A few weeks ago, my fellow Twitter fountain pen-aholics and I were ogling the Enveloop: a lovely canvas and suede pen wrap which looked ideal for keeping each pen separated and safe, but easily accessible. Until now, I have been using a small black Muji pencil case, which had one separate zipped pocket on the outside, in which I kept my beloved Lamy 2000 fountain pen. However, since then, I’ve acquired (somehow — my hand slipped on the ‘Buy’ button!) a couple of other fountain pens, and I was beginning to worry about them knocking about with all my other pens in the main compartment. I looked around on the web, and found that there are various designs of pen wraps out there. It seemed to be something I could probably have a go at making myself. Since this weekend was a Bank Holiday in the UK, I decided I would buy some fabric, pull out the old Singer 99, and have a go at making one.

I must say that I had a really fun afternoon making this wrap. I should really try to do something creative with my hands more often, as I found it really satisfying. I’m very pleased with the result which you can see above (the inside is on show here). It was all done in a rather ad hoc way. I made a paper template to cut out the main pieces for the liner and the outside material, amazing myself with how inept I am at creating shapes with right angles, and — indeed — using scissors to cut a straight line. After that, I decided that I might was well wing it, and cut out the pieces for the pen pockets and flaps as I went, (mis-) judging by eye. The seams are a bit wonky in places if you look closely, and the whole thing is not entirely square, but I’m rather proud of it. There are 5 main pen slots, covered by a flap when it’s closed, and there are two further small pockets in the left edge for my Kaweco and various other bits like an eraser and pencil lead container. I was after an Asian look for the wrap, and found some lovely dragon-patterned viscose material in the market for the outer, which I paired with a fake suede material to give a soft lining. A bit of braided cord with a plastic toggle button on the end wraps around to close it.

I might still add a few features, but it’s usable as it is. I’ll see if I need to add any velcro to close the vertical pockets at the left edge, and I might also add an external slip pocket on the right edge to keep one pen handy, like the original Enveloop. However, I tend to tuck my Lamy 2000 into the pen loops of my notebook when I’m out and about, so I’m not sure if I really need an external slot. I feel a bit like a kid again, going ‘back to school’ tomorrow with my new pencil case!

I’ve written here before about how I initially got into using the Vim text editor, and how I keep cycling back to it on a tour of OS X text editors. More recently I’ve noticed that I’ve been less tempted to try out the latest shiny new text editor, and I’ve been sticking with Vim for everything. I used to find prose writing a little hard-going with Vim, so I would open Textmate or BBEdit for that kind of editing, but I seem to have hit upon (with a lot of help from the Internets) a set of customisations and settings that allow me to work very comfortably with any kind of text in Vim.

One big change has been that I’ve moved away from using MacVim to just plain old Vim in the terminal. I think I was using the familiarity of the Apple application environment and the keystrokes that have become burned into my muscle memory (e.g. those for copy and save) to help ease the transition, but actually Vim in the terminal just feels a bit more natural. I think it helps that I’ve moved to running Vim (and various other commandline utilities) in tmux inside iTerm2. This solves one of the problems I had before which was that I found it a bit tedious to have to reopen all the files I was working on before when I resumed work on a particular project. That’s easy with tmux: you just open all the windows you want, put Vim in one, work away, and then when you want to switch to another project you detach the session. When you resume working on that project, you reattach to the session, and everything is exactly as you left it. I think I had avoided tmux (and the very similar utility, screen) because I assumed it was only of use if you were logging in to a remote server, but it’s definitely worth using for saved sessions alone. The other handy thing is having separate panes within one window (or other windows) running other commands, such as having one running latexmk to compile a *.tex file, and displaying the errors as you work. If you’ve given up on tmux before, I can highly recommend reading the tmux book by Brian P. Hogan. It’s a great guide to getting tmux set up easily.

