Migrating From Gmail To FastMail: Part 6

Okay, so I have been negligent in finishing my series of blog posts about my Gmail to FastMail migration. But that negligence ends today.

This is my final post in this series. First, I will list the things I don’t like about FastMail and discuss the problems that I’ve had during my migration from Gmail. Then I’ll cover the things I like about FastMail.

Bad things about FastMail

The list of problems that I have experienced is almost non-existent, and the few issues I have had were my own fault! At one point in my migration, I had my Apple Mail app (on OS X) set up with both my Gmail and my new FastMail account. This meant that I effectively had duplicates of everything.

When I was trying to, ahem, ‘tidy up’ my soon-to-be-defunct Gmail account and check that everything had migrated over to FastMail properly, I accidentally deleted my Gmail ‘Spam’ folder. Only it turned out that this was actually my FastMail Spam folder.

It took me a while to troubleshoot this, but only because a lot of FastMail’s online documentation specifically refers to a folder called ‘Junk Mail’ and not ‘Spam’. E.g. (click to enlarge)

When I later noticed that I was unable to mark mail as junk on the FastMail website, I realized that I had maybe deleted the wrong folder. A quick email to FastMail confirmed that in their new web interface, they have renamed ‘Junk Mail’ to ‘Spam’. Their support team quickly rebuilt my Spam email folder and all was well again.

So that’s my sole criticism of FastMail: because of an error that was my fault I was temporarily confused by some of their documentation which is not up to date. I can live with this!

Good things about FastMail

  1. It works just as you want a mail service to work. Stable, reliable, and powerful.

  2. If you use a custom domain (as is the case for me), they set up a default subdomain at mail.yourcustomdomainname.com that lets you check your mail [1]. I found this was a nice little touch.

  3. The Desktop web app is good. Really good. Supports all of your Gmail keyboard shortcuts and many more besides.

  4. The mobile web app is also fantastic, and supports many great ‘slide’ gestures that makes it feel like a native iOS app. E.g. (click to enlarge):

  5. There is a great set of default settings (click to enlarge):

  6. But when you need them, their Advanced settings are there and they could probably keep you occupied for several days (every option in the left-sidebar opens a whole page of preferences). Click to enlarge:

  7. Fantastic, and timely, support from real people!

  8. Integration with 3rd party mail clients is straightforward and seems to work as expected.

  9. The web app has four main components: Mail, Address Book (I easily imported my addresses from OS X Contacts app), Notes (a simple way of collecting some thoughts in the style of Simplenote [2], and Files.

  10. The aforementioned file storage space can be used to host files or photo galleries.

Native or web app?

I’m really impressed by the web app experience when using FastMail. So much so, that I’m currently switching a lot between the web apps (on my Mac and on iOS) and 3rd party mail clients. FastMail is working beautifully with Apple’s mail apps (on OS X and iOS) as well as apps like the fantastic AirMail (OS X) and Triage (iOS).

Overall

I’m loving FastMail, and still discovering many new things about it every day. I’ve no regrets about migrating away from Gmail and am happy to pay a fair price for this level of quality, functionality, and service.

  1. You can, of course, still access the web mail interface at http://fastmail.fm  ↩

  2. Though there is no easy way of searching notes that I could find.  ↩

7 reasons why I don't like content 'aggregators' who scrape blog sites

Today a post on twitter drew my attention to Bioinfo-Bloggers, a site that aggregates content — i.e. the full blog post is reproduced — from 28 different bloggers who write about bioinformatics and genomics.

Outwardly, this might seem like a good idea. The bloggers get more exposure to their material, and readers can visit just one site instead of 28 separate RSS feeds. However, there are several reasons why I have issues with this type of aggregation. Many of my concerns apply even when individual bloggers have expressly licensed their material for reuse (e.g. by use of a CC0 Creative Commons license).

  1. The site lists the 28 blogs as 'contributors' and lists the blog writers as 'authors'. This strongly suggests that the people in question have consented to their material being used, even when this is not the case.
  2. Links to the original blog posts are included, but only at the end of each reproduced entry. The included text says that 'This is a syndicated post', further suggesting that the original authors agreed to have their content syndicated.
  3. The Bioinfo-Bloggers website asserts copyright over all material (see footer section of website).
  4. The original bloggers lose web traffic. This can matter for minor reasons such as when you want to include details of how popular your blog is for outreach sections on research grants. But it potentially — depending on how much traffic Bioinfo-bloggers gets — deprives you of knowing who is looking at your content, which articles are more popular, etc.
  5. People don't a chance to comment on your blog (unless they follow the links). You may lose some direct engagement with your readers.
  6. If people start using this site rather than viewing your blog, what happens if Bioinfo-Bloggers stops including your blog site, or shuts down altogether? In the former case, people might just assume you are not posting any more.
  7. What happens if Bioinfo-Bloggers starts including content from other blogs that you don't approve of? Your blog post may appear alongside another which espouses views you find offensive.

The first three points could easily be addressed by removing the claim of copyright over all material, by making it explicit that this site is just scraping other sites and that the original bloggers may not be aware of this, and by placing links to the original blog content at the top (not bottom) of each article.

There are currently some ongoing discussions about this on Twitter. E.g.

Bacon, bacon, bacon: a bacon extravaganza

Today I cooked a three course meal with every dish featuring bacon. This was a special treat for some dear friends of ours who will sadly be leaving Davis after many years here. One friend has always made it clear to us that she loves bacon, so I thought I would cook her a meal to remember.

