doubting thom

Yes, my computing environment at home is Wintel, and I’ve continued to use Microsoft Outlook for email to this point just as a matter of course. Apparently, there’s a known–though not widely publicized–bug in which once your personal folders file (by default the outlook.pst file) reaches 2Gb in size, it immediately and always becomes corrupted; this is an absolute limit. Once that happens, there’s no way to repair the file without suffering a loss of data; you have to use a hex editor or similar tool to truncate a fairly sizable chunk of data from the end of the file, and then run a repair tool on the resulting smaller file. At the end of this process, you might end up with a new folder that does not include all of your original data, and you have no control over what messages or contacts or calendar information might have been irretrievably lost (well, perhaps not irretrievably if you’re willing to spend a few hundred dollars for specialized software, of if you have an Exchange server, but there doesn’t seem to be a reasonably practical or affordable solution for the home user).

Worst of all, in a default installation of Outlook, there’s no warning as the personal folders file is reaching the 2Gb limit. There have been patches that–while unable to allow Outlook to address personal folder files over 2Gb–are supposed to provide this warning feature, and prohibit downloading any new mail or composing any new once the file is approaching the file size limit. I had that patch installed. It didn’t work.

Several years worth of mail messages–carefully organized by theme and/or sender–were in my outlook.pst file that got corrupted two nights ago when it hit the file size limit, about which I wasn’t even aware (or I’d have moved files into multiple pst files in order to avoid the problem). I’ve been working since then to try to recover as much as possible, and I did manage to get all but about 10Mb of the file back, after several attempts that seemed to create usable files but that still became re-corrupted after a few minutes to a few hours; fortunately this didn’t affect any of my current unanswered mail, since now that I’m using IMAP I keep all of that on my mail server, but I have no idea which archived messages from the last four or five years of my life–messages from my late father or love notes from my boyfriend, maybe–are now just digital flotsam on this hard drive.

It’s probably not really that dire; most of this information isn’t important to anyone but me, and even then generally only with sentimental value. I also have an uncorrupted copy of my mail folders on my old computer from just two months ago, so worst-case scenario really is that I’ve only lost some messages I’ve saved since then. And information I keep only on a single computer, with no backup, is as good as toast anyway. Even so, I’m still frustrated that 1) this problem, though acknowledged by Microsoft, isn’t well-publicized, especially given the certainty that it will occur when the file reaches 2Gb and that there’s no way to resolve it without losing data once it does occur, and 2) the patch that was supposed to prevent me from being able to reach 2Gb, and which I diligently applied (I went back and checked my update history), didn’t actually work.

Any recommendations for a better Windows-based email client?

Well, well, well… I really didn’t think they’d go this far, and certainly not so overwhelmingly, but in a lopsided 22-2 vote last night the board of the Log Cabin Republicans actually has decided not to endorse President Bush for re-election.

[New York Times: Gay Activists in the G.O.P. Withhold Endorsement]

In a statement afterward, Patrick Guerriero, executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, cited exit polls showing that more than one million gay men and lesbians voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. That included 45,000 in the pivotal state of Florida, which Mr. Bush carried by roughly 500 votes.

“Some will accuse us of being disloyal,” Mr. Guerriero said. “It was actually the White House who was disloyal” to those gay voters, he continued. …

A depressing article in last week’s Washington Post notes that conservative, religious Americans are breeding more rapidly than their liberal, secular counterparts, who aren’t having enough children to offset natural population decline. It goes on to state that, since “most people, particularly if they have children, wind up with pretty much the same religious and political orientations as their parents,” America’s future will be more solidly one of conservatism and religion.

Conservative site Lucianne.com posted a link to a news article about President Clinton’s bypass surgery. Many of the responses exhibit a truly horrific degree of hatred and inhumanity. Some of the worst examples:

I at least hope he lives long enough to see JFK AND Hildabeast go down in flames. Then he can go down in flames, metaphorically speaking.

I hope his big honkin’ bible is printed on asbestos so he can carry it with him.

sorry, I cant muster any sympathy. I’d feel the same if they said Saddam was gettin [sic] bypass surgery. It’s a waste of time and money.

My prayers are for all those he lied to, hurt, and misused.

I wonder if this is heart damage from snorting cocaine.

Where can I send a happy meal?

Do us all a favor, Clinton. Take herself with you!

