Fixing Gmail: One Inbox, Not Many

After sending google some extremely unhappy feedback and dinging them in their survey, I decided I would blog about my frustration with their idea of "giving you more control" by making decisions for you-- a very Facebook approach. But before doing so, I wandered through the settings to see if any improvements could be made.

Lo and behold, there is a simple way to return to a single, unified Inbox... they just didn't bother to tell us!

1. 
   Click on the Preferences gear on the upper right of your Gmail screen. Select the "Settings" item from the drop down menu.
2. 
   Click on the "Inbox" tab on the upper left of the new screen.
3. 
   Per the instructions there, deselect all categories to go back to your old Inbox. (You cannot deselect "Primary". That's OK.)
4. Scroll down and select [Save Changes]
5. Things are back to normal!

I would love to be able to claim that my feedback to Google prompted this, but I'm sure it was there all along. This moves them back well above Facebook in my opinion. Facebook almost never gives you a way out; they know best what you want, and are determined t give it to you whether you want it or not.

Race Relations: the Lesson We Keep Missing

(Not just about the Zimmerman - Martin tragedy.)

Most surveys today include selections for "race".

I always check "Other".

When there's a box to designate said otherness, I enter "human".

Twits? Tweets? Haircut.

"Nice haircut!" (laughs)

"I went for Indie. I got Irish." (shrug) "You can do a lot worse than Irish."

"Wait a minute."

"Keep laughing, Paddy."

This was a response to a statement about writing vs tweeting, which I took as a challenge. Just because I could. I don't twit. Tweet. Whatever. But 140 characters (I ignored newlines, which probably violates how Twitter does it) is a viable short story medium. I can do less (100, 50, 25), but 140 feels about right for my preferred shortest length.

Books! Books! And More Books!

I can't really remember a time without books.

My parents read to me. And they read for themselves. They read books-- fiction, history, biographies, all sorts of books. Magazines galore. Journals. Letters. Pretty much everything readable. I don't recall what they read to me early on, just them reading to me. And I recall reading, well before starting school.

I had my first public library card by age 5 (or maybe 4). The librarian wouldn't listen to me about what I wanted and insisted on taking me to the section with picture books and stone simple kid stuff. I got two giant, picture books. One was a book of dinosaurs with maybe one fact per page, and the other was a joke book, with a question on one side and an answer on the other. Example:

• What did the large firecracker say to the small firecracker?
• My pop's bigger than your pop!

While I loved the play on words, I read them both within five minutes-- including time to tell several of the jokes to my family. I reread them until I knew them by heart (fifteen minutes?) I went back the next day to get more books.

"Did you really read those?"

"Yes, ma'am. A lot of times."

She quizzed me, developing a funny look on her face. But she took me to the chapter book section and let me pick my own books. She'd always quiz me, but I figured out it was more fun for her than anything else.

Once school started, I got a school library card and a bookmobile card. I often had the max checked out on all three cards.

I don't recall too many Dr Seuss books, though I recall Yertle the Turtle and Horton Hears a Who. I discovered Tom Swift, Jr and then Tom Swift, Sr by third or fourth grade, and the Hardy Boys sometime around then. I read all the science fiction, mystery, adventure, and scary books (Hitchcock, Poe, and Lovecraft, especially) I could find. I liked history and biographies. I read the Bible. I would look up a word in the dictionary and end up reading for several pages. The same thing happened with encyclopedias. I'd get an atlas to find where something was, and end up devouring cities, states, countries, or continents.

Mom introduced me to science fiction and fantasy. Dad introduced me to history and biographies. My sisters got me hooked on Nancy Drew and the Bobsey twins. My friends, a babysitter, and the doctor's office got me into a serious comic book addiction. I'd read my parents' magazines-- I especially liked Readers Digest. I found a MAD Magazine in ninth grade and kept reading them until a few years ago.

I also liked coloring books and painting books. With these, I could tell the story as much as read a story. I think this actually prepared me as a writer since graphical art was never a real strength. But I loved story and coloring or painting-- especially a story line (or several, especially intertwined)-- was just another vehicle for that.