The appetizer — for which I stupidly forgot to take a picture of — was Bacon Cheddar Deviled Eggs. The bacon was cooked on top of a wire rack in the oven (to try to reduce the fat content a little bit). I used an English mustard (Colman's) which has quite a tang. Eggs were served with a few cherry tomatoes on the side that were drizzled in olive oil and served with a large drop of a local Black Currant Balsamic Vinegar.

The main course was a bacon-wrapped cheddar and stout meat loaf (my first time ever cooking meat loaf). The organic beef was grass-fed and from a local source.

 

 

 


 


 


Accompanying the meat loaf was some mashed potatoes (which included some of the bacon fat, plus a couple of handfuls of crushed cooked bacon) and a green bean and garlic recipe that we love (you add fresh lemon zest right at the end).

 

For dessert, we did not attempt to shy away from bacon. I made some beer-candied bacon (using the same stout that went into the meat loaf) which was served on some vanilla bean ice-cream with a little bit of dark chocolate with sea salt.

 

I have never cooked so much bacon in my life! I guess I could have gone the extra step and also prepared a bacon martini but maybe that would have been too much?

 

Gmail, FastMail, and Mavericks…can't you all just get along?

As a brief interlude to my never ending series of blog posts about migrating from Gmail to FastMail, I'll quickly note that:

a) Gmail has some problems when used as an account in the Mail app of  Mac OS 10.9 (Mavericks)

b) FastMail also has some issues when being used with Mail on Mavericks (these would seem to be due to changes Apple made)

So on the one hand, the former news might encourage more people to move away from Gmail but the latter news item means that Apple's Mail app needs some fixes before being ready to work with FastMail under 10.9 (of course, web access to FastMail is unaffected). This is making me consider waiting a little while before upgrading to 10.9.

 

Update: 31st October

Turns out the 2nd item above was not FastMail's fault and was an issue with a particular user.

Update: 4th November

Marco Arment's piece on the wider issue of Gmail not adopting standard IMAP protocols is well worth a read.

Migrating from Gmail to FastMail: part 5

In this part, I will discuss the changes that I had to make to get FastMail working with my own personal domain.

When I was only using Gmail, I used a personal domain name that I had purchased from the excellent Hover domain name registrar[1]. For just $5 a year, Hover will forward email from a personal email address (using your own domain) to another email account. If I borrow from the fictional example in part 1 of this series, let’s assume I own the domain name mos-eisley-cantina.com and I was previously using Hover to forward mail to greedo@mos-eisley-cantina.com to my Gmail address (greedo_1977@gmail.com). How does this happen with FastMail?

One of the reasons I chose FastMail was that I knew that they supported personal domains[2]. You still get your own FastMail email address as well (and this becomes your account name) but I don't intend to ever use this as an email address.

On following FastMail’s guide to setting up your own domain name I was surprised to find that I had to alter my Hover name server settings for the mos-eisley-cantina.com domain name. I.e. I had to configure Hover to redirect all traffic heading towards mos-eisley-cantina.com to instead go to FastMail’s servers.

2013-10-25 at 9.34 AM.png

I thought I would just be configuring the mail settings at Hover.com rather than redirecting all traffic to FastMail. One of my concerns about this was that I was also using Hover to forward web traffic from mos-eisley-cantina.com to another domain that I own (er…let’s call it wretchedhiveofscumandvillainry.com). As soon as I changed the name server settings in Hover, this forwarding was broken.

I needn’t have worried. Turns out that FastMail provides a lot of options for custom DNS configuration. By visiting Settings->Advanced->Websites/Redirects I could configure my web traffic to be redirected just as before:

2013-10-25 at 9.44 AM.png

So I now have FastMail set up to use my custom domain, though when I set up mail clients such as Apple’s Mail app, I need to use my underlying FastMail email address[3] in the 'User Name' field. To make my custom domain name the default email account, you need to place it first in a comma separated list of email addresses in Apple Mail’s ‘Email address’ field:

2013-10-25 at 1.47 PM.png
  1. If you want to give me some Hover referral love, please use this link when signing up for a domain (I will get $5 in credit)  ↩
  2. Though you have to sign up for the more expensive enhanced plan to have this feature. On the flip side, I’m no longer paying Hover $5 a year for the email forwarding.  ↩
  3. FastMail provides many different options for your account email address with maybe 50 different domain name extensions (e.g. allmail.net, fastemail.us, myfastmail.com). I went for the default username@fastmail.fm format.  ↩

Migrating from Gmail to FastMail: part 4

I’m falling behind on my (seemingly never-ending) series of posts about migrating from Gmail to FastMail. I still have lots that I want to write about, but for this post I’ll point you towards some resources I found helpful, and will briefly discuss FastMail’s IMAP migration tool.

Resources

FastMail provides a lot of really detailed and useful help online. They appreciate that many of you will want to work with FastMail on specific desktop and mobile clients and have created different help pages to address these scenarios. E.g. here is the advice on configuring Apple’s Mail app to work with FastMail folders. Their support team are also very quick to deal with emailed requests.

Here are some guides for migration of Gmail to FastMail:

FastMail’s IMAP migration tool

If you decide that you like the free trial of FastMail and want to move to using it 100%, then you will want to bring all of your Gmail (or other email) with you. FastMail has an IMAP migration tool which worked well for me. After logging in to FastMail, navigate to your Account page and select Migrate IMAP under the ‘Maintenance’ settings.