Sorry.

No, I take that back….I’m not sorry…Take McAuliffe, too.

I TRULY hope he doesn’t die the ignominious death he has earned for himself! The death of the very first elected president to be IMPEACHED!

That’s really too bad. I feel sorry for those with heart problems. Say hi to your friend Vince on your way down. I understand he’s still in the waiting area.

Right on #56! I think of this waste of human life not as a past president (and I use that term loosely), but as a lying, self-centered trader [sic] that the United States and world will be better off without. By the way, how’s Carter’s health?

It is going to be a wonderful weekend.

Fair enough… I won’t however wish Saddam, Castro, and their ilk the best of wishes for a speedy recovery when feeling poorly. I’m sorry, but I think of Clinton as just another Communist and rapist with blood on his hands.

forgive me…I do wish him well…In the w(h)ell that the traitor deserves. That includes his waterboy Kerry, too

The Clinton’s [sic] have earned our cynacism [sic]. In fact, the timing of this ‘heart’ problem so close to the Republican convention is sure to be suspect.

There is nothing wrong with denouncing an utterly corrupt traitor who severely damaged our country, even when he is sick. Would we praise Hitler or Stalin on their deathbeds, or wish them well. The faster bubba clintoon goes to Hell the better off this country will be, so I’m rooting for that much sooner than later.

Considering that Clinton is a viscous [sic]professional con man, why should anyone believe this story? Do you not think that this story is a sympathy ploy (the con artist’s favorite ploy) done because Kerry is tanking?

[Via AndrewSullivan.com]

Jeff’s not the only one with new toys. During my blogging hiatus, I bought myself a new computer too, a [ed. note: Gene, you might want to stop reading now, lest you lose any respect you might still have had for me] Dell Dimension XPS (3.4GHz P4, 2Gb RAM, 240Gb HD, 256Mb Radeon video, DVD burner) gaming PC, and a really sweet 20-inch flat panel display. The system kicks ass, especially for online 3D gaming. I also bought my nephew, who just went off to college this past Saturday, a wide-screen Dell laptop as his high-school graduation present. (His college recommends Dell, and offers priority service for students who purchase through their program with Dell; I’ve consistently had good luck with their products, so I went with them again.)

And last week I got the new Motorola v710 phone, Verizon Wireless’s only current Bluetooth-enabled handset. It doesn’t quite live up to the hype that preceded its release (more about that below), but I’m really very pleased with it nonetheless. I know many of you don’t like Verizon, but it’s the only national carrier from which I can get a signal both here in the Washington metro area and at my mother’s house in the Virginia mountains and along the entire route between, and I can even get a signal inside my office (whereas the Sprint and ATT users generally have to go outside) and in the Metro, so it’s the best choice for me.

The good points: First of all, the phone is attractive. Some users have complained that it’s too big, but I have no complaints. It’s my first clamshell phone, and though I wasn’t sure I’d like that form factor, I really do. The displays are very nice, especially the large internal screen. Typing aside, which isn’t particularly easy on any cell phone, it’s actually usable for reading text and browsing the web.

The speakerphone is amazingly good. The sound quality is clear and crisp. Given that the speaker otherwise is hard to position just right in order to hear when held to the ear, this is a cell phone that actually works better as a speakerphone than in its normal handhelf configuration. The speaker-independent speech recognition, too, works remarkably well, and notably better than the voice recognition of the Prius, which is so bad to be practically useless.

The bad points: The camera in the phone sucks. Advertised as a “high-resolution 1.2-megapixel camera… with the same high standards of a stand-alone digital camera,” the quality of the resulting photos nevertheless just doesn’t cut it. The photos are fine when viewed on the internal display, so they work well for associating a person’s picture to their phone number, which then displays when you receive an incoming call from that number, but when transferred from the phone to my PC and viewed full-size, they were of embarrassingly poor quality.