In fifth grade, a couple of popular books were always checked out in the school library. Mrs. Clark, God bless her, ended up reading them to us. We could have read them ourselves, but the library only had one copy and we didn't all want to buy them. One of these books as Louise Fitzugh's Harriet the Spy. Another was L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Both of these books spoke to everyone in the class, from the geeks to the cheerleaders, from the jocks to the Beatles wannabes. They are still near the top of my list, many years later.

About the same time, Mom got me more hooked on science fiction with the golden and silver age pulps-- Amazing Stories, Astounding, Galaxy, SF&F, Asimov's SF, and more. That was also about the time we got into UFOs; I devoured those magazines as well. I started watching every science fiction, adventure, horror movie or show I could, and story became even more a part of my life. I would spin tales weaving elements of all these together. The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift vs Godzilla and the Giant Robots of Death vs the Radioactive Mutant Ants and the Roller Derby Queens. (I found the latter both awesome and scary.)

Meanwhile I was also reading Dad's chemistry journals. Or trying to. I was determined. His dozens of histories and historical novels also took root in my psyche. I read up on all my heroes (from the Lone Ranger and Tonto to Edison and Einstein to Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy).

At twelve, Mom handed me Schmitz's The Witches of Karres. I was already reading Andre Norton, so strong women protagonists were fine with me. But the story here! This is still one of my all time favorites, by which all others are judged. Claude Thompson drug me into the Mushroom Planet books and the world of Freddy the Pig.

The next milestone, a major turning point, was at fourteen, when I followed Mom into Middle Earth. Tolkein tore almost everything I knew apart, carried me off on an adventure, and left me in a brave, new world. I reread these over and over. I have read Lord of the Rings at least once a year since, The Hobbit nearly as much.

I'd already found a law book or two from Mom's and Dad's college days, and pored through those. Dan Croft and I started reading every legal document we could find. We decided we were lawyers and wrote ever longer documents full of all the flowery legalese we could come up with, going back and forth with our complaints against one another. If we could use several sentences instead of a phrase, we were delirious. I'm pretty certain I once got a whole page out of a basic salutation. But we could only do it because of what we were reading.

This actually helped me later when I had to decipher government technical requirements for traffic control systems and write proposals, RFPs, and other documents to win or fulfill government contracts. I can still crank up the fluff-o-meter when I need to.

I got into electronics. I read dozens of books on theory and practice, learning both vacuum tubes and solid state. I practically memorized the 1970 ARRL Handbook. My current electronics favorite is the Radiotron Designer's Handbook, Fourth Edition, a masterpiece of technical brilliance.

I am leaving out any number of subjects-- books and magazines on guitars, guitar playing, guitar players, amplifiers, guitar repair, just to cover one set of interests.

I read less than I used to, but only because I now write more. I still reread favorites. I usually have several books in progress scattered around the house.

I like eBooks OK, and there's nothing handier for a trip. But I still love "real" books, paper books. The smell. The feel. The fact that if I drop one in the bathtub, I have only lost one book, as opposed to far more money in electronics.

We have a well worn (we inherited it with a house we rented) Webster's Third International Dictionary (Unabridged)-- that huge, beige tome you would find on a hefty stand at your old school library. It weighs thirteen pounds. We love it. It still gets used... and read.

I really need to go through and get rid of books that are not very good, or which I just don't care about. It's tough, though, because they're... books. But we only have so much shelf space, and just as people sometimes wonder out of our lives, so have some of these books. But letting them go means room for new ones. And that's always a Good Thing.

Top Ten? Hah! My Top 25 will vary over time, but some would always be in it. Here are the books I consider my Top 25 at the moment (not necessarily in order):

1. Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkein)
2. Perelandra (C. S. Lewis)
3. A Wrinkle in Time (Madelaine L'Engle)
4. Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzugh)
5. The Witches of Karres (Joseph Schmitz)
6. The Mote in God's Eye (Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle)
7. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series (Douglas Adams)
8. To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth (Jeff Cooper)
9. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein)
10. The Two Faces of Tomorrow (James Hogan)
11. Perilous Dreams (Andre Norton)
12. The Valley of Fear (A. Conan Doyle)
13. Retief's War (Keith Laumer)
14. Radiotron Designers Handbook 4E
15. The Firebrand (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
16. The Message Bible
17. Murder Must Advertise (Dorothy Sayers)
18. Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)
19. Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
20. Code of the West series (Stephen Bly)
21. Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone (J. K. Rowling)
22. Madman in Waco (Blair / Darden)
23. The Earthsea trilogy (Ursula Leguin)
24. Classics in Software Engineering (Edward Nash Yourdon)
25. The Krytos Trap (Michael Stackpole)

