Still plodding along…

Apologies for being a bit slack with posts this last week. I’ve been very focused on the iVokh model, plus work, plus sorting out my new email client, plus hardware issues, plus life….

Ahem, enough excuses! On the creative side, this is the most recent concept of the iVokh’s second, mostly hidden arm. First the skeleton:

As you can see, it’s very much like the arm of a bat:

One major difference, though, is that the iVokh hand has a ‘real’ thumb. This is what the hand looks like once it has some skin:

It doesn’t look like much, but it’s a lot better than my first attempt:

According to the Offspring, this one looked more like a duck’s foot than a wing…

When I looked at that first attempt without my rose coloured specs, I realised the Offspring was right. Don’t you hate that? lol I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow of how hard it was to create the illusion of ‘folds’. Moving on.

I mentioned some time ago that I was having email issues. Well, they all stem from the fact that I refused to give up my personal email address. That email dates back to the time when I hand coded my own website, using a graphical interface that looked great, imho, but wasn’t all that user friendly:

Okay, maybe it didn’t look that great, but it was back in 2002 and clicking on one of those images took you to a new page with info specific to that image – i.e. clicking on the guitar took you to ‘music’ while the newspaper took you to ‘news’. -sigh- The website was a failure, but I’m still proud of what I did.

Anyway, in order to have a website back then, you had to have a ‘domain’. Think of a domain as a digital anchor. Once you have one, you can attach it to a web hosting service. The hosting service provides the actual ‘real estate’ on which you build your website. Once you have a website, you can use it to create email addresses. Remember, this was long before Gmail etc.

Now we get to email clients. An email client is a program [app] that sits on your computer and ‘talks’ to the server where your email lives. Outlook is an email client, and so was Opera Mail. I used Opera Mail for years until it stopped being supported. Then I paid, in advance, for one, long year using Microsoft 365 via Outlook….

-cue happy music-

That year is over, and I am now using Fastmail. 😀 Fastmail is web-based, but when I have the energy, I’ll set it up with Thunderbird [the Firefox email client]. The beauty of using Thunderbird is that it will check Fastmail for me and download any new emails…without me having to log in and out all the time! I know that sounds lazy, but I used to check my emails multiple times a day. With 365 I’d only check once a day because of the hassle. I’m really looking forward to using my email properly again.

And finally, my hardware problems have been sorted too, thanks to the Offspring. I’ll be taking one of the Offspring’s old computers into work to use as my demonstration machine which will free up my laptop for one of the students to use [during class]. -dance-

All’s well that ends well, and I hope your week was as productive as mine. 🙂

cheers

Meeks

 

 

 

The SPAM folder ate my homework

I love my Opera email client, really I do, but the SPAM detection feature is vicious. It’s supposed to ‘learn’ what is and is not SPAM from what I do with the items in my inbox, so when I first installed it about a month ago [after the pc upgrade] it flagged  nothing as SPAM. Fair enough. Now though, it seems to be eating emails at random. Not happy Jan. 😦

I would not have known what my SPAM folder was up to if not for this new course I’m starting tomorrow. For days now I’ve been checking my inbox 10 times a day for some important emails from the course providers, and getting quietly more uneasy with each day. Why were they not sending me the info. they had promised?

Imagine my surprise when I get a call today from the course providers wondering why I hadn’t responded to their emails.

Feeling totally flustered and guilty [had I somehow missed these all-important emails?], I finally thought to check my SPAM folder… and there they were. But they were in good company. As my eye scanned the list of supposed spam, I saw emails from friends who are in my contact list. That is not supposed to happen.  What the expletive deleted ?

So friends, neighbours, and fellow denizens of the internet, if I haven’t replied to your emails it’s because the SPAM folder ate them. 😦

I’m scrambling to catch up with the things I should have done for my course, but as soon as that’s done I will scour my SPAM folder and unspam all of you. Promise.

Meeks