I’ve been using my 3-year-old gmail account more and more for things lately. I created it back when gmail was still in invite-only mode because I could, but I’ve never had much use for it because I’ve preferred to have my mail stored locally in an email client that didn’t necessitate that I keep a gmail tab open in my browser. But I’ve been more and more irritated by spam lately and have even thought about changing my email address. Problem is, my personal email address is old enough that it’s attached to accounts and lists I can’t even remember that I might still need to get info from. I had noticed that spam control on my old gmail account seemed to be pretty good. So this weekend, I looked into hosted gmail for my domain. It was actually very easy to set up. Within a half hour of starting my investigation, I started getting mail at my own personal instance (for all practical purposes) of gmail. And I’ve been lonely ever since. Only one or two spams have actually gotten to my inbox (and some 500 were successfully blocked in the past day), and this paucity of spam has actually helped me to garden a few other emails I get but am not interested in. I’ve just continued to delete them along with spam for however many years, but now that I get no spam, I’m finding it easy to weed out these other annoying messages (e.g. from lists I no longer care about). The result, of course, is that now I’m lonely. My old email client (Thunderbird) caught mucho spam, but mucho still got stuck in my box, so there was always something of a clatter simulated by the clutter. Now that’s gone, and I’m rattling around in my own inbox, listening for the whisper of footsteps, peeping out the front window for visitors.

We have an old laptop whose AC adapter in is busted. It’ll stay powered on for just a minute or two before shutting off. This means of course that we can’t keep it on for long enough to charge the battery. Unfortunately, we have a year’s worth of photos of Lennie on this computer’s hard drive. This week, I went in search of a hard drive enclosure that would allow me to pull photos off the drive and then go on to use the drive as a portable external disk. I’ve bought two so far, and neither one has hardware that’ll accept the pins on my drive. This is where I hang my head in shame and admit that I don’t know very much at all about hardware. ATA vs. IDE vs. SCSI? It’s all Greek to me. Here I implore my friends who do know about hardware to help me out. Drive specs follow, along with photos of the pins.

Some strings from the back that look like model numbers:
HDD2188
MK8025GAS

Cylinders: 16383

Compaq P/N: 312954-001

Update: A coworker took a quick look at the images and said he guessed the piece pictured was a connector that could be removed. Sure enough, I gave a slight tug and the thing wiggled. So I tugged a little more, and there was a regular old IDE connector plugged into it. I currently have the drive mounted and am yanking pictures off of it. Whew.

I tried making a brioche again this weekend, but this time I dispensed with the fancy pan and just made regular loaves that would be better suited to sandwiches. One of my loaf pans is a little smaller than the other, but I let the dough for both rise the same length of time. So the smaller one rose a bit too much and has a big air pocket in the top. It’s kind of neat, actually, but it makes (correction: made) it difficult to cut the bread without smooshing it down. The extra rising also made the bread less densely structured all around, so it’s not as firm a previously. I’d like it a little firmer than the small loaf came out, though there’s something to be said for having it a bit less firm than before. I suspect the second loaf will be a near-perfect denseness. There are a few spots in the bread where I didn’t get the butter fully integrated, and around these, yummy gooey buttery air holes formed. We ate the small loaf within a day. I’m hoping the larger loaf will last a few days, at least, as I’ve got a pile of salami and turkey for sandwiches.

Brioche is thought to be the bread Marie Antoinette was referencing when she (the story goes) said “let them eat cake.” My bread book has recipes for three grades of brioche, broken down into the classes “rich man’s,” “middle-class,” and “poor man’s” brioche. The primary difference among them is the quantity of butter, which was harder to come by (and keep) a few hundred years ago. Antoinette’s plea, then, was basically an attempt to swap a little butter for her own dear neck. I’ve made the middle class version so far, with its two sticks of butter and five eggs (the rich version has double the butter!). I’m not sure I have the nerve to make the rich man’s version. You can probably see why this bread translates into cake. And come to think of it, the bread actually looks a bit like pound cake.