For many of authors, it was hard to pick one book, and the book would vary from day to day. In the case of The Krytos Trap, I could have picked any novel from the Star Wars X-Wing series. I picked the Christie and Sayers books almost at random; they wrote so many excellent stories. It pained me to leave off Chesterton and others. Another day, they would have made the cut and someone else would have missed it, but the authors/series above are always on my reread list.

Who are your favorite authors? What are your go to books?

I Want to Hug the Westboro Baptist Church

I hope Westboro Baptist Church pickets my funeral.

No, really, I do.

I hope Jesus lets someone call me back, like Lazarus. I'd run over to hug the Westboro people first. They'd either get saved or run away and never picket another funeral.

But if not, I'm sure the revivalists, the community of people around me who are madly in love with the God of Love (and I don't mean Cupid), will show so much love that the Westboro folk will either get saved or flee in panic and confusion. I can hear the cops talking to them now. "No, sir, they were trying to hug you, not assault you. I know, because they hugged us all when we showed up."

Not long before going to the cross Jesus said, "Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples-when they see the love you have for each other." (Jn 13/33-35, The Message)

Or how about this? When asked earlier on which of the commandments was the greatest, Jesus said, Jesus said, "`Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.' This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: `Love others as well as you love yourself.' These two commands are pegs; everything in God's Law and the Prophets hangs from them." (Mt 22/37-40, The Message) Many versions say "your neighbor" instead of "others". Jesus made it clear in his parable of the good Samaritan that everyone is our neighbor, including those we might tend to look down on, left to ourselves.

I'm sure that twisted logic would tell the WBCites that they are acting in love, but it's pretty obvious to the rest of the world that they aren't. I hope and pray that the people at Westboro Baptist Church come to know real Love, and are set free from their fears and hatred, as I pray that for all-- from world leaders to terrorists to people in third world hell hole slums to those caught up in sex trafficking. I want to hug you all. because God does.

There's an excellent booklet I recommend on the base topic here, The Mark of the Christian by Francis Schaefer. It's a quick read, less than 10,000 words. I wish every Christian would read this. It's available online (with permission from the publisher!) at http://www.ccel.us/schaeffer.html .

 

Passages from The Message copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson.

The Tsarnaev Ripple Effect

One of the nastier things that surfaces around any heinous crime is a putrid fascination with sordid details of anything and everyone around those involved-- especially the perpetrators.

In the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, I'm appalled at how their family problems were drug through the mud. It's one thing to note, as we grapple to understand the suspects, that one was arrested for violence against his girlfriend. It's another thing altogether (and a nasty one) to find headlines like, "The Mother Of The Boston Bombing Suspects Was Arrested For Shoplifting Last Year".

As long as they could get away with it Big Media danced around the fact the brothers were Muslim. I saw blog and Facebook posts suggesting that since the suspects were Muslims that explained everything. Both attitudes are wrong. We are perfectly capable of assimilating facts without making judgments. Why do so many refuse to do so?

In both Big Media and on blogs, some were quick to assume it was the work of "right wing extremists", "the Tea Party". and so forth-- while decrying any who would assume it was Muslims or foreign terrorists. Guess what? Any of those is just as wrong as another.

Today (and every day) you have a choice. You can wait for the facts or jump to unwarranted conclusions based on prejudices or feelings at the moment. You can stir up trouble for people or you can show grace and love and try to help heal people and situations.

Any time you throw a rock into water, you get ripples. But if you put up barriers, you can keep the ripples from spreading. If you leave the water alone, the ripples will dissipate. If you throw more rocks in, it just makes more ripples... and squashes life under the surface.

Don't encourage the mess. Don't dig up dirt on people, or listen to it, much less rejoice in it.

Choose life. Choose love.

Real Poo and Green Hair

It's Tax Day, so "poo" seems like an appropriate subject.

