. I have about 300 emails from my supervisor with the unhelpful subject line “sdarticle.pdf” or “fulltext.pdf” or “Entrez Pubmed”.

One of the things I really loved about the apartment was that there were no bugs. Okay, next to no bugs, since there were the tiny, slow crawly ones near the cat food, and in the summer the little tiny flying ones that liked to die in the lamps, but never as many bugs as in a house.

Now that we’re coming into the first spring of the new house, we’re dealing with a lot of bugs. In the basement, of course, are potato bugs. Dead ones for the most part… it seems to be some sort of holy resting place for them. They just come out of the cracks and die in the middle of the floor. Or, they could be chased out of the cracks by something altogether more sinister that we haven’t seen yet, but I don’t like to think about that possibility. Either way, I don’t really mind potato bugs. They’re slow, they tend to stick to the less-travelled parts of the basement, they’re easy to spot, and they don’t appear to have any kind of propensity to actually climb up or touch an unsuspecting human.

Earwigs, I hate. I hate earwigs as much as the hated undead. I strongly suspect that earwigs are in league with the undead, should it come to that sort of conspiracy. Fortunately, I haven’t seen any earwigs yet, and hope I never have to again.

We do, however, have an ant problem. I also dislike ants, for many of the same reasons I dislike earwigs. They can be pretty quick and mobile when they want to be. They climb up walls and ceilings at least as often as they like to be on the floor. They hide in cracks and cupboard doors, pouncing on the human flesh that disturbed them, showing no hesitation to climb on — or given the opportunity, burrow into — a human. They appear in waves, and numbers beyond counting at times… then go into remission for a spell, but only ever long enough to lull you into complacency then attack again. But perhaps most of all, I hate ants because they’re big and black and when you just see a glimpse of them, they look like earwigs.

Anyhow, our ant problem began as soon as the weather turned warm. We had a few large black ants appear in the kitchen, and we immediately took steps to get rid of them. We bought this “perimeter defense” spray that repels and/or kills them as soon as they pass through a crack sprayed with the stuff, and deployed a few of the poison bait type ant traps. It seemed to work, because after about 10 days of ants showing up and scouting out the kitchen, they vanished. It also seemed that they were attracted to the empty coke cans I had stacked up by the sink, since each one appeared to have at least 3 ants inside, delighting in the concentrated syrup residue at the bottom. After getting into the habit of rinsing my cans right away, the problem seemed to get better immediately. We had nearly a week of peace there… but it could have been that they were simply frolicking outside in the pleasant weather, because today dozens of them were back. I don’t know what, exactly, drew them back inside. I had nothing stacked up beside the sink, no food was left out — the only thing inside the sink that they seemed interested in was my cereal bowl, which had a partial ring of sweetened milk on it (I had dumped the left over milk and gave it a quick rinse, but obviously didn’t get fresh water all the way around the rim). Yet today they went crazy, swarming around the one cupboard that’s never had food in it. We couldn’t quite understand it…

Understanding was not required. After slaughtering over 20 of them, the invasion receded, and I haven’t seen a single one since this morning. We’re debating at the moment what to do. If we search hard, we may be able to find all the crevaces they use for entry, and seal them with caulking, or poison them with the perimeter defense spray. The ant traps don’t seem to be working: these ants either don’t care or are too big for the small holes in it. We’ve never seen one go in or come out. Someone at work recommended getting poisoned sugar: basically the same stuff as in the “take it back to kill the queen” trap we have now, except sweeter, and in a form we can place anywhere, not confined to a trap (for example, we could put it inside an empty coke can…) With the exception of leaving very sweet things near the sink, cleanliness doesn’t appear to be a factor. Several times we’ve left crumbs near the stove (much to Wayfare’s chagrin… though I’m not the only one who leaves a trail of crumbs when cutting bread ;), but the ants never seem interested in breadcrumbs. Likewise, the cat has a bowl of food out constantly, and in fact she’s such a messy eater that chunks of her food are on the floor and up the wall around her food dish, and the ants don’t care (only those tiny bugs from the apartment seemed to like cat food — we’ve never had bugs bother with it in my parents’ place either).