And the Bluetooth is a mixed bag. Partially crippled–it’s still unclear whether inadvertently by Motorola, in which case a patch is rumored for sometime this month, or purposely by Verizon, in an alleged (and not unbelievable, given their history) attempt to force users to pay for services that otherwise would be free and easy using Bluetooth–the phone includes only the hands-free and headset Bluetooth profiles so that it can successfully be used with a wireless headset or with a Bluetooth-enabled car, like my Prius. However, it doesn’t support the Object Push Profile, so you can’t transfer files to and from the phone using Bluetooth, but must use either a separately purchased–and hard to find–Transflash card, or by paying Verizon for message transfer and airtime fees. Moreover, this means that the phone also can’t share its directory with other devices, so there’s no way to get its directory information into the Prius. Effectively, then, while I can use the Prius’s speakers to listen and talk on the phone, I either have to dial the number from the phone itself–pretty much defeating the purpose of a handsfree mode in the first place–or else dial the number manually on the Prius’s phone pad, which automatically deactivates when the car is in motion. So I’m hoping that a fix for this is indeed forthcoming from Motorola.

The phone also allegedly functions as an MP3 player, but since 1) it only has 10Mb of RAM and I don’t yet have an expansion card; 2) with the crippled Bluetooth, there’s no apparent way to get MP3s into the phone’s RAM other than via expansion card; and 3) I already have a 40Gb iPod; I don’t really expect to use this functionality anyway. I also haven’t explored the video capture capability, but I suspect the quality will be no better than the static images taken by the digital camera.

On the other hand, intellectually at least I know my life really isn’t so bad. I have a stable, decent-paying–if not especially satisfying, creative or challenging–job; I own my own condo, which continues to appreciate in value almost obscenely; I can afford to travel, eat at nice restaurants, give to charitable causes and buy all the amenities I need and nearly all that I think I want, for myself and the people I love; I have a wonderful family and a fine pet; and I’m in an amazingly strong relationship–something I had come to believe wasn’t really going to be in the cards for me–with Jeff. I’m loved by my friends and family and, I think, generally respected and appreciated by my colleagues. I really should be grateful, content and secure.

But I’m a spoiled, middle-class, white American male. I guess I just want more, dammit.

Recently I’ve been feeling somewhat dissatisfied, disaffected, disengaged and unmotivated, and at the same time mildly anxious–about my health, my future, my career, the direction the country is headed under this administration and the likelihood of four more years of eroded civil liberties, loss of trust and respect in the international arena, and growing authoritarianism and unilateralism–though not overwhelmingly anxious about any one thing in particular. My sleep lately has been troubled and fitful, punctuated by dark and ominous dreams, dreams of death, destruction, violence and storms.

Is this just my mid-life crisis? In the past year both my dad and my grandfather have died; is that double-shot of coming face-to-face with mortality primarily fueling this existential drama? Or maybe the 20th-year Harvard reunion I decided to forego, but whose passage nonetheless left me feeling like a failure, in the realization that I’ve accomplished nothing worthwhile; created nothing of lasting beauty or significance in the intervening two decades; neither discovered nor exercised any useful talent or skill; only rarely having made or sustained any true connections with other human beings; and even, despite years and years of soul-searching, introspection and self-examination, actually understanding less and less about who I am and what in the hell I’m doing?

Believing as I do that this is all we get, why have I done nothing better with my time and my life? And yet, even in this moment of rare recognition of the uselessness of this kind of self-indulgence, it’s still all I seemingly can manage.

June:

• My eldest nephew graduated from high school.
• Jeff and I went to the Madonna concert.
• We also saw The Blue Room at Arlington’s Signature Theatre.
• We had a long New York weekend during their Pride, during which we celebrated our one-year anniversary. While there we saw Bombay Dreams, Assassins, and Rent.
• I took a week off, my first full week of vacation in two years.

July:

• A pretty quiet month, really.
• Matt and Jeff visited from New York, and we met up with them for dinner.
• On the 30th, my grandfather turned 83.
• On the 31st, I turned 42.

August:

• My mom and youngest nephew visited from my home town, and we spent a whirlwind four days of sightseeing, going to Wolf Trap, Mount Vernon, Arlington National Cemetery, Baltimore (for an Orioles game and to see the National Aquarium), and the Smithsonian.
• We saw The Tempest and The Producers.
• My grandfather died, and I went home for his funeral.

Yes, despite all evidence to the contrary, I am still alive. No promises, but for the moment I’m back, if tentatively. If I stick around this time, I’m also hoping to give the design a makeover–at the very least change the colors–but there’s no point in waiting for that before starting to write again.

