03-IX-2017.
New regime in Firriver - the mail server is dead, long live mail server. Except it is now a windows exchange server, i.e. not a normal email server, you'll have to install outlook. WTF? I was seriously thinking of retiring on the spot. I use Netscape/Mozilla for 20 years now, and they want to force me to use this PoS? Send me a machine with everything preinstalled.
Then I started reading how to plug Thunderbird into this Office356 and found that it's up to the university (!). Because that's what they use out there to handle students' email accounts. And they have all kinds of fancy names for this or that kind of server. Well, f'off.
Simply tried to create a new account in Thunderbird myself. Entered server address, email, password and waited. Shortly, it found everything by itself, both pop3 and smtp and everything. Done in two minutes. Fuck your five page instruction on how to install Office256, m$ may eat shit.
Except it wasn't pop3, it was imap. Which I never used, and over the next two days learned why. I probably read the specs a few times over the years, understood what kind of protocol it is, and stayed with pop3 while forgetting what I read. Now for the last time: it's synchronizing your local directories... which are basically just a cache. Something gets deleted on the server, or moved to another directory - same thing happens with your local copy. Which means that my archive (and there's already 19000 messages for this year alone) is not mine, things can vanish, and any search I do is not guaranteed to be local.
So the next day (I guess 5th) I switched back to pop3, after having moved a dozen messages to (my local) junk, and then had to put them back because other people may have needed them. Shit, this never happens with pop3, so... And it worked. I was in full control of my email directories and there was no problem. I could live like before.
Except that it stayed so until the morning. Norman did the same (he's the other linux shop here), and complained likewise when we discovered that the pop3 protocol was turned off. By who? Dunno. I know that the person behind this move was Laura, and this is where we started parting ways.
The following weeks (and months) would bring more corporate-like moves, specially in issue tracking (bugs, features in Feds, client issues), which became a live exercise in how things can be made complicated when you combine clue-have-nots trying to create an information flow with their goal to get things under control and away from us of the production. Jan was regularly pissed off at most of their decisions at least as much as I.
Today, BTW, we swung by Arpi. Sitting alone at home, babysitting Milan and Jagoda. The kids are progressing nicely, really. She wears glasses, though, and doesn't seem to mind, got used to them.
To the garden from there - we still have tomatoes to pick, and the peppers are ripe, tiny red hot ones. The disco saw cuts neatly. Had a good shower, and I tried to make a shot of the jet from the castout gutter, but you can't really get a good shot of water against a mottled background, not even with a flash. Turns exactly different from intended, each time.
On tuesday she ground the peppers in the blender and made hot sauce. Put that in a smallish jar, so we'll have internal heating for the whole winter.
Mentions: Arpad Gunaroši (Arpi), Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Jagoda Umljanić, Jan Brenkelen, Laura O'Hare, Majkrosoft (m$), Milan Umljanić, Norman Shen, in serbian