After entering your Gmail credentials, you just let this tool run in the background. It took about 4 hours to copy all of my ~15,000 emails [1]. The best part of this is that it sends you a detailed report when it finishes.

As I mentioned in an earlier post in this series, I was initially confused because my Gmail ‘All Mail’ folder seemed to shrink by several thousand emails. But this is because Gmail — which does many non-standard things with email —counts all sent emails as part of ‘All Mail’. FastMail resolves these into separate folders.

The only hitch in this process was due to my own stupidity. I use SaneBox to pre-filter my Gmail and I needed to tell SaneBox to work with FastMail instead. Foolishly, I did this while my mail was still being imported in the background. This may or may not have been the reason why I ended up with two sets of my SaneBox folders under FastMail. This was easy to resolve though [2].

In my next post, I’ll talk about how I migrated my personal domain settings over to FastMail.

  1. It leaves all the original emails in Gmail, so there is no real risk of using this tool.  ↩

  2. SaneBox gives folders a prefix to make sure that they appear at the top of your list of folders. On Gmail it uses the ‘@’ symbol, but it turns out that different providers sort email folders differently. On FastMail, these folders use a ‘+’ sign (e.g. +SaneLater). During my email migration from Gmail, I also ended up with underscores being used. This gave me a +SaneLater and a _SaneLater folder. I simply moved the contents of _SaneLater into +SaneLater, deleted the former and everything was okay from that point. But really, don’t migrate SaneBox to FastMail until you have finished the Gmail->FastMail migration!  ↩

What's in a name? Better vocabularies = better bioinformatics?

About 7:00 this morning I was somewhat relieved because my scheduled lab talk had been postponed (my boss was not around). But we were still having the lab meeting anyway.

About 8:00 this morning, I stumbled across this blog post by @biomickwatson on twitter. I really enjoyed the post and thought I would mention in in the lab meeting. Suddently though that prompted me to think about some other topics relating to Mick's blog post.

Before I knew it, I had made about 30 slides and ended up speaking for most of the lab meeting. I thought I'd add some notes and post the talk on SlideShare.



I get very frustrated by people who rely heavily on GO term analysis, without having a good understanding of what Gene Ontology terms are, or how they get assigned to database objects. There are too many published anayses which see an enrichment of a particular GO term as some reliable indicator that there is a difference in datasets X & Y. Do they ever check to see how these GO terms were assigned? No.

A grammatical analysis of Russian email spam

As part of my recent migration from Gmail to FastMail, I’ve been going through my Gmail Spam folder to check for any non-spam emails that were mistakenly filtered away. In doing so I noticed the following set of emails:

Here is an example of what one of these emails looks like:

These emails are all slightly different, but follow a very similar format:

  • All but one comes from — what I imagine to be real — Yahoo! accounts, that have probably been hacked.
  • They all ask me to reply to a variety of Russian-based email addresses.
  • They all use a series of similar phrases to try to engage with me

It is the last point that amuses me. The ‘little girlie’ who sent these emails uses the following variations to tempt me to reply to her:

“I love your page”
“I enjoy your user profile”
“I like your user profile”
“I like your page”
“I enjoy your profile”
“I love your profile”

And it almost worked. I was just about ready to reply — and hand over my credit card information for good measure — when I noticed this email:

“Most”?!? You only enjoyed most of my user profile? If you are trying to tempt me (and scam me in the process), you’d better work on your flattery skills.

Migrating from Gmail to FastMail: part 3

I promise that I will get around to explaining the gory details of my Gmail to FastMail migration (and also how I’m finding FastMail as a service), but one final post before then. This time I want to talk about ‘preparation’.

If you are thinking of taking FastMail for a test drive, you can of course do this as a 60 day free trial (no credit card needed as well[1]). If you do this, then you don’t need to do much preparation other than set Gmail to forward your email (and keep a copy in the inbox or Archive folder):

Something else to bear in mind is that Gmail applies spam filtering rules before email gets forwarded. I’ve had issues where Gmail routinely flags some emails as spam (even though I’ve set up filters to tell it not to[2]). This is where I’ve found the SaneNotSpam tool by SaneBox to be really useful.

Michael Crusoe gave me a useful tip on twitter about this. Simply make a filtering rule in Gmail to forward all spam email. I did something slightly different and made a rule to not move any email to the Spam folder[3].

If you set up forwarding like this then you can continue using Gmail as before, but everything will also end up in FastMail. To be able to send from your Gmail address within FastMail, you’ll need to set up a Gmail personality. FastMail also allows aliases, but these differ somewhat from personalities[4].

Go on a Gmail diet

My final preparation tip — for those who are considering a permanent migration to FastMail — would be to slim down your Gmail archive. The much-touted advantage of never needing to delete emails when using Gmail is great…except for when you want to switch providers.

Although FastMail has a decent IMAP migration tool, it can take many hours to migrate thousands of emails (and I’m assuming that most Gmail users have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of emails). When I first started thinking about leaving Gmail (over a year ago now), I realized that I should probably start slimming down my Gmail archive[5].

It wasn’t until I completed the migration to FastMail that I realized that Gmail’s Archive folder also contains all of your sent mail. Initially I thought that the FastMail migration tool had made an error because I was missing about 6,000 emails. Turns out these were all of my sent messages, which FastMail — like other email providers — only keeps in the Sent messages folder.