In an email to another blogger, I explored a little the potential reasons I’d stopped–though, admittedly, I don’t know that any of them are really responsible, or that there even was any specific cause or causes. Self-doubt, laziness, inertia, life events, weariness and despair at the current shambles the current administration has made of our freedom and civil liberties, other interests and old patterns of behavior (near obsession with a hobby followed by complete disinterest) certainly contributed, but mostly the journal seemed to lose its purpose and personal relevance; I had started writing here not for an audience (though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like having one, however small), but almost more as a means of relatively cheap personal therapy, in which I was able to indulge in an honest and relatively unfettered disclosure of my thoughts and feelings.

Over the months, though, as family and co-workers stumbled across the site and some began to let me know that they looked for it daily, I began to feel more and more constrained from disclosing what I might really think or feel, and in one case even going back and deleting posts in which I’d made unfavorable comments about my job or my co-workers (at the same time realizing that my opinions and impressions often had dramatically changed since the original posts). As I began to spend as much time second-guessing, editing, or altogether eliminating content as I was writing it in the first place, this journal began to feel less safe, less wholly mine, less and less personally useful or redeeming, and more of a frustrating, meaningless repetitive chore.

To be fair, the impact wasn’t all negative. While knowing that my partner reads my blog may mean that I’m less willing to speak completely openly about our relationship, if not for this blog I’d never have met, dated and fallen in love with Jeff in the first place. And my life is immeasurably richer for his presence and involvement in it. My blog also reconnected me with former friends and out-of-touch family members, and introduced me to a whole world of wonderful new friends and acquaintances.

I think, at least, that I’ve finally grieved and accepted the death of my blog’s original intent and incarnation, and perhaps now can move on to envisioning its rebirth. I don’t know yet, though, what form such a revival might take, if any at all. It might be that this was the full natural lifespan of this particular creative endeavor, having reached its inevitable conclusion.

Oddly, just since Saturday I’ve received several new comments on a post–“Virginia is for haters”–published nearly a year ago noting Virginia’s historical stance against miscegenation (fighting all the way to the Supreme Court in the 1967 Virginia v. Loving case that ultimately resulted in that court’s striking down of anti-miscegenation laws) and parallels to statements by the state’s attorney general last summer decrying the Supreme Court’s striking down of sodomy laws (which Virginia continues to keep on the books). At that time, I hadn’t even imagined the Commonwealth’s even more extreme action of this spring, taking effect on July 1, in which private partnership arrangements otherwise legal between opposite-sex participants–medical powers of attorney, asset sharing, etc.–will be made illegal when contracted between two people of the same sex.

That post of a year ago, though, seems to have taken on new life with the deluge of comments (ok, so it’s only a half-dozen or so, but given my usual volume here, that’s a deluge). Given the negative, condemnatory tone of several of them, I find myself wondering if this post has been linked from some religious-oriented site.

The comments pretty much speak for themselves, though, and illustrate pretty well how it is that we have legislators in Virginia that pass discriminatory and hate-filled legislation:

Joe, for example, says (and he repeats it in three separate comments), “You smart ass fags make me sick!”, while George supports Virginia by noting “you are commiting grave sin–and I don’t want to be with you in hell– so please stop pushing your perverted lifestyle on god fearing americans… and yes im gonna buy more virginia products than i ever have before…………..” [apparently God also hates proper capitalization, spelling and punctuation].”

And then there’s “J”, who feels compelled to quote a particularly bad translation of 1 Corinthians in which HOMOSEXUALS–along with the covetous, so I sure hope J has never wanted anything someone else owns, or we might end up sharing some fiery pit for eternity–will not inherit the kingdom of God. J goes on to witness to me, exhorting me to accept Jesus as my savior, though I must at least give him/her credit for doing so–capital letters being his/her harshest attack–in a relatively non-aggressive, almost loving–if unasked for and misguided–way.

The strangest comment on Saturday, though, was to a completely different posting of mine from just last month, “Stranger than Fiction,” about my trip to London in which I met another gay man from northern Virginia whose itinerary coincidentally exactly mirrored my own. In response, “Catalyst4Christ” remarks that my “mostly brown” web site (I assume he means the color scheme of khaki and pink) in conjunction with my being a gay man is somehow “Naughty-Naughty.”

Um. What? I’m pretty sure that anyone using multiple animated clip-art graphics and buttons, a blue rivet background, and scrolling black text on a dark green banner isn’t particularly competent to psychoanalyze me based on my design choices.