I'm really loving Firebird and Thunderbird - moreso Thinderbird though.

  For years I've worked in MS shops so I've naturally turned to MS for my needs - IE, Outlook, etc.

  Well, the past couple of years I've been unemployed/self-employed (Depends on which hour/day/week it is) and so I haven't been as involved with MS technologies as I once was.
Recently my server admin switched us over to IMAP - which wasn't a problem for me. I used Outlook express and received my email as usual, life was well. Until I became a list mod for OOo.

Oh sure, things where fine - I adapted to the influx of mail, though I was disappointed in the lack of a good free spam plugin for OE as well as the inability to apply mail rules to IMAP accounts.

Then MyDoom came.

All of a sudden the mail surged forth unabated! The biggest offender? Not the virus, not in the least. It was all those damned inconsiderate email administrators that leave on the "Tell people they sent us a virus" switch. We're talking about receiving something in the range of 500 emails an hour - 1/2 being valid, 100 or so MyDoom and the rest AV auto-replies. OE was dying! So I bit the bullet and installed full blown outlook.

  Damn have the times changed. I absolutely hated it. It was slow, bloated, inefficient, and sucked the life out of my machine. Not to mention it couldn't quite handle that flood of email I was receiving, the STILL inefficient spam plugins and the horrible mail rules.

  So I said, "iirc, Thunderbird has everything I'm looking for". So I went and set it up - and I'm loving it. It's fast, efficient, clean to the point of almost being sexy.

Oi, I only wish I would of found it sooner!

After 3 years, my desk chair is dying. About a year ago the vinyl covering on the armrests started cracking due to it hitting the edge of my desk all the time. Now just recently the back is refusing to stay straight, it constantly bends back about 15 degrees. So I get up, and bend it back in again, only to have it bend out again when I sit down.
So out came the duct tape. Huge swaths of it reinforcing the back so it stays relatively straight. I was worried I'd end up breaking it due to metal fatigue from the bending cycles.

So now I have both armrests covered in a healthy amount of duct tape as well as the back. It looks so sad and pathetic - but I love this chair. It's got 5 large rollerblade wheels on the bottom which makes it fly over everything - carpet, power cords, cat tails, etc etc.

The one thing I learned through all this is that duct tape isn't all the same. I've taken a liking to the premium Duck brand tape. It's quite sticky and seems stronger and thicker then the cheaper brands. I only have to fix the tape on the armrests once a year or so because of it. With other brands, it was more like once a week.

Then again, maybe I should just get a new chair.