Monday, August 25, 2008

First Tooth

As a proud (recently initiated) papa, I feel obligated to post a picture of my son's first tooth:

First Tooth

It took me enough tries to finally get a good photo, so I need to validate all of that work by sharing the result.

For historical reference, the tooth first reared its head on Thursday, August 21 2008.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

This is My Life

This is My Life

I wish that I knew the source for this little gem, but I ended up at some non-English site and lost the trail.

I need to get out more.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Zune Moves North

Well, just over a year after my original post, Mr. Bill Gates himself officially announced that the Zune will make it to Canada in the Spring of 2008... if anyone still cares ;)

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Gmail and Shaw email over POP

This post is mostly about how Gmail seems to know how to set up POP access to my shaw.ca email account better than I do. Not that it is really news to anyone.

You see, I decided to try using Gmail as my central email storage. My ISP is Shaw, so I have a shaw.ca email account. When I started the process of configuring Gmail for POP access, it asked me for the Shaw's POP3 server name - and pre-populated it with 'pop.shaw.ca'. Now, I have had my Shaw email address for some time, and have set up numerous desktop email clients to retrieve my email over that time - and I was pretty sure that the Shaw POP server name was 'shawmail' (or the appropriate FQDN name as described on Shaw's online help). So, I replaced the pre-populated value with the shawmail value. Well, when I finished the configuration, Gmail wasn't able to access my Shaw email account (something about a connection timeout). A quick Google search and I found out that I was not alone. Looking through the Google search results, the consensus seemed to be that Shaw does not allow external access to their POP servers. I was sure that someone must have found a work-around, so I spent the better part of an hour following the numerous search results, without any real solution (other than forwarding your Shaw email to your Gmail account). Then, just as I was about to give up, I came across this handy Shaw support page - lo and behold! Shaw does support external POP access using the server name 'pop.shaw.ca'. If only I had trusted Gmail at the beginning and not changed the POP server name, I could have saved myself some grief...Hopefully, this post saves someone else from a similar fate.