Coming next

In part 4 I will explain a bit more about how the actual migration went for me, and what other things I needed to do in order to use my custom domain with FastMail.

  1. I wish more services would let you try them without having to hand over credit card details  ↩

  2. In particular, emails from Amazon often end up in my Gmail spam folder.  ↩

  3. Though this is only catching spam email that is directly addressed to me. I’m still seeing some spam email where I’m presumably bcc recipient. But I can live with this.  ↩

  4. I now have a personality in FastMail for each account that I want to be able to send email from.  ↩

  5. Over the course of the last year, I’ve shed about 3,000 emails from my archive. This might seem like a lot, but my starting point was about 18,000 emails so I’m not sure how much time this saved me during the actual migration.  ↩

Migrating from Gmail to FastMail: part 2

In my last blog post, I explained the complexity of my email setup before I began the migration from Gmail to FastMail. Although I will move on to explaining how I did the migration, I thought I should briefly touch on why I did it.

Gmail is powerful, full-featured, very robust, and most importantly…it is free. Why would anyone want to move away from this premium email service?

Support

When you don’t pay for a service or app, you can’t necessarily expect any problems you encounter to be dealt with any sense of urgency. It is true that Gmail doesn’t exactly break very often, but what if you needed help or feedback on a particular issue that might only be of relevance to you? If you pay for a service like FastMail, then you get fast and effective support [1].

Privacy and security

It is no surprise that Google’s business model relies on advertising. They not only want to generate revenue by putting ads across all of their products, they also want to benefit from all of the information that they have gleaned about their users.

Although you may never notice or care about the personalized adverts that can appear in Gmail, since last March Google has effectively started sharing your personal data across all of their products and services. Although their privacy policy initially suggests that they do not share this information without your consent, they allow sharing to ‘affiliates … and trusted businesses’ for the vaguely defined category of ‘external processing’:

Privacy concerns such as this are among the chief criticisms of Gmail.

The future

Google experiments with lots of different products and increasingly they are honing down their portfolio to a smaller number of (revenue-generating) services. They have discontinued more services than most companies will ever launch. Many of these are products that you will have never heard of, but closure of services like the popular Google Reader sparked outrage across the web[2].

Although it seems unfathomable that Google would kill off Gmail, it can’t be assumed that Google will not introduce changes that limits the functionality of Gmail or annoys users in other ways (e.g. more ads).

FastMail

Companies that charge a fair price for a service can use their revenue to provide you, the user, with all the support and help that you need. They also don’t need to look at your emails to mine personal information for the purpose of selling you stuff.

Also, companies not based in the USA may not have to hand over their data to organizations like the NSA [3].

  1. I’ve already had my first FastMail support request submitted and dealt with…all within 24 hours.  ↩

  2. Though if you don’t pay anything for a product, I’m not sure that such outrage is justified?  ↩

  3. FastMail is an Australian company and have been very upfront about where they stand with respect to situations such as NSA requests for information. This is not a big reason why I have switched to FastMail, but I appreciate their openness on the matter.  ↩

Migrating from Gmail to FastMail: part 1

I have recently migrated my email setup from Gmail to FastMail. This has not been as simple as moving a single email account from one provider to another, so I thought I’d write about my experiences of getting setup with FastMail.

Before I address the question of why I wanted to move away from Gmail, I thought I would first explain my email setup. In future blog posts, I’ll cover the minor hiccups I’ve had as I’ve switched to FastMail and will also talk about my overall experience of FastMail.

 

My email setup: the early days of relative simplicity

Like nearly everyone on the Internet (or so it seems), I’ve had a Gmail account for many years. This has not always been my primary account though and I’ve had an Apple-related email service ever since the days of iTools and .Mac. And of course I’ve also had a work email account plus other unwanted-but-necessary email accounts[1].

For a long time, I had these three main accounts (Apple, Gmail, and Work) all connected to my main Mail client (Apple Mail on Macs) as separate accounts.

 

My email setup: getting more complex

About the time I bought an Android phone[2], I started using Gmail more and more. So that was when I decided to redirect all of my Apple email to Gmail. If you didn’t know, one of the great things about Gmail is that you can connect other accounts to it and send email through Gmail but make it appear that it comes from those other accounts (go to Settings->Accounts):

You can even do this for email aliases. My Apple email account lets me set up a few free aliases. This allows me to have one email address that I can use for me and my wife (emails to this account go to me, but get autoforwarded to her[3]). So my Gmail account contained four accounts at this point.

 

My email setup: fewer accounts, but more complexity

The above configuration works well when using Gmail’s web interface, but initially I thought I had to keep my Work and Apple accounts in my desktop Mail app for those occasions when I wanted to send an email from my Work account. But it turns out, you can have one Gmail account in Apple’s Mail app, and still send from different accounts. You can also do this is in iOS, though you paradoxically have to set up your mail as a non-Gmail account.

 

My email setup: even more complexity

For a year or so, I was happy with my email setup. Everything was routed to one place (Gmail) but on my Mac or iPhone I only needed to have one account set up and yet I could still send email from my Work or Apple email accounts (including aliases).

At some point though I realized that I might not be with Gmail forever. So I decided to invest in a domain name which, in theory, would stay with me forever and would give me the opportunity to have a stable email address for the rest of my life. This email address could be moved between providers as and when I needed to move.

