Everything’s beginning to smell of smoked fish. It reminds me of the time in Dublin when Burdock’s fish’n'chip shop burned and the Lord Edward pub next door smelled of kipper for years. I think the 1970s red vinyl flock wallpaper can apparently absorb 100x its weight in smoke particles.
Saw this and checked and, yes, it seems that after literally years of retarded obstinance, Google has finally enabled IMAP for its GMail email service. I just checked and the option appears on the “Settings” tab. There’s HowTos here. Finally this will make using GMail on the mobile less annoying by reducing the number of duplicate entries. Maybe this is a result of competition from Microsoft’s new Live Mail (or whatever) which, after I went through a tedious upgrade process, actually seemed to have some very cool integration *and* 5GB of storage. And Yahoo’s Go client for mobiles is very slick and way, way ahead of any Google’s equivalent available offerings except, of course, the client-native Maps.
Of course, a new issue I face now is that, with IMAP, a mail server behaves more like a folder store in that you can copy messages to and from it. So I could import all my old email into GMail, finally, without having to fake it with a spoofed POP server as some crazy people have done. It’s usually as simple as drag’n'drop. But I have email archives going back to 1987 – I may be over GMail’s space limit. Maybe this is a plan to get people to pay for upgraded server space?archives
I did get lots of emails and even some calls, but this is a quick note to say that I am safe from the fires for now. I am pretty close to the airport and quite well insulated by surrounding urban development although I can see huge pillars of smoke along the horizon. Because I was to have taken an exam on Monday, I actually spent most of the weekend looked into a small room with no TV or media and had literally no idea anything was going on until I arrived at the campus. The sun was rising and saw the sky was a kind of sick colour resembling the weird sky near the end of the Quatermass Conclusion when most of the people on earth under 20 have been converted into cosmic space dust candy by the Sky God and their residue is beginning to block out the sun.
These maps show the local San Diego fires, these show thermal imagery, and this one shows the whole SoCal thing. There’s pretty ones and even big picture ones. There’s even raw incident reports. It’s all about the weather, and the crazy Santa Ana winds (they actually blew over some of the multi-axle freight trucks).
The compulsory evacuation zone grew to just a horizon or so from the UCSD campus and the air was quite toxic (resembling Dublin in the coal-burning 1980s) so school was cancelled until further notice. The hotel where me and Lisa stayed last March is actually in the middle of the worst-hit zone (“Rancho Bernardo“) and that area now looks like World War 1′s No-Man’s Land. On TV, reporters are running around trying to get money shots of burning houses and then the pathos shot of poking through smouldering rubble pointing out melted PCs and family heirlooms and so on.
Anyway, there are many satellite shots of the plumes, professional and amateur photography, blogs blogs blogs, and NBC announced that FEMA will be “getting involved”. People have even found some redeeming uses for the formerly hilariously narcissistic Twitter. There are emergency services radio chatter streams. Webcams. Power outages. Wikis. TV. Finally, it’s (mostly) not snark, it’s Fark 8 9 10.
