Jim's Random Notes

A few odds and ends on a cold day. It was 20 degrees or so when I went out to pedal in the garage this morning.

And yet another reason to turn off your television permanently: Al Sharpton wants his own sitcom. It's bad enough when actors try to become political activists, but going the other way? No thanks.
For years now I've been getting credit card applications that offer 0% interest for up to 18 months on transferred balances. It's tempting to see just how long I could carry one of those. Get a new card today and transfer a balance. Next year, when I get another offer of a year at no interest, transfer the same balance again. In theory, as long as I maintain my credit, I should be able to keep that going indefinitely. But since I don't have a balance to transfer it'll just remain idle speculation.
I was backing up some data the other day when I noticed that my Thunderbird mail file was over 500 megabytes in size. Now I might get (and save!) more mail than some people, but I looked at my saved messages and just couldn't see how they could add up to half a gigabyte. I searched the menus and found "Compact Folders" under the File menu. Now my mail files are a more manageable 100 megabytes. That's still pretty big, but half of it is archived messages from the project I've been working on and most of the rest is my "Sent Items" folder, which I probably should go clean out. It's hard to believe that 550 sent messages are occupying 37 megabytes. Thunderbird chews up disk space.

Musings on technology and life