UPDATE on missing notifications … and more!

It had nothing to do with WordPress. They were all in my spam folder!!! Apparently, Google must have changed some spam detecting algorithm. I’ve heard about this before but was never affected by it … until now. I had sixty emails there, that shouldn’t have been there. Normally I only go in and look at spam once a week. Now I’ve catched up, hope I didn’t miss any.

Speaking of ‘miss’, right now it seems that Hurricane Irene will miss us here in Saint John totally and pass by west of us. We’ll probably get a lot of rain and wind but no major hurricane as it will have weakened a great deal by then.

It was a partly foggy day today but my husband went for a swim. I didn’t, and right now I’m regretting that a little. It’s very muggy. Didn’t see any birds today but I took this… Assumption Church in fog.

Advertisement

it looks like rain

They’d promised that today would be a rainy day. That had changed when I got up this morning. By then it said only ‘thunder showers …chance of’. Well … now it seem that could actually play out to be true. Perhaps that will freshen up the air for a little while. Most of all, I feel bad for McDuff. Slightest little change in air pressure and he goes into hiding.

There’s nothing I can do to make him feel more secure. He is skittish in general, but the weather … that’s the worst!

On a different note: I use Gmail as my main email client. Many people do. I was happy with Gmail, and didn’t think it could get any better than it was. Well … it could! Google is revamping all their products so that you’ll get a similar experience/interface all over the line. If you’ve been into Blogger’s dashbord you’ve seen big changes. Here we are in WordPress, I shouldn’t be writing about Blogger, huh?! LOL

In Gmail, you can get a preview of what it will look like when they’re finished: Go to Settings > Themes > and select a theme named «Preview»
. I find it very clean and very convenient … how the bar with the buttons follows you down as you scroll, for example.

Eventually, you’ll also get a choice of how to have your Inbox organized: Do you want Unread first, Starred first or just let it be as it was. I found this excellent! I’m obsessed with order in my Inbox … I want as few as possible there, so I chose Unread first.

This can’t be of much interest for all of you Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or AOL users out there but I wanted to write it anyway. I keep an account with each of these services too, just to keep up with what they’re up to. All three of them have recently revamped their services, bit time.

I used to be a faithful Yahoo Mail-user, but I have a few accounts that I like to be able to forward and send from my main account. Yahoo charges you for that, and I refuse to pay for something that I can get for free elsewhere (gmail).

While I’ve been typing up these, few, lines, fog has rolled in and it no longer looks like we’re going to get any thunder showers. Good for McDuff. He’s our barometer … right now he’s lying on the floor, looking perfectly cool so there’s definitely no thunder in the offing.

rearranging

These last few days, there’s been some re-arranging going on — both in my ‘real’ surroundings and my digital world.

When we moved in to this apartment, having emptied and left the house in Quebec, we had the chance to start from scratch almost, as we brought very little stuff with us. We said to each other that this place will be entirely for us … arranged with no regards to «what others might think» — we don’t have any plans to entertain here in this little apartment. So … only what was convenient for us, no matter what it looked like.

The drawing room is shaped like an L. One part is the dining area, nothing much to do about that part. Then there’s always the TV-set … you get sort of stuck with that, unless you have very long cables ‘n stuff. Besides, I don’t think we’d placed it elsewhere anyway. This picture is from when we’d just moved in and didn’t have any stuff at all. Dining area off to the right… outside the picture.

Gerry has some back problems, so he wanted his desk and a good, ergonomic chair. I wanted a couch, witch lots of cushions where I could curl up as much as I wanted. This was placed in the middle of the room, which caused a space to be unused … not taken advantage of at all, behind the couch. This has irked me, because that space tended to be a place where you put stuff that you didn’t know what to do with.

At the time, I had the desktop computer and that got a room of its own. Guess that worked alright … even though, deep down, I didn’t feel all that good about having to go in to another room each time I wanted to go online even though I had my little ‘sanctuary’ in there.

Then my laptop came into play in September, two years ago. When I unpacked it, I put it on the coffee table in front of my couch, and it never left. I’ve spent two years on that couch, I was almost growing roots there.

To make a long, tedious story a little shorter, we’ve now moved my desk into the drawing room … that space is now fully taken advantage of … by me! I have a very nice «computer corner» here behind the couch, I can still watch TV at the same time when I want to, or gaze out the windows. It was very hot [still is] when we made the move — I was sweating gumdrops, but I felt very pleased with the result.

Before I got totally lost in the description of our computer spaces, I mentioned the digital world too. Well … I don’t know how many of you who use Gmail as your major email client, but I’ve done that since day one. Now Google is going to do some general overhaul of the interface so that you’ll get the same experience no matter which part you’re in … Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs even Blogger … and you can already get a preview of it in Gmail by changing the theme. There’s a post about it here. So I did that, and it looks great. The bar with the buttons follow you down as you scroll, for one, which is very convenient.

WordPress released a new theme last night, that I’ve applied to my blog here. Usually I find something that I don’t like about those themes — most often that the main column is too narrow for my taste, or the navigation bar is pitch black. This new theme was all to my liking.