The other change I made which helped a lot was to try out Yan Pritzker’s dotfiles setup, aka ‘YADR’. I’ve tried a few different systems for managing Vim plugins and configuration files for other commandline utilities before, but this was the first that seemed to make good sense and allow easy maintenance across a number of different machines. It comes with an enormous number of plugins, and is also optimised for using MacVim rather than terminal Vim, so I have heavily customised it to my own use, removing a lot of the plugins that I don’t use and cutting down on the key mappings. Previously, one of the things that occasionally sent me scurrying back into the familiar arms of Textmate or BBEdit was the awkwardness of browsing a directory tree to look for files, or opening files where I know the name. I’ve finally configured (and learned to use) the plugins NERDTree for the former and CommandT for the latter, and this has made my life much easier.

I finally feel as if I’m becoming more proficient, and therefore more comfortable, with Vim. Some of the commands are becoming second-nature, and I’m branching out into more complex techniques and finding that it’s saving me time and effort. However, one of the joys of Vim is that there’s always something you can learn. I recently bought a copy of Practical Vim by Drew Neil, and have been amazed by the number of things that I didn’t know about Vim. The book is really excellent, because rather than just providing a set of ‘recipes’, it suggests a set of principles for working with Vim that increase your efficiency and accuracy with the editor. There is always more than one way to accomplish anything, but Drew suggests trying to use one keystroke to move, one to edit, one to repeat the edit and one to undo. When that idea sinks in, it becomes really powerful.

I like nothing better than tweaking my dotfiles and learning about complex systems, so on a cold, windy rainy day like today, I’m about to settle back in my chair in front of the computer, and continue reading ‘Practical Vim’ with a happy sigh: geek bliss.

I haven’t yet written about the other item I bought with my birthday money: a Fitbit wireless tracker. It’s really a kind of fancy pedometer that tracks the number of steps you’ve taken, the number of flights of stairs you’ve climbed (it has an altimeter), and various other estimated measures like calories burned and distance travelled. There are a couple of reasons why I really wanted to get one of these units. One is that I’ve been trying for a while to become a bit more active and also to lose a bit of weight. I think it’s hard to change what you can’t measure (and even harder to know when you’ve achieved your goal), so I wanted some objective way of measuring just how inactive I am. The other reason is that the Fitbit isn’t just a bit of hardware, but comes with online software (and an iPhone app), which gives you a great deal more information about your activity and your progress over time, and I’m a sucker for a nice graph.

The bottom line is that while I want to be healthy and I want to shed a few kilograms of weight, I’m bone idle at heart. I don’t like exercise much, except for walking and cycling. However, I prefer to do both as a means of transport from A to B, rather than as exercise in their own right. If you want to get fitter, this isn’t necessarily an impediment, as any activity (even if it is fairly low intensity) can help, as long as you are active. This is where the Fitbit really comes into its own. It is small and light enough to wear all the time (it clips to your belt or to a pocket), so that you can track your activity all the time throughout your normal day. There’s a button and an LED display on the device, so you can scroll through your steps, distance, floors climbed, calories burned and general activity score for the current day. The unit syncs wirelessly with a basestation connected to your computer via USB, so you also get a more detailed breakdown (and information for past days) on the website.

The website is very well thought out, and you get a ‘dashboard’ with progress bars for each of the main measures, showing how close you are today to your goals (10,000 steps per day, 5 miles, 10 floors, a certain calorie expenditure tailored to your age, sex and weight, and an activity score of 1000). You also see a graph of your activity over the day in 5 minute blocks, with the bars colour coded for activity level: sedentary (aka ‘complete couch potato’), lightly active, fairly active and very active. A pie chart shows you how many minutes you have spent in each of those activities in the current day. If you’re in to counting calories (I’m not) you can log the food you eat and it shows you a kind of ‘meter’ display of your current consumption and how many more calories you can consume today. This takes into account your activity level in working out how much energy you have burned. I did try this for the first couple of days, but if you don’t eat many processed or pre-packaged foods, it’s a bit of a hassle to work out the calorie content of your food. However, if you are counting calories anyway as part of a diet, this would be very helpful. I just ignore that part now and try to increase how many calories I’ve burned, while keeping the amount I eat fairly constant.

