Luna Tail

A while ago I posted about how I’d outgrown Thunderbird and needed a new email client. I found The Bat! and tried it out. Well, I purchased a copy because I liked it so much.

Thunderbird was just too slow for the amount of emails i was getting. It would be deathly slow to just read an email when I had a whole bunch of them… I’m not really sure how many, but I’m sure it was about the same as I have in The Bat!

The Bat! allows me to have an inbox per account, and so I have five. Some are from my VPS to catch server emails. Currently my main email account, which is actually hosted by Google Tools now and catches 3 email addresses, has 83 emails in the inbox, 69 in the sent box, and 96 split into various subfolders. And there is no noticable slowing in reading, deleting, or organizing emails.

And that’s just one account. In my VPS email I have 157 emails stored, in one account, 61 in another, and 5 in the third. I’m not even going to add all those numbers up but you get the idea. Would Thunderbird be able to handle those numbers? I don’t think so.

It’s fast, and clean, and I love the layout. I also love the templates you can set up. So if I want to send emails from an account, I can set up a template that will be used for every sent email. This includes a signature, where the courser starts, and a greeting, if any.

Yup, I’m sold on The Bat! If you are looking for an email client that can handle the abuse, I would highly recommend it!

I thought I was so fat… I had my shorts up to cover my stomach. What stomach?

At my old house in West Jordan, Utah. Again I thought I was fat. HA!

Me at Bryce Canyon, Utah, in August of 1994.

Yup, dang skinny, huh?

Me and my 1990 Toyota Pickup. I miss that truck. I traded it for my outback about four years ago. Had that truck for 14 years.

Wordless Wednesday

I have been running some collie rescue here in Utah, though I haven’t done any for a while because our house is just too full with six dogs now. But sometimes I’ve wondered about getting some car door magnets for Utah Collie Rescue in order to advertise and get the word out that there are homes for collies in here Utah.

Vista Prints car door magnets are great. And wow, they are inexpensive! They start at $9.99! That would be so neat to have one. I’d even love to have one just for the collies… because I do love collies and love to plaster stickers on my car all about collies.

They have tons of designs, over 100, or you can create your own and use it on your magnet. You can receive it within three days, which is amazingly fast. And you can chose from a couple of sizes, one that will fit your car.

I have used Vista Print for business cards and they always have great, fast service and their quality is very high. I need to get some more business cards too, soon. I’m running out. Maybe I’ll get a magnet at the same time…

So did Google change it’s policies and go back to ranking blogs that do paid posts? I wonder… because low and behold, this morning, like magic, all of my sites have page rank.

I gave up caring… but I will admit, I do make a bit more money when I have page rank. Not that I blog just for money, because honestly I don’t. I love to blog. But the money does help my dog habit for sure!

Tip Tail actually did have PR for a while, the last month or so. Now it’s a 2. It was a 3… so that’s a bummer.
Luna Tail, this blog, has a 2.
Tatum Tot has a 2 (it is not monetized).
Pixie Tail has a 2.
And Tail Pix, my photo blog, has a 3.

So interesting… we’ll have to see if these numbers stay around for a bit. You just never know with Google.

Staying safe in today’s world is getting harder and harder. Personally, I am afraid of going camping all by myself. My husband said, the other day, he might take the trailer and go camp on his own for a bit, take a few of the dogs with, and have fun. I told him that’s great and I envy him that he feels safe doing so. Being a woman, I would not feel safe camping on my own.

Online saftey is also important, and lifelock provides a great service that can help you prevent identity theft. I haven’t signed up, but I’m seriously considering it. I do get nervous about having my identity stolen, especially since I’m on the web so darn much. I just hope that it will never happen to me and I monitor all my resources like a hawk.

Lately I have been thinking about my own frustration tolerance, as well as my husband’s. And, of course, the dogs.

See, my husband is not working right now. And he did take a Semester at the Salt Lake Community College, but he really didn’t like it. He had a hard time dealing with the instructors lack of knowledge, ineptitude, and being unorganized. I went to SLCC years ago to get my associate degree, and I understand how the instructors are. The adjunct instructors are better than the full time ones. But for me, I am just able to brush off the frustration level and get through it, because I wanted that piece of paper.

But my Husband has a harder time dealing with frustration. I think he has, in some areas at least, a lower frustration tolerance than I do. We both have social anxiety, which makes tolerating being around people harder. I work at it… keep doing it, and I am better. I’m also on meds for anxiety and oh boy, they help me a lot. He doesn’t want to go on drugs, he is afraid of their addictive nature. But this is not a post about that.

I think a good thing my parents taught me was to be able to just deal with frustration and let it slide off my back. Thus, I can work, and even if it’s a miserable day, I can get through it okay and go on to the next day. I can eat foods I don’t really like and tolerate them. Life is just life and can be pretty miserable sometimes. But most of the time it’s okay.