So I bought a domain name with the awesome Hover registrar (please click here to use my referral link if you consider using them). For $5 a month, Hover will forward email from your chosen email address (e.g. greedo@mos-eisley-cantina.com) to another address. So while I could have used Hover as the email host, I decided to stick with Gmail and just forward email to it as before.

So how did I end up being able to send from my new address (greedo@mos-eisley-cantina.com[4]) from within Gmail or Apple’s Mail clients? Well in Gmail, you can add other accounts to your account and either treat them as an alias or make them the default account:

 

So in my case, I made greedo@mos-eisley-cantina.com the default email address associated with my Gmail account. Setting this alias to be the default email address for your Gmail account in Apple’s Mail clients is trickier, especially on iOS. But it can be done.

 

Moving on

Over the last few days I have finally decided to leave all of the above setup behind and move to FastMail. Why and how I did this, will be the subject of future blog posts in the coming days. However, my early experience is that FastMail is excellent and I have no regrets about making this move.

 

  1. Comcast (my ISP) required me to setup an email account. I never use this but forward the billing-related email announcements on to my main accounts. Also, I have a Yahoo email account which is solely because of the Fantasy Football league that I play in.  ↩

  2. My Android experience lasted about a year, I’m now an iPhone user  ↩

  3. You can setup a filtering rule in Gmail to do this  ↩

  4. This is not the address I am using!  ↩

A new type of email annoyance, it's not quite spam or bacn, but what is it?

I understand that companies want to keep in contact with their customers. But the volume of email a company sends should hopefully be proportional to how often you purchase, or use services, from that company. An email every few months is one thing. When you start emailing every few weeks, it becomes bacn, and when you email me every week it is spam and I will delete it, ignore it, or unsubscribe from your emails.

Recently, I've been getting a lot of emails that look like this one:

Ever since Google rolled out their new inbox for Gmail, some companies have started to worry that we might not giving their emails the amount of attention that they would prefer. If I were in charge of a company's email strategy, I would let the customer make their own mind up as to whether the email was important or not. I would not send the customer even more emails to tell them how to prioritize the emails that the company sends.

A name is needed for this annoyance. How about 'facn' for fake bacn?

 

Thinking of migrating your older Squarespace sites to Squarespace 6? A cost-benefit analysis

I have been using Squarespace for a few years now to host the few websites that I maintain. Last July, Squarespace released the latest version of their software: Squarespace 6 (which I will refer to as ss6 from now on). While I mostly prefer the changes that have been made in ss6, I've put off migrating all of my sites. This is partly through laziness, but partly because I've been confused as to how the pricing differences with Squarespace 5 (ss5) will affect me.

Luckily, Squarespace has fantastic support, and so I emailed them and they revealed all. I thought that others, who are also thinking of migrating, might find their answers to my questions useful. My original email is below, and I've interspersed their answers. A brief summary follows that.

My email exchange:

Background

Currently I have one master Squarespace 5 (ss5) account, two Squarespace 5 sub-accounts, and one Squarespace 6 (ss6) account that — if I understand this correctly — remains free while connected to my master ss5 account. I also have plans to start a fifth Squarespace site and trying to decide whether to migrate any or all of them to ss6 is the cause of my confusion. So here are my questions:

Question 1

With the 15% discount I get for the three ss5 accounts, this currently costs me $25.50 per month (the ss6 account remains free). If I migrated all accounts to ss6, would this end up costing me a flat fee of $8 per month (standard accounts, billed annually) for each account? I.e. a total cost of $32 for the current accounts I own ($40 if I create a new ss6 account)? I haven't seen any mention of discounts for managing multiple ss6 accounts.

There are not any special discounts for multiple sites associated with the same email address. You will need to upgrade each account individually. Also when you pay for an annual account you pay for the whole year right away totaling to $96 per account

If you decide to go for monthly billing you will be paying $10 per month

You can refer here form more information on our paid plans: http://help.squarespace.com/customer/portal/articles/1257605

Question 2

Under ss6, I understand that all accounts can be tied to a single email address which is fine, but is all the billing centralized as well, or would this be 4 or 5 separate payments off of my credit card?

All of you accounts would be billed separately

Question 3

If I went ahead and migrated everything to ss6, I guess I'd have to start with my master account. So I assume that initially I'd create a new ss6 account (which would have to have a new name?) and then I would import the ss5 content to it and finally redirect my domain name to the new site. Once I have the new ss6 master account I could connect other ss6 accounts to it, but my one current ss6 account is tied to my ss5 master account. The question here is whether everything will be okay if I disconnect the current ss6 account from the master ss5 account and then reattach it to the new master ss6 account?

There is no such thing as a master account within V6. All Squarespace 6 sites are managed individually. You are, as mentioned earlier, able to have several sites associated with the same email address.

When you unlink your Squarespace 6 site from your old Squarespace 5 account it will now function as its own independent site. You will not need to link it to anything else

So the bottom line is that Squarespace 6 removes the concept of centralized billing for multiple accounts. So this also means no multiple account discount. Without that discount, ss6 sites are 50 cents cheaper per month than ss5 (assuming you pay for a year at a time). But, I currently have one free ss6 account which would no longer be free if I get rid of the ss5 sites.

So if I moved my three current ss5 sites to ss6, I'd end up with four ss6 sites which would work out to $32 per month...a ~25% increase on what I currently pay. Hmm, still not sure whether the extra features in Squarespace 6 will tempt me to switch.

