A guy who knows how to use his instrument

Last night, I recorded an episode of PBS's Great Performances, A Tribute to James Taylor, which had JT's great music and lots of special guests doing his music, including the Dixie Chicks, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, and others. Then Sting came out. If you've seen him perform lately, you've seen that he's taken up using medieval instruments, like the hurdy-gurdy he used at the 2004 Oscar telecast.

So on this show, he walked out, and I said, "Jeez, what's that he's carrying? Did he bring a fucking lute again? Yeah, that's what it is."

Dori says, "What's the problem?"

"There's nothing he's doing with the lute that he couldn't have done just fine with a guitar. It's just an affectation."

"It sounds good to me. He's Sting, he can do what he wants. Besides, chicks dig a guy with a lute."

"Really? Since when?"

"Um, since about the sixteenth century."

I knew when to quit.

Archiving Mac-based email

One of the problems that we all have is archiving our old email, yet having it be easily accessible when we need it. I use the excellent Microsoft Entourage as my mail program, and I create mail folders for my individual projects, then use Mail Rules to automatically shuffle incoming and outgoing email associated with each project into the project folders. But when the project is over, I don't need to keep the project folder in Entourage anymore, as it just takes up space in the Entourage database and clutters my folder list. The same goes for messages from mailing lists; I may want to keep them, but I don't necessarily need to keep them inside my mail program.

All this doesn't just go for Entourage users, of course; anyone who uses email, with any program, will eventually want to archive old messages, because leaving them in your mail program will eventually clutter your work environment and slow things down. And don't get me started on people that just keep messages in their Inbox forever.

At archiving time, I used to drag each old project folder out of the Entourage folder list to the desktop, which exports the folder as a single MBOX file, then I'd delete the folder from Entourage. To retrieve old messages from that MBOX file, I'd have to search the file with a text editor. It all worked OK, but not very elegantly. I couldn't search mail attachments, and there was no good way to browse or sort the messages.

That's why I started using MailSteward, a program that imports email from Apple Mail, Entourage, or most other programs into a single mail database. The database is in a standard SQL format, so you don't have to worry about your mail data becoming unreadable when your mail program vendor changes its data format (like when Apple changed the format of Mail's messages to work with Spotlight).

I like MailSteward a lot. It's easy to import messages into it, and searching and retrieving messages is quick. It's not the prettiest program I've ever seen, but it gets the job done. It's also in active development, with frequent updates. If you need to archive old email (and who doesn't, really?), it's worth checking MailSteward out. There's a free demo that is limited to 3,000 messages, which is more than enough to get a feel for how the program works.