** Really, I should be getting the human slaves to do this. **

I have now moved into the phase of trying to get all my old mail transferred over to the Mac. My mail archives go back quite a ways--1996, at least for the stuff that's still in mail-readable format--so this is quite a daunting task.

It's complicated as well by how I apparently have quite a lot of duplicates of mail, having previously saved stuff out into this or that archive file and not having kept track of what was where. And, the various methods I have been trying of porting mail from the PC over to the Mac seem to have different degrees of effectiveness, so I've been having to try a couple at the same time to see which ones actually do the right thing.

I've found duplicates of mail showing up where I previously hadn't had duplicates--time-stamped eight or so hours later than the actual time I sent the mail. So one of the processes I'm using, either the Outlook2Mac program or else the Outlook->Thunderbird on PC->Thunderbird on Mac->Mac mail transfer path, seems to have been doing weird stuff with splitting up non-plain-text and plain text sections of email and defaulting to GMT for the plain text section it spits out.

And, Thunderbird has interesting ideas about how to interpret some of the mail headers, too. I've seen mails come through with mangled address lines. Granted, a lot of this stuff is ancient at this point and it's hardly likely that I'll need to reply to it, but it annoys me on general principle.

So I'll be at this a while, I think. But I needed to do a major spring cleaning on the mail archives anyway, and I think that in the future I will be following solarbird's sage example and storing everything in mbox format anyway.

Book Log #103: Innocent in Death, by J.D. Robb

This post is out of date at this point, since I actually read this book several days ago--but I wanted to go ahead and get it in so it still counts as part of the 2007 Book Log. ;)

Innocent in Death is the mumble-mumbleth entry (I lost count ages ago) in the "In Death" series, which even a long-time fan like me has to admit is pretty formulaic at this point. That said, this particular installment wasn't half-bad at all. We get another round of a genuine fight between Eve and Roarke, which for me helps add some interest and conflict to their relationship long-term. Sure, they always make up in the end, demonstrating their commitment to stay together--but real couples do have fights and misunderstandings. And one thing I'll say for Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, she's done a good job at making the fights Eve and Roarke have had not be for stupid reasons.

Meanwhile, we have a murder plot at hand that gives the reader a good run for the money with the red herrings through the first part of the book. I won't say much more about that because I don't want to spoil it; I'll just say that the perpetrator this time around was an unusual choice, and occasionally genuinely creepy.

So all in all, a good quick read. Three stars.