Everyone breathing knows about the Apple iPad. It is a cool tablet like computing device. It has some nifty uses and I enjoy using it for browsing the internet while sitting in the loo. Recently Apple released a new version called the iPad 2. It is faster, slimmer, has a camera and that is basically it. But because it is an Apple product, everyone is infected with "have-to-have-for-no-good-reason" sickness. So it is impossible to find one at any retail store.

Apple implemented a new facility this time whereby you can go to their online site and make a reservation. Every work day at 21:00 sharp they update their site for the specific store you choose, for the stock they received that evening. At 21:02 sharp all the stock is sold out. That is how insane people are.

So I would like to get one but for no good reason at all other than I want to. I therefore looked everywhere, but could not find one. To be expected. The release day people were queueing for 45 hours before launch, so I had zero chance of getting one. I am not that sad.

I have an Adaptec RAID 3805 controller with several SATA 7200rpm 1.5TB drives in RAID5. The volume is formatted with NTFS with default allocations, compression enabled under Windows 7 Professional x64. When I copied a 10GB file from my Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.6.7 via "cp -av" to the smb share, this is the graph that resulted. Can anyone explain why? There was no other load on the system or network, which is gigabit:

I had a small problem just now. In trying to convert email from Outlook 2011 on the Mac to mbox format, I used the brilliant eml2mbox Ruby script on the directory of files I created by dragging and dropping all email to the Finder, to convert them from eml format to mbox. I did this otherwise MailSteward imports them with a billion different mailbox names, as it uses the subject line as the mailbox.

I had several emails however that were sent from the iPhone, and their headers were wrong. Look at an example:

waldo@waldopcm fixed $ head Zipped.eml
From: Waldo Nell
    <IMCEAEX-_O=FHB_OU=FIRST+20ADMINISTRATIVE+20GROUP_CN=RECIPIENTS_CN=hhh@xxx.xx>
To: Some One
    <IMCEAEX-_O=FHB_OU=FIRST+20ADMINISTRATIVE+20GROUP_CN=RECIPIENTS_CN=RRRR@ddd.yy>
Content-Class: urn:content-classes:message
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:44:58 -0600
Subject: Zipped
Thread-Topic: Zipped
Thread-Index: AclP5lEwDZMQ7G1VMUiyvRhJDoqWmw==
Message-ID: <A552D92C.2D3%hhh@xxx.xx>
...

As I have mentioned in an earlier entry, I recently purchased a new Longines analog, mechanical watch to replace my ageing Seiko Actura Kinetic Auto Relay. The Seiko is a great watch, and I have had it since 2004 I think.

But I got tired due to the weight of it - it is a hefty 160g. Contrast this with the meagre 72g of the Longines:

I am weird, ok? Usually I do not like to gather stuff. I get irritated and get rid of things I do not use. However when it comes to things digital, I am the opposite. Especially with data. Not many people I know of still have ALL the email they have EVER sent / received. I do. Except for my university email account (which was under Novell Netware), I still have all email ever sent and received. Well, ok - exclude free email accounts which I used from time to time to accomplish some devious goal or another. So I recently purchased MailSteward Pro and imported everything I have on me - all my emails since 1997-06-10:

From 1997-06-10 thru 2011-04-03
Total Number of emails in date range: 193,685
Number of emails with attachments:    35,086
Number of emails with tags:           0
Number of mailboxes:                  259
By Year: 
1997:  128
1998:  1,229 
1999:  1,423 
2000:  1,259 
2001:  5,117 
2002:  5,202 
2003:  6,867 
2004:  13,550 
2005:  19,573 
2006:  26,200 
2007:  25,455 
2008:  22,982 
2009:  17,770 
2010:  37,089 
2011:  9,841

Impressive? I am one of the few people to receive fewer emails as time goes on, except for some blunder in 2010. Seems like I was doing something right.