A while back I blogged about not putting poo in your hair. There I covered shampoo and no poo, but not real poo. Today I want to talk about all three, with some experience under my bandana on two out of three.

But first, a note about "real poo". I figure if the totally synthesized stuff made from all sorts of scary chemical names is shampoo, then there ought to be real poo, made from natural, scalp friendly ingredients. I wondered why nobody was marketing real poo. Then I thought about the name. I'm a little slow at times.

We'll come back to this and green hair later.

The Experiment

I've stuck as much as possible to the No Poo treatment for almost a year. I cut waaaay back on shampoo, but I work in IT. I can't run around with greasy hair, and left to its own devices, my hair definitely heads that way. Most days I use the baking soda solution on my scalp, as little shampoo as I can get away with on most of the hair, and vinegar solution on the ends. For a while I was pushing my luck, trying to skip shampoo every other day. That seemed to be iffy, but was all over when we went on vacation.

I didn't think ahead of time to plan for hair cleaning while traveling. I make up large containers (old shampoo & conditioner bottles) of the two solutions. These would not travel well without leaking (or bursting open and emptying). So I punted and used shampoo and conditioner for 10 days, losing serious ground.

Results and Thoughts on No Poo

• My scalp doesn't itch! Most shampoos make my scalp itch to some extent. The baking soda doesn't. Even two days of full bore shampoo usage irritates my scalp.
• I can get by with very little shampoo. A normal bottle will last at least a year now. (My wife uses it as her main hair product, so I have no idea how long the bottle would last if only I used it, but certainly over a year.)
• When I don't underdo the shampoo, my hair looks great, and is very controllable. It's super fine and most conditioners leave it either waving in the breeze, or looking plastered down. Vinegar is Da Bomb.
• I still haven't figured out why my hair gets greasy. I am guessing it rubs the scalp, and if the scalp thinks it's too dry, it cranks up the pump on the oil pipeline. Any hair scientists out there?
• The three stage process, and being careful where each part goes, takes a little longer, but not much.
• Keeping the baking soda only on and near the scalp, and vinegar only at the hair ends, is a lot easier if you have very long hair that's pretty much the same length. It's almost impossible with medium length or short hair, especially if the hairs aren't all similar in length.
• My hair dries much faster with vinegar than with conditioner.

Real Poo, Marketing Poop

I tried one brand of shampoo and conditioner a friend recommended. It was supposed to be "organic". And a couple of ingredients were. But others came from the same list of chemicals I find on most hair product labels. Ultimately the one I tried didn't work; it made my hair sticky and clumpy. Not quite oily, more like I had been in a food fight,. And it smelled weird-- "pork chops cooked in industrial chemicals" or something like that.

I may have tried the wrong flavor. There were several types, each for a different type of hair. Unfortunately, none of them were aimed at guys, much less geeks. I wanted one for "oily hair". Apparently I wanted a "full bodied" effect, but that sounded like Farrah Fawcett, so I got the only one that didn't sound like that. I tried it twice and gave up. IT guys are not supposed to come to work straight from a food fight. Especially when they work for the VP of Finance.

Toward Greener Hair

Green isn't really my color. If I dye my hair, purple is far more likely. But I try to be reasonably green ecologically. To this end I prefer not to use a hair dryer unless I have to (very cold weather, have to go straight to somewhere I need to have dry hair, etc.) With medium length hair (about collar length) my hair dries in a half hour most days (just right for my drive to work). With conditioner it used to take twice that. Also, with most conditioners, I had to blow dry my hair or it did Very Strange Things.

Between the chemical changes and the hair dryer, I'm not saving the planet, but it's a part of my part in hurting it less. And it's less expensive. That's the best of both worlds.

A Final Note-- It's Alive! (Not.)

Hair is dead protein. You aren't actually damaging a part of you if you lighten, dye, straighten, or perm it. Unless you do something to destroy the follicles, you'll grow more, and you can cut the old off. In fact, I bet you do already.

It does no good to put nutrients and vitamins on your hair. It's dead stuff, remember? And vitamins don't absorb through the scalp; you have to ingest them. So don't obsess over "hurting your hair" or "keeping it healthy". If it looks good and does what you want (or as close as it ever does) you're golden.

 

So... Can anyone recommend a good, natural shampoo?