Looking at the statistics gathered while wearing the Fitbit for a week was encouraging and horrifying in roughly equal measures. The good news is that when I am working at the University, I am fairly active. Commuting to work involves some periods of activity whether I cycle or get the train (I have to walk to and from the station), and the geography of the building is such that I end up walking long corridors or going up and down stairs a fair bit in the natural course of my day. Similarly, at weekends and while I’ve been on holiday over Easter, if I’m going into the city to shop or out for the day visiting National Trust properties (which we did quite a bit of over Easter), I’m also fairly active. So far, so good. The horrifying bit was what happens when I’m working from home or just spending the day at home at the weekend, footling around on the computer: a sea of terrible low grey ‘sedentary’ bars. Eeek! I suppose that I knew that I was pretty sedentary at those times, but actually seeing the figures and the difference in energy used between ‘active’ and ‘inactive’ days is really sobering.

I’ve set a target to gradually increase my activity over a number of weeks, and the instant feedback you get from the Fitbit is really helpful in sticking to those targets. Luckily, you can make quite a bit of difference by just getting up from your chair periodically and wandering around the house or running up and down the stairs a couple of times: regular bouts of even light activity can help a lot. It’s quite addictive actually. On more than one day, I’ve got tantilisingly close to 10,000 steps late in the evening, and have had to explain to Mr. Bsag that I am wandering aimlessly around the house to get myself over 10,000 steps, not because I’m going senile.

If you’re in to the whole Quantified Self thing, you’ll probably love the Fitbit. The website includes all the now de-rigeur ‘social’ aspects, but you don’t have to use it like that. I use it in a battle with myself to try to understand my activity (and lack of activity) in order to do something about it. I like measuring myself and aiming for targets. Another handy feature of the website is that you can view your position in the population of data collected by other Fitbit users, either overall or by age, gender or BMI (or all of those). Thus, you can see what is ‘normal’ (in the statistical sense, for the population of Fitbit users) and try to improve your percentile position against others. My steps and activity level are not great, but I’m in something like the 90th percentile for stair climbing for some reason! You can also opt for ‘Premium’ membership for an extra annual fee which gives you more detailed reports and access to a virtual ‘trainer’ to help you achieve specific goals, as well as a the ability to export your data. I wish that exporting was part of normal membership, as I think you have a right to your own data if you purchase the unit, and the other benefits of Premimum are still substantial enough to get people to sign up without holding your data hostage. Apart from that minor quibble, I’m very happy with the Fitbit. It is really helping to motivate me to be more active, which must be a good thing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and wander around the house and bag a few more steps…

Sometimes you can’t help but be amazed by the awesome superpowers possessed by cats. Let’s take their uncanny ability to detect the maximally inconvenient location in which to place themselves, shall we? Mr. Bsag tends to come to bed a little later than me, since I’m a lark and he’s an owl, so while I get ready for bed, I usually have the bedroom to myself. Well, not quite to myself, because the cats tend to join me, particularly Bella. What usually happens is that I turn a corner of the duvet back on my side of the bed (ready for me to get into bed), then turn away from the bed to hang a few clothes in the wardrobe. Inevitably, what I’m greeted with when I turn back to the bed moments later is Bella, sitting with her paws tucked comfortably underneath her, squarely and neatly in the middle of the turned-over corner of duvet.

This, I am fairly sure, is mathematically the Location of Maximum Inconvenience (or, LMI) on the bed. Imagine the surface of the bed as a 2D contour plot, shaded using a kind of heatmap indicating how inconvenient it would be (for the human occupant, i.e. me) to have a cat placed at that location. Less inconvenient areas would be shaded a cool blue (such as the entire side of the bed that belongs to Mr. Bsag), while the Inconvenience Hotspots would be bright red. The hottest and reddest spot would be that little triangle of folded over duvet, and Bella homes in on it like an inconvenience-seeking missile.