Speaking of the cat, she’s been absolutely useless in our time of ant crisis. She was born on PEI, and there she used to hunt and eat flies. After coming back to Ontario with us though, she seems to have completely lost her killer instinct, and if we point out an ant to her, she runs up to look at our finger, totally ignoring the naturally wiggling cat toy. One time, I pointed out a group of ants to her, and said “eat the ants!” and she went up, sniffed them, then rolled in them to show me her pretty tummy.

Stupid cat.

So there were some break-ins at work two days ago, and a few computer systems were stolen. The offices were locked, and security had the building locked down to just one (watched) entrance (as they usually do on the weekends/evenings), but the locks were simple handle locks that weren’t installed properly, so one could get in with a credit card. Then, with incredible audacity, the thieves came back last night with a crowbar and tried to get into some of the more secure labs and offices, making off with more equipment.

Today was spent trying to lock the place down a bit more. We’ve been looking into some sort of network security alert, such as having our PCs ping the server every 10 minutes, and sending out an email when they don’t report in, but I don’t know how much progress the network guys are making on that. My supervisor had us running around writing down serial numbers and service tags, and making sure all our data was encrypted for a chunk of the day. He thinks that if there is a theft, we won’t be able to get new computers unless we have the serial numbers handy. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on that — yes, it is handy to have them for the long odds of retrieving them, but the insurance should pay out without them, especially since we have all the purchase orders on file.

We have something living under the front porch of our house. I don’t know what it is… originally I was thinking some small burrowing animal, since the hole was pretty small through the winter and early spring. But recently there’s been a lot of extra activity around that hole that makes me wonder. A few days ago, the extension cord we have plugged into the outdoor socket near the hole was dragged in, and rather forcefully at that: the cord had been pulled partly out of the socket, and it’s a pretty tight socket. I couldn’t think of any animal that would be very interested in taking an extension cord into their burrow: it’s not a very cozy object, it doesn’t shred into bedding well, it’s not edible, and it’s not even very good for lining the walls or blocking the door. Then, the hole was widened. Significantly. The dirt was cleared clean down to the concrete underneath the porch, and the 2×4 pieces of wood used to help hold the porch up were pushed out, all together making the hole nearly 10X the size it was just a few weeks ago. That could be due to whatever creature lives under there being big, or it could be that something else has tried to go after it down there…

Right now, the leading theory is that a large rabbit is living under there, with a raccoon or groundhog as a close second & third theory. In a distant fourth place is the thought that we have gnomes living under our deck. It explains the need for power, and the clean swept concrete. If I start seeing piles of copper bolts piling up outside the burrow, then I’ll know it’s gnomes (and also that they’re skilling up engineering, possibly to make a mechanostrider).

I woke up this morning (and here, I use the word morning very loosely, since it was actually 6 pm — a great night; I managed to get nearly 15 hours of sleep) and had a very peculiar realization. I’ve gone through the last few years of my life without any more Star Wars movies to anticipate. I knew that somehow, life had… changed… in the past few years, and that the future seemed just a little less bright. But never before had I quite been able to put my finger on it. Of course, I lived through similar times before (the 80’s and early 90’s), but back then we didn’t really know that more Star Wars movies were possible. The slow, measured release of prequels and alternative cuts had simply become a way of life for so long, that it’s tough to find the groove in life afterwards. There’s always the remote hope that the often-rumoured follow-up trilogy will be made (and in fact, considering the franchise is basically a money mint, and that there’s already enough source material in the books and video games to throw together a few movies, I’m surprised they aren’t already in production), but really, this is the shape of things to come.

I also realized that I now have pretty bad spring allergies. I’ve had bad ragweed/fall allergies for a long time, but this spring runny nose thing is pretty recent. I’m also amazed at Reactine. It’s such a tiny pill, yet it completely dries me out for a day. It really makes one respect the power of chemicals.