Rakesh Agrawal’s Blog

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Originally uploaded by rakeshagrawal.

We’re off to Austin. Check out the house all boarded up!

I feel good tonight because I fixed a mechanical problem with Shonali’s Dell Latitude laptop. The hinge on Shonali’s laptop (between the screen and the base) has been extremely loose for, oh, about the last year or so. I spent about 30 minutes this evening, took the thing apart (thanks in part to the service manual on www.dell.com), found the loose screws in the hinge, fixed it and now the laptop feels like new.

I’m surprised at xeni and boing boing for taunting India’s offer to help the United States with handling the aftermath of Katrina in this post. The post is entitled, “Katrina: whew, here comes India to save us, at last!” Hey Xeni, boing boing, way to propagate American arrogance to all of your readers in and outside the United States!

I’ve been using Gmail now for a little bit and it works pretty well — I’m impressed with the Gmail interface. There are still some things I need to experiment with like attachments and keyboard shortcuts (are there any?) but right now, I’m not feeling much pain after using Gmail for a while. I wonder if there will be pain associated with not having my calendar or tasks in Gmail.

One thing that I wish worked better: I’ve setup my personal and work e-mail addresess to both forward to my gmail account and I’ve also verified both against my Gmail account so I can send e-mails from personal/work addresses from with gmail. But one problem I’ve encountered is that Gmail doesn’t make any inferences about which e-mail address to use when replying to a message — it simply uses whichever e-mail address you’ve marked as default. In my case, I have my personal address marked as the default so when replying to work e-mails, I have to CLICK on other choices (under the from address) and then I have to CLICK and CHOOSE my work e-mail address. Three extra clicks, in my opinion. Hey Gmail product people: why not do away with those extra clicks?

For the past week (give or take) Outlook has randomly been crashing on me about 3-4 times a day, on average. What a frustration. I spent a little bit of time playing with GMail yesterday and with their support for third party verifiable e-mail addresses, I’m thinking about making that switch. It sure would be nice if Google had a client-side rich app, though I have to say that Gmail is pretty damn rich for a web app. Off to re-run Outlook. Sigh.