I think she likes this spot so much because not only is it maximally inconvenient for me, but also maximally comfortable for her, because it consists of not one but two thicknesses of lovely squashy duvet. When I turn back from the wardrobe and see her there, and address her with a weary, “Bella!”, she looks at me with her most innocent “What?” expression, and a kind of limpet-like tenacity that Occupy Movement protestors could learn a great deal from. In my more charitable moments, I try to see this daily battle of wills in a more positive light. Some fancy hotels leave a little chocolate on your pillow when they make the room up, I have a cat adorning the corner of my duvet.

It was my birthday recently, and I was lucky enough to be given gifts of money by a few lovely friends and family. One of the things I bought was a Kaweco Classic Sport fountain pen. I know, I know: another fountain pen? Wasn’t I raving about the Lamy 2000 only recently?¹ Well, I haven’t fallen out of love with my Lamy — far from it. I use it every day, and each time I pick it up and write with it, I love it even more. It is the smoothest, most comfortable, most gloriously tactile fountain pen I’ve ever used, and I’m pretty sure it will always be my ‘main pen’. So why did I buy a new fountain pen?

First, fountain pens are pretty addictive. Once you’ve used a few, you find out what style you like, and you get tempted to collect others. If you follow fellow fountain pen addicts on Twitter (@HelgeG, @BestofTimes and @m_s, I’m looking in your direction!), you get even more tempted by someone else’s shiny new discovery. In fact, we just end up enabling each other, but I suppose there are worse things to be addicted to. The other reason (I like to pretend this is the main reason, but who am I kidding) is that I like using different coloured inks, for which you really need more than one pen. My main writing is usually in blue or blue-black ink, but I have some lovely red, green, purple and brown inks that I’d like to use occasionally for annotating notes, marking and so on.

I think it was @BestofTimes who got me looking at compact fountain pens, and somehow that led me to the Kaweco Classic Sport. I think that I might have seen it before, but while I thought it was a really neat little pen, I was put off by the fact that it was a cartridge pen, and that the barrel was too short to accommodate a converter for bottled ink. Then I found out that you could easily convert it to an eyedropper, and that’s when I decided I had to have one. It’s actually a pretty cheap pen (as fountain pens go), so buying it and having a go at converting it seemed like a fairly low risk option, as well as giving me a very compact ‘marking pen’.

For those of you who don’t know what an eyedropper pen is, it’s a pen that you fill by pouring ink straight into the barrel, and it relies on having a fairly water-tight seal between the barrel and the section. It’s pretty low-tech, and the ‘conversion’ process for the Kaweco was absurdly easy: all you have to do is remove the cartridge, and smear a small amount of silicone grease (as used in plumbing and on scuba equipment) around the threads of the section to improve the seal between the section and barrel. Then you just use a syringe, eyedropper or a freakishly steady hand to fill the barrel with ink. Even though it is a short barrel, the Kaweco will take a very useful 2ml or so, so you can go a long time between fillings. Only time will tell how leak-proof this arrangement is, but after several days of use and of knocking around in a pencil case in my bag, there is no sign of any leaking. I’ll probably clean and renew the silicone grease when I refill, but given the volume of ink it holds, that’s likely to be quite a while.

I really like this little pen. For one thing, it allows me to use my gorgeous Diamine Monaco Red ink that I’ve been dying to use properly for ages. I don’t want to use red ink all the time, so I haven’t filled the Lamy with it, but the Kaweco is the perfect vessel for it. I deliberately choose the transparent model so I could admire the delicious red velvet/antique book leather colour of the ink. The nib is pretty smooth for a cheap-ish pen, but not quite as glorious as my Lamy. However, I think if you were new to fountain pens, you would be very pleased with it. It certainly doesn’t snag on the paper, and there seem to be no problems at all with skipping or starting the ink. It is a drier writer than the Lamy, as you can see from the photo above (please excuse my handwriting). Both pens have a medium nib², but the Lamy appears much broader, partly because of the wetter line. This actually suits my main purpose for the pen quite well, because I usually have to write quite small when annotating notes or marking students’ work.

