Kashmir

2 weeks ago while taking a break from playing drums in the Music Building I got some Indian food at a place called Kashmir - it's on the West side of 8th Avenue between 39th and 40th. Good naan and some Kashmiri tea which is pink and has pistachio chunks floating in it. Sweet, tasty treats abound as well.

gmail

I've been using gmail for about a week and have mixed feelings about it. I started sending a copy of all my unfiltered mail to gmail to see how it would handle spam and to give me a chance to really use it. The spam filtering is getting better now that I've been training it on my spam for a week, but still not as good as spamassasin is doing on our local mail server. Gmail will probably catch up to spamassasin in terms of quality of filtering with some more training.

The best "feature" of gmail is its interface - in particular its keyboard shortcuts, especially since it uses vi key-bindings to move up and down through mail (j, k). Normally people don't use keyboard shortcuts much since they are usually hidden in menus and the like. But the more popular keyboard shortcuts on gmail are shown in hints at the bottom of the page which I'm guessing will get more users using the keyboard. It makes quick work of going through the list of mail and marking mail for deletion or as spam. I find myself doing "k x !" all the time which selects the next mail and marks it as spam. This is surprisingly quicker than three clicks of the mouse.

Other than that, the use of labels instead of folders is useful as is the threaded discussion feature. And the related links are useful sometimes if a bit spooky. But I don't think any of these things we'll get me to move away from using Mail.app on my laptop for my regular mail use in the near future. I'd prefer to have full control over my mail even though I have to be a bit paranoid about keeping it safe. When I am away from my laptop (which isn't very often!) I use squirrelmail to get to my email. What would be great is if someone took some hints from gmail's UI and modified squirrelmail to behave in a similar fashion. The only problem is who wants to write a whopping great JavaScript app?