The never-ending quest to rate and organize my iTunes library - part 2 of 2

In part1 of this blog post, I indicated that I had been rating the music in my iTunes library for about 8 years. Having thought about this some more, I think its probably been at least a decade. But after all of that time, I am finally finished! For the last four years I've kept track of how many songs remained in my 'To Rate' playlist, and so I can graphically show you how I finished this very long marathon.

Here is an explanation for the various milestones along the way to having no unrated songs remaining in my library.

a) January 2009 At this point I was only rating music that I had purchased (CDs, iTunes, and Amazon) and had just over 1,500 songs left.

b) August 2009 I tend to buy CDs in splurges rather than regular purchases every week or so. This jump probably represented about 10 new CDs. Most of the small spikes on this graph represent new music purchases.

c) February 2010 Finished! All of my purchased music had been rated...but what about all of the other music in my library which I had legally acquired for free. How much could there be?

d) February 2010 Well quite a lot as it turns out. Since 2005, the South by Southwest festival (SXSW) has provided free torrents of music by people performing at SXSW (one song per artist). If you didn't know, a lot of artists play at SXSW and these torrents are big. You can still get hold of all torrents from this site. The current running total is about 9,000 songs (45 GB!) and every year the torrents seem to get bigger.

These torrents are usually provided as two files, with the second one being smaller (and released a little bit after the first file). So this big spike represents me starting to rate 5 and a half years of SXSW music. Sidenote: a shout out to Danny Novo who had made some cool SXSW iTunes album artwork every year that the torrents have been available.

e) March 2010 I think this smaller spike represented the second of the two 2010 SXSW torrent files, with the majority of the SXSW music included in the previous huge spike.

f) and g) February & March 2011 The two SXSW torrents for 2011. You may note that initially I seem to rate the music very quickly and then it slows. This is because I tend to sort the yearly SXSW torrent by song length. Songs that are extremely short (< 1 minute) or extremely long (>7 minutes) tend to be music that I don't like and I can quickly process these. I have also found that songs that feature 'death' in the song title, or 'black' in the artist name are also not to my liking. Finally, I am not a fan of rap music so artists with 'MC' or 'DJ' in their name can also be quickly filtered.

h) March 2012 SXSW 2012.

i) August 2012 A bunch of new CD purchases.

j) January 2013 I think I had finished all of the SXSW music at this point, but then discovered a whole bunch of previously purchased music that had slipped through the cracks (pretty much of all of my classical music), plus I also had another bunch of new CDs to rate.

k) March 2013 SXSW 2013.

l) April 2013 Each year I get quicker at doing the initial pass of that year's SXSW torrent, and I think you can see how quickly I go through the long/short/black/death/rap songs (see steps f) and g) above).

m) August 2013 Finished. Done. The End. No more rating. right?

What now?

The SXSW torrents represent a real mixed bag of music. If you drove coast-to-coast and kept on randomly flipping through radio stations — preferably college radio stations, there is not much mainstream pop music at SXSW — it would get close to the experience of listening to a SXSW torrent. So unlike the music that I buy, where I have pre-selected albums based on one or more songs that I have heard and that I like, the SXSW music provides no such guarantees.

What tends to happen is that I discover a bunch of new artists through songs that I really love. However, a large swathe of SXSW music is either not to my taste, or is just a bit 'meh'. In fact, I realized that I had ended up with about 1,500 2-star rated songs from my SXSW torrents. While having some 2-star songs in the middle of a CD that own is one thing, these 2-star SXSW songs represent a potential waste of disk space.

As I am a iTunes Match user, I deleted all of these songs from my iTunes library (after ensuring that they had first been matched by iTunes). This frees up some disk space but means I can still play these songs and download them again if I really want them.

However, it still irks me a little to know that these 2-star songs are part of my library, even if they are not taking up any space. So because I am a masochist, and because I can't abide to delete them all in case there are some gems buried amongst them, I decided to re-rate all of these songs. If I decide that I really do like a song, I upgrade it to a 3-star rating. Otherwise I permanently delete it (removing it from iCloud). So far, I've processed about 200 songs and it will probably take me several more months before I finish this.

And then I am done.

Really done.

Until the next SXSW!

The never-ending quest to rate and organize my iTunes library - part 1 of 2

This is a blog post that I've been intending to write for many, many years. The final impetus for getting on with it was seeing David Sparks write about how he rates his music in iTunes. Before I reveal the minutiae of how I rate my own music — a system which is very similar to David's — I should give some background to my music collection and my long attempt at organizing it.

My music

I consider that I own a fair amount of music. I think that the new standard to be used when deciding if you own a lot of music, is whether you find iTunes Match's 25,000 song limit restrictive. Currently, I have 13,275 items in my iTunes library. These include:

  • 9,715 songs ripped from CDs I own
  • 2,209 songs from free SXSW downloads (more of this in part 2)
  • 840 songs purchased from iTunes
  • 121 songs purchased from Amazon MP3 store
  • 70 songs that were available as free downloads (predominantly from artists websites)
  • 35 self-recorded songs or musical sketches
  • 23 audiobooks
  • 22 podcasts (I mostly use Downcast to manage podcasts)
  • 2 E-books (I mostly buy Kindle books)

I can be so precise about this breakdown because I use a set of custom 'tags' for nearly all items in my iTunes library. These tags simply consist of adding text to the 'Comments' field of tracks; I use tags such as [CD], [ITUNES], [AMAZON] etc. The addition of square brackets makes it very unlikely that this text will exist anywhere else in a comments field. It also makes it easy to include as part of a Smart playlist. I'm curious whether the tagging feature of OS X Mavericks will allow tagging of songs in iTunes, which might mean I can replace these comments.