The pen is really small and light — I couldn’t quite believe how small and light when I got it out of the packaging. Since I have tiny hands, I can actually use the pen fairly comfortably unposted, but it is meant to be used posted by people with normal sized hands, and feels better weighted that way. The cap sits right down over the barrel, so when the pen is closed, it is more or less the same length as when it is uncapped and unposted. It feels comfortable in my hands, but not as glorious as the Lamy. You can buy a clip as an optional extra, but I didn’t bother with that: the facets in the cap stop it rolling around on the desk.

I’m really fond of this little pen. I think it makes a great-value ‘alternative colour’ pen for people with other fountain pens, or it would be a superb starter pen for someone new to fountain pens as an alternative to the ubiquitous Lamy Safari.

I have to confess that I was tempted into buying yet another pen with my birthday money (I still have other colours to use!) by the Twitter Fountain Pen Sirens, so I also have a TWSBI Diamond 540 on backorder, which should come sometime next week. What can I say — I’m a sucker for a reasonably priced piston-filler. And so it begins…

I’ve just caught up with a great Classic Albums documentary about Peter Gabriel’s ‘So’. I loved that album to bits, and have listened to it fairly regularly since 1986, which certainly makes it a classic in my opinion. There can’t be many albums featuring such a high density of musical talent: quite apart from Peter Gabriel, ‘So’ was produced by Daniel Lanois (a wonderful artist in his own right), and features Tony Levin, Manu Katché, Laurie Anderson, Youssou N’Dour and Kate Bush.

It was a really fascinating documentary, and I loved the way they isolated parts of the mixes so that you could hear how it was all constructed. Peter Gabriel’s deep ‘shadow vocal’ on ‘Mercy Street’ was particularly lovely to hear, since it’s (deliberately) rather hard to pick out in the mix. I have to say that ‘Mercy Street’ is among my all-time favourite tracks by any artist. The mood and texture of it is so dark and yet so lovely, and the lyrics (inspired by a poem by Anne Sexton), are sensitive and evocative. Phrases like ‘There in the midst of it so alive and alone/Words support like bone’ are beautiful.

Another track I love is ‘Don’t Give Up’ which is a duet with Kate Bush. Musically, I couldn’t help adoring it because it was by my two favourite artists, but it also featured an amazing video in which Gabriel and Bush stand in an embrace for the entirety of the song, in front of a film of a solar eclipse. I had (still have, actually) an enormous musical crush¹ on both of them, so this was a kind of perfect storm of fascination for me in my late teens. I think I would have been equally enraptured to have taken the place of either of them in the video and been held while being sung to.

I was therefore rather startled to learn in the programme that Peter initially wanted Dolly Parton to sing the female part.

Wait. What?

I have a lot of respect for Dolly Parton, even though I’m not keen on her music, but I imagine that Don’t Give Up would have been a very different song with her singing on it. And a very different video. Anyway, the actual track is a fantastically optimistic, comforting song, even though it is quite dark in places, and there have been many times in my life when listening to it (and thinking about being hugged by Peter Gabriel and/or Kate Bush) has been a great solace to me. I also really like the fact that Peter gives the female voice the part of the strong, encouraging one.

The whole documentary was fascinating, and full of funny stories about the rather lengthy recording process. Daniel Lanois recalled nailing the door to the studio shut with Peter inside when he got frustrated with how slowly things were progressing. And Peter told the story of recording ‘This Is The Picture’ with Laurie Anderson in only 48 hours (which included making the video), which resulted in him falling asleep mid-take, sitting bolt upright in a chair.

It’s an album that doesn’t seem to age. I refuse to believe that it’s 26 years since it was released, but I’m sure I’ll be listening to it for at least the next 26.