Many people, an couple of old boyfriends of mine for example, had very, very low frustration tolerance levels. To the point where they could not hold, and keep, a job. Little things would bother them so much they had to quit. Long customer lines, heavy lifting, coworkers that complained a lot. It’s interesting, to me, to see people with different frustration tolerance levels. I don’t think it means a person is bad, to have a low frustration tolerance. But I wonder if it’s a sign of a mental illness? Or is it an upbringing thing?

What are your thoughts on tolerating frustration? Can you tolerate a lot, or do lots of things bother you to the point that you have to remove yourself from the situation? Or are you somewhere in the middle? What is the ideal place to be?

Just an interesting thought.. at least I think so. Maybe I’ll have to find some adjustable beds to lay one and really think about this topic!

[poll=8]

Well, Saturday was a pretty miserable day for me… it started with Phoebe, our black cat, getting upstairs and being treed in the cat tower up there. Which isn’t really a big deal because she just sits up there and says ‘nah nah’ to the dogs. But the dogs bark and whine and that was just annoying, and woke my husband up.

Then I got yelled at by the judge for using my mean voice on Chase when he wouldn’t stop tunnel sucking. Gah! Almost made me cry! I wasn’t even mad at Chase, I was just using my enforcing voice. But then I got all upset. And it was miserably cold and windy and my back hurt so bad it almost doubled me over during a run.

Sunday I made myself more comfortable. I swear, when I was younger, I never had to. I could tolerate just about anything. But now I’m older I actually have to make my environment as comfortable as possible, including taking some Ibruprophin with me to help with my stupid back. Pisses me off!

Sunday was, then, better. Here’s a picture of the trial site, Pleasant Grove, Utah. It was nice on this day, Sunday. Warmer. But not warm enough, and there are no leaves on the trees yet. I want leaves! I want spring! :p

And yup we are still thinking of moving to the Richfield area, though not into commercial real estate, more residential. I haven’t heard back from the Realtor down there yet. Though another friend is moving to Grants Pass, Oregon, and she says it’s warmer there. hrm.. I do prefer warm! We’ll have to see!

You Should Live in the Country

You are laid back, calm, and good at entertaining yourself. You don’t need an expensive big city to keep you busy. You’ll take the peaceful life over the stressful life any day of the week.

Yeah, I coulda told you that.

Though I’m not quite sure yet. I think I get OpenID… just like finally I get del.icio.us. Here is my OpenID page if you care to see:

So with OpenID… it has to be a URL / domain name. I guess… you can use your own domain name. If you don’t have a domain, you can sign into one of the companies (like ClaimID) and they give you a pseudo domain name that is your OpenID.

I think I was thinking OpenID is more than it is. I was thinking it was a social type network thing… and I guess it can be, but it’s not really, yet.

What is it, you may ask? OpenID is an ID you can use to log into websites that support it. When you post to a blogger/blogspot blog, it will give you the option of using your OpenID as one of your logins (if the blogger has set it up this way). But.. as far as I can tell, you have to use one of the publicly hosted OpenID sites to host the OpenID. ClaimID is one of them. Then… when you log in using your OpenID, the login page checks… err, checks something, not sure what, to confirm your OpenID and log you in.

What does it check? What does it know what to check? The geeky side of me wants to know!

I was thinking OpenID was a website in and of itself. Well it is, but you can’t get an OpenID from the OpenID website! Or at least I don’t think so. You get one through ClaimID or sites like it, such as MyOpenID. How does ClaimID talk to OpenID? No idea. Maybe someone will come along and clear this up.

I was thinking OpenID was a website where you could enter your information, link to other people with OpenIDs, and have a good old time. But… it is not. However, ClaimID seems to be, though it’s limited. You can claim your websites, and you can have contacts that have other ClaimIDs. I have one.. Johann The Dog. So if you have a ClaimID OpenID, I hope you’ll consider being my friend… my ClaimID is very lonely!

I need some home theater furniture to sit in while I figure this all out. OpenId really should be easier to understand than this! Or, sometimes, I’m just a bit slow.

One of the things I really enjoy about browsing to other blogs, is checking out things in the side bar and clicking them to see what they are. That’s how I found VerveEarth.

It looks pretty cool! I don’t even remember what blog I saw it on now… oops. Anyway, you can put in your blog and info, and then you can see what other people are around you and read their blogs.

They do need to be able to allow people to put in multiple blogs. Since I have six blogs, it’s not really practical for me to put all six in. So if I could relate them all to my one login, that’d be better. Guess I need to suggest that to them.

It’s a kinda fun community kind of website!