An alternative way of categorizing my music is to break it down by decade of recording. I try to change the dates on tracks to the original recording dates rather than the date that the CD/album was issued. This is mostly a problem for older music that only exists on iTunes from compilation albums or re-issues.

I think this represents a good spread across the decades (maybe Jazz fans would beg to differ). Another way of looking at this is that 11% of the music that I own was recorded before I was born (1971).

Rating songs

I've been using iTunes ever since I purchased my first Mac in 2001 (the era of rip, mix, and burn). I started ripping CDs from around this time, slowly working my way through my CD collection. At some point (maybe around 2005) I started to systematically rate my songs as follows:

1 Star - 2.8% of my library

Things I never want to hear. This sometimes include songs that I really don't enjoy on albums that I otherwise like (typical culprits being low-quality live tracks, or extremely long and unfocused instrumental jams). However, it mostly includes things like silent tracks that are used as interludes on some albums, or spoken tracks (think of all the classic radio DJ interludes on the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack). Giving all of these tracks 1 star means I can create smart playlists that will never randomly shuffle between music and spoken word (or silence).

2 Stars - 44.2% of my library

Songs that I am largely indifferent to. On a good day I might be in the mood for a 2 Star song, but on a bad day I might be offended by one. This category represents a large slice of my iTunes library, reflecting my opinion that there are many great songs which exist on largely mediocre albums (and I like to buy albums rather than individual songs). Perhaps my tendency to down-rate rather than up-rate songs is reflected by the fact that out of about 750 full-length albums, I have only 33 with an average rating greater than 3.5 stars (I have a Perl script that generates average ratings).

3 Stars - 44.2% of my library

Currently, I have almost an identical number of 2 star and 3 star songs. A 3 star song must have at least one great quality about it. This could be the lyrics, the melody, or even the performance of a single instrument. Often it is just a good hook in part of the song, or just the energy that the song imparts. I pretty much always enjoy listening to a 3 star song, but I wouldn't want to listen to the same song over and over again.

4 Stars - 7.9% of my library

There is a big drop in the number of songs that make it to this level. A 4 star song must be amazing. It must have at least two or three great qualities about it and I will almost never tire of hearing a 4 star song. The things that stop them becoming a 5 star song could be something minor, but something that might seep through into my consciousness when I listen to it (a song that outstays its welcome, a bad note in one part that can be jarring, or a single line with a flawed lyric).

5 Stars - 1.2% of my library

These songs represent songs that I find exceptional in almost every way. Usually I find them to have a stunning combination of lyrics and music, with fantastic vocal and instrumental performances. Furthermore I find these songs to have superb production values, with great arrangements and pristine sound (letting you hear details of every instrument on the record). In nearly all cases, I find these songs to be flawless. There is nothing about them that I could imagine being improved. It perhaps reflects my overall preferences for what I might broadly define as 'classic pop/rock' that 90% of these songs are less than 5 minutes long. My iTunes library does comprise genres such as Jazz, Classical, and Prog Rock, but they reflect a small proportion of the music that I own.

Finally, I should add that I will often listen to a song 10 times or more before making my mind up as to what the most suitable star rating should be. This, coupled with the tendency to keep on buying new music, is the major reason that it has taken me almost a decade to finish rating my entire iTunes library. My progress in getting there will be explored in part 2, along with a few comments on the challenges provided by the free SXSW downloads, and the question that now looms large on my horizon:

Once you have finished rating the entirety of your 13,275 song iTunes library, what do you do next?

Not So Breaking News

A new idea for some blog posts to single out some examples of 'Breaking News' services that bring us 'news' which is barely worth calling news, let alone breaking news. First offender is from the Breaking News twitter account which today gave us this:

 

 

So Apple is 'evaluating' plans to offer iPhones with screens up to 6 inches. When you click through to the Wall Street Journal story, it reveals the source of this 'breaking news' as people familiar with the matter.

I have no doubt that that might be true, but only in as much that Apple is probably also 'evaluating' iPhones that are thinner, fatter, lighter, and heavier. For all we know, Apple might be 'evaluating' iPhones that come with a free pony as well.

In any case, it is vague speculation from an unnamed source about a possible plan that, even if it happens, would almost certainly not take place until a year from now. Whatever this story is, it hardly seems to constitute 'breaking news'.

 

 

Remembering my father

As of today, I have passed a sad, and unwanted, milestone. At the age of 41 years, 9 months, and 26 days, I have become older than my father was when he died.

I was eleven when he passed away, just a month shy of my twelfth birthday. However, I was probably only ten when he was first diagnosed with cancer, a brain tumour. In many ways, I think we lost the person we knew and loved several months before he actually died. Brain tumours can cause so many different symptoms depending on their location. Increased headaches. Confusion. Memory loss. These were all symptoms which affected him in the early stages...but even then he was still our dad. He could still function on his own, he still knew who we were, and he could still hold conversations with us. This would all change.

In the summer before he passed away, it was decided that it would be better for me to spend some time away from everything. My two elder brothers — three and six years older than me — were better equipped to deal with what was happening, and remained at home. I spent that summer break from school — what seemed like an eternity when you are eleven — staying with two of my aunts. It was during this time that I was told that my father was not going to make it. I can't remember whether I had already reached this conclusion for myself. Probably not.