Sunday trading hours are in the news at the moment, as the government is planning to suspend current Sunday trading restrictions for the duration of the Olympics this summer. ‘Small’ shops are currently already exempt from such laws, but what many people do not perhaps appreciate is how disruptive apparently ‘small’ shops can be.

But first, a bit of backstory. When we first moved into our house, there was a pub just opposite it. At first, this wasn’t much of a problem, but gradually the customers got rougher and the landlord lost of control of the situation. There were regular fights in the car park and up and down the road between lagered-up lads, and the whole thing ended tragically in someone being killed. The pub was closed pending the licence being re-issued under particular conditions. In the end, it stayed closed for months and was eventually sold. The building remained empty for quite some time until building work started suddenly. We were surprised, because we hadn’t heard about any planning applications, but when we spoke to the workmen, it appeared that Tesco had bought the building.

Planning regulations are labyrinthine, but it seems that if you buy a building, work within its shell, and you do not alter the use of the building, you do not need to seek planning permission. Changing from a pub to a small supermarket does not apparently constitute change of use, and since Tesco just gutted the interior of the pub but left the exterior largely unchanged, it could all go ahead without any of the neighbours needing to be informed.

The supermarket has been open more than a year now. Since it counts as a ‘small’ shop, it does not have restricted hours on a Sunday. In fact, it is open 6am until 11pm every day of the week (we do get peace and quiet on Christmas Day, though!), despite the fact that in a meeting before they opened, representatives from Tesco said the hours would be 7am until 10pm. The problem is, a small supermarket in a large chain is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Huge articulated trucks deliver goods to the shop several times a day, literally blotting out the light to our front room as they pass, and often having difficulty getting in to the small loading bay at one side of the shop. Newspapers get delivered (noisily, by two separate companies) at about 5am before the shop is open, and customers wait with their engines running and music blaring in the street (rather than the purpose-built car park) for their buddies to come out with a pint of milk or a pack of cigarettes.

The thing is, we live in a normal, residential street, but the shop is serviced and run like a huge hypermarket in an empty industrial estate. We had no say in any of it. We have since tried to complain about various issues (like the unnecessarily noisy newspaper deliveries), but trying to find the correct person to complain to in a giant corporation like Tesco is and exercise in frustration and futility. I have no love at all for Tesco, but in fairness they are probably no worse than any of the other big supermarket chains. The problem is that planners regard these small shops like a corner shop, but they are not. The owner doesn’t get his son to nip to the Cash & Carry in the Rascal for supplies¹, with minimal disruption to anyone else — it’s one node in a country-wide supply chain for a gigantic corporation.

If the government goes ahead with its planned changes, people living close to those shops will be inconvenienced for 8 weeks. Spare a thought for those of us who have to live with these wolves in sheep’s clothing all the time.

Last week we went to see Chris Wood perform at the Red Lion Folk Club. We last saw him perform in Moseley more than two years ago at a fantastic gig, so I was really excited to be getting to see him perform again. Chris Wood is an amazing performer when you hear him recorded, but he’s even better (if that’s possible) live, because of the incredible warmth and presence of his voice, and because his banter with the audience is lovely.

The Red Lion Folk Club is a very long established club, where we saw Megson last year. It’s a small upstairs room in the Red Lion pub, so it’s very intimate and you are very close to the artists. The support act were David Gibb and Elly Lucas, who we saw supporting Megson too. They are a great couple of singers, and we really enjoyed their sets (and bought their debut CD, ‘Old Chairs to Mend’). But Chris was who we were there to see, and he certainly didn’t disappoint.

This time, he performed alone, just with an acoustic guitar. He played an amazing range of songs, from some traditional folk songs (some new to us) along with some of his own compositions. ‘Hollow Point’ (about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes) was electrifying. Even listening to the recorded version has the power to make me cry surreptitiously in a coffee shop, so hearing it live again was incredible. I stand by my assertion that it’s the Best Modern Folk Song Ever. Ever. Folk songs have always told the stories of people who do not have their own voice, so that we don’t forget them, and also criticize those in power. ‘Hollow Point’ does that very powerfully, but also manages to have a lovely, hypnotic tune at the same time, and — if you ignore the occasional references to buses and Oyster cards — has a timeless quality to it.