Returning home I was shocked to see how much his condition had deteriorated. He could no longer speak, but what hit me the hardest was that he no longer seemed to recognize anyone. I don't think there is anything that could have ever prepared me for that day. To an eleven year old boy, it made no sense at all. He was my dad but he no longer knew me. As summer drew to a close, so did my dad's fight against the cancer. Despite the immediate sadness at losing him, I think we were all glad that he was no longer suffering.

On the one hand, I am grateful that my memories of my father are all good ones. It's possible that I could be looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but I don't think so. I can't recall him ever being angry with us, or disappointing us in any way. What more could you ask for? But at the same time these memories are the memories of a child. I'm jealous of my brothers. Not just because they have more years of memories, but because those memories were from a time when they were able to not just talk with him, but converse and more fully interact with him.

As today's date has approached, I have been surprised by how many feelings it has stirred up from the deep. It has made me reevaluate many aspects of my life. I have only just become a father — of a wonderful 5 month old boy — yet my dad had already helped raise three kids by the time he was my age. It has made me think about the preciousness of life and about how we only have so much time on this planet to do the things we want to do.

I'm sad when I think that my dad never got to see how we all turned out — I like to think that he'd be happy with what we have all made of our lives. I'm sad that he never got to see his four grandchildren, and that they will only have passed on memories by which to know him. I'm sad that I never got to discuss 'grown up' things with him, such as talking about politics or even football (he was a huge Arsenal fan). But mostly I'm sad because I miss him.

Love you dad.

My father and me, 1972

Fruit of the Month Foolery inspired by the USDA

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), August is Get Acquainted with Kiwifruit Month. This amuses me for the implication that the USDA doesn't necessarily want you to eat any Kiwifruit...just become 'acquainted' with them.

This makes me wonder what other fruit-related months the USDA will endorse in future:

  • September: Become Vaguely Familiar with Mango Month
  • October: Stroke a Strawberry Month
  • November: Make Eye Contact with an Elderberry Month

Fly me to the moon...or maybe just take a train to Birmingham instead

The UK government has been planning a new high-speed rail network known as HS2, the first phase of which will connect London to Birmingham (the UK's second city).

I was shocked to discover that the planned timetable for this initial phase spans nine years (2017–2026). The surprise is because the distance for the London to Birmingham route is only 119 miles. Less surprising — but sadly more predictable — is the recent news that the planned costs for the first part of this project are now projected to be 30% above the initial budget (up to £21.4 billion, ~$32.1 US billion).

This seems a lot of money to connect two cities that are not so far apart. I'm sure that this budget has to cover lots of other things besides the actual construction (e.g. purchasing land). But even setting the cost aside, will it really take almost a decade to construct the line? This is the best-case scenario of course, and pessimists among us no doubt imagine that there will almost certainly be delays (assuming the project is not derailed — metaphorically, not literally — by opposition campaigns).

We are not talking about building a railway line across mountainous terrain or having to circumvent huge lakes. However, any route built in the UK does have to face the twin forces of nature that are leaves on the line and the wrong type of snow.

How did things get so bad? After all, we are the country that introduced the first public passenger railway (1825), the world's first intercity railway (1830), and we also have the world's oldest continuously working public railway (since 1758). We used to be good at building railways!

So just to summarize the costs, timetable, and distance of this rail route:

  • $32.1 billion
  • 9 years
  • 119 miles

If we convert this into a cost-per-year-per-mile, we get a figure of $29,971,989. How does this compare to some other public transportation projects? Well, the new Eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will hopefully open this year. It is running over time and budget, and still keeps running into problems. How does this project compare to the UK's HS2 line?

  • $6.3 billion
  • 11 years
  • 2.2 miles

Cost-per-year-per-mile: $260,330,579 (almost an order of magnitude worse than HS2).

One final comparison. Between 1969 and 1972, the Apollo program put 12 men on the moon. This is, as you might imagine, much harder to work out the total cost of this massive project. There are some estimates that try to allow for inflation, and these put the final bill of the Apollo program between $153 and $422 billion. Let's go with the upper limit of this estimate. That gives us:

  • $422 billion
  • 13 years
  • 239,000 miles

Cost-per-year-per-mile: $135,822 (a bargain!).

Of course these very fickle calculations make no effort to factor in how many people make use of these routes. The Apollo missions only took a grand total of 24 people to the moon (and of course not all of them got there), whereas the Bay Bridge carries 280,000 vehicles a day. However, I still can't get past the fact — and again this assumes that the project won't overrun at all — that the 1st phase of HS2 will see an average of just over 1 mile of the route completed per month of the nine year construction phase. British Rail — the former nationalized rail company that ran the UK's railways — once had a series of TV adverts that ended with the proclamation "We're getting there". A modern day update to this slogan might be "We're getting there...slowly".

Frustrating web design #1: AT&T

Earlier today I was trying to see whether the pre-paid phone plan that my inlaws are using during their visit here would allow them to send texts to the UK. A quick trip to a page on AT&T's website almost, but not quite, revealed the necessary information. 

The box highlighed in red says Text to Mexico, Canada & 100 countries. In order to find out what those other 100 countries are, I tried mousing over the question mark symbol. This short video shows what happened next:

 

That's lovely AT&T, make me have to copy a URL by hand and type it in. Because the web is much more efficient that way.