Chris has a kind of gruff, slightly curmudgeonly persona, and he is (justly) angry about the mess we are in in this country. Between songs he said that he had started to think that the kind of grasping, acquisitive, nasty situation that we have the moment is actually the default condition of the English, and that grand, wonderful schemes like the NHS are actually the exception. He might well be right, but he is passionate about equality, simplicity and the fellowship of other humans. He sang the wonderful song ‘John Ball’ which is about the Lollard preacher, and expressed surprise that we did not join in with the singing. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I was just so mesmerised by his lovely voice that I forgot everything else. He’s right though: it is a wonderful, evocative song. I have it on a playlist that I use to wake me up in the morning. The list is on random, but on days when ‘John Ball’ comes up, I tend to wake feeling very serene, and the song stays with me for the rest of the day. I have been known to sing it under my breath while cycling in to work, like a kind of mantra.

Despite the gruffness, I suspect he’s an old softie underneath. Certainly, he can write and sing a beautiful, tender love song like no-one else. I hadn’t heard the love song ‘The Little Carpenter’ before (from the Isle of Wight), but that was lovely, as was ‘My Darling’s Downsized’, which I know well and love to bits. No-one but Chris Wood could sing about the simple joys of making rock cakes or watching potatoes chitting with such tenderness. He said that he’s quite a fan of marriage and likes the fact that the word ‘husband’ can be a verb. He also had some deadpan advice for any young men in the audience lucky enough to get the opportunity to marry (“Don’t f*ck it up.”). I think that says it all. There were many great stories about his friend Hugh Lupton (who has written the lyrics for several of his songs). Hugh sounds like a great dude: one of the anecdotes about his rather eliptical utterances ended with the comment “It’s like sharing a car with Galdalf!”.

All in all, it was a wonderful evening of music and conversation, that seemed to be over far too quickly. Throughout the gig, he was changing his mind about what to play next (some of which was new, ‘in progress’ material, excitingly), and explained that he finds playing the guitar to be a very tactile experience, and he has to literally feel his way to the next song depending on how the guitar feels, how he feels, and I guess how the audience responds. It’s such a privilege to be part of that process, and to spend some time with such a sensitive, warm, gruff, person. Chris Wood is a brilliant human.

There are some categories of software that I tend to play around with a lot, switching frequently from one application to the next. The category of text editors is one (though recently I have settled fairly comfortably on vim/MacVim), and email clients is another. I think that part of the problem is that these are applications that I use very frequently, for which I have rather exacting and complex requirements. Put simply, I try a variety of applications and tend to encounter a kind of ‘Goldilocks’ situation: the application is too simple, or too fussy and complicated, and it’s difficult to find one that’s Just Right.

Recently I’ve switched email clients again¹, and have started using MailMate. This is a relatively new and not very well known application, but it deserves to be a lot better known. It reminds me in many ways of the excellent Mailsmith, in that it has powerful features but without unnecessary frills. Also, unlike Mailsmith, MailMate is under very active development and only supports modern technologies like IMAP. I had actually tried it once several months ago, and wasn’t sure that it was for me, but I don’t think I gave it enough of a chance. MailMate has some really wonderful features that you can’t imagine living without after you have been using them for a while. These are my favourites:

1. The ‘Correspondence’ button: this is magic. If you select an email in the list and click this button, the display changes to show you all the emails you have exchanged with that sender. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is a feature I use every day, several times a day now, when trying to quickly track down an email in an exchange in which we may have changed subject and broken the threading a few times. It’s also really fast: in my head, I hear a Steve Jobsian ‘Boom’ every time I click the button, because the listing appears instantly. You can also use it to pre-filter emails for further search. Let’s say that I hit the Correspondence button but I can’t immediately see the email I’m looking for in the list. I can hit the / keyboard shortcut to bring up search, and then narrow it down to a particular subject, a word or phrase in the body, or filter on a date range.
2. Handling of signatures: Signatures (and whether you ‘top-‘ or ‘bottom-post’ replies) are handled rather rigidly and inflexibly in most email clients. In MailMate, you can set up different signatures as you can in most email clients, but it learns which you prefer to use with which recipients/accounts over time. It does the same thing with top- or bottom-posting. I mostly want to bottom-post, and it always irritated me that you couldn’t get Apple’s Mail to do this by default. However, sometimes I have to reply to epic email threads at work in which everyone has top posted without trimming the content of the email. If I bottom-posted to those my reply would be buried at the end of an enormously long email and probably missed. So I set bottom-posting by default, but it’s easy to switch to top-posting using a drop-down menu in the compose window. The next time I respond to these persistent offenders, it will probably bottom-post right away, because it has learned the patten. The effect is rather magical after you’ve been using it for a while: it just seems to anticipate exactly what you want to do.
3. Navigation and moving emails: MailMate has emulated TextMate’s excellent popup list to jump to and move emails. The way it works is this: if you want to jump to another mailbox folder (or account), you hit Cmd+T and a list appears with a search box at the top. As you start typing the name of the mailbox you want to go to, it filters the list. Once you have the right one selected, you hit enter and jump right there. The same thing works for moving emails: you select the ones you want to move, hit Cmd+Option+T and type away. Again, these lists are sorted by recent use, so you can very quickly find what you’re looking for.

It would be some kind of miracle if MailMate was Just Right in the Goldilocks sense. There are inevitably a few things that I would like to see done differently, but they are not serious enough that I want to move to another client. MailMate displays HTML emails fine, and cleverly uses Markdown to help you to generate HTML emails, but it falls down slightly when you need to forward (and edit) HTML emails inline. I don’t need to do this often, but occasionally someone at work sends me an HTML-formatted extravaganza² to forward on to students to promote some event or other, and on those occasions, I have to go into Fastmail’s web interface to accomplish this. If I wanted to forward it un-edited as an attachment, MailMate would do that fine, but I usually do need to do some trimming of the text.

The other thing I would love to see is the ability to ‘focus’ on a particular account, hiding the mailboxes associated with the other accounts and also muting any notifications from them. Someone called infotexture suggested this in a support ticket, and I made a comment on it. I would still love a feature like this, but since making the comment, I’ve discovered a way to temporarily focus on one account, hiding another. When you have one of the accounts selected, you can choose to go offline. Unlike Apple’s Mail, this setting is easy to get to and persists across restarts of the application. Once the account is offline, you can still view already downloaded emails (and see the mailboxes of that account), but you don’t see any new mail, nor do you get any notifications. I’ve found this to be a reasonable work-around for my attempts to separate work and home lives. I put the account I don’t want to see offline and my pathetically distractible, over-stressed brain doesn’t have to be bothered by notifications until I actively choose to put the account online again.

I seem to have developed a twitch around my eyes. At first, it was just a small twitch of the muscle at the outside of my left eye — annoying but intermittent. Then it got more frequent, and my right eye occasionally joined in. Last night I was looking in the mirror and realised that the muscle underneath my left eye is continually fluttering. I didn’t know because I can’t feel it, but it’s pretty obvious when you see it.

As I looked in the mirror, I thought that my twitching reflection reminded me of someone, and then it hit me: I look like Herbert Lom as Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films, when Clouseau’s incompetence starts to get the better of him. It’s not a great look to be honest. Next thing you know I’ll be accidentally amputating my thumb with a cigar cutter. Perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t own a cigar cutter.

This whole twitching thing is starting to get really irritating. It’s almost certainly just tiredness and stress, but it is proving remarkably stubborn, and seems to be resistant to the calming effect of listening to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington while sipping a gin and tonic. If anyone has any suggestions for how to still my misbehaving facial muscles, I would be very grateful for them.