Busy/Quiet Period 2, and email
Saturday, April 17, 2004 at 06:42PM
Now that Christine’s back from overseas, I seem to have entered another busy/quiet period. In the last week we have had Z’s birthday (he’s now a precocious three-year-old), Easter, our midsemester break, various small house renovation things, and catching up on previously unattended email. (The inbox is down to two items as of this afternoon, both of which came in today, so that’s going fairly well.)
On the topic of email, it’s been interesting to see how the topic of email filing practices is in the aether, now that Gmail is there, tempting you to archive all of your email and use search to get at it, instead of filing it away in different folders. My own email folder hieararchy is slowly spiralling out of control: the act of asking “where should I file this?” (and answering it) is becoming stressful, and burrowing through folders to find things (did I put it in the Teaching folder orthe Admin folder or…?) is tedious. I am tempted to ditch the folder hierarchy completely and stick everything in an archive folder and let the pretty competent search box in my mail client dig up what I need.
But I won’t do that yet. I’d like two features I currently don’t have in my mail client.
- Labels or categories: I want to label all of my correspondence to do with the AJL (to pick a salient example) with an “AJL” label, so that I can pull them out when I want to see all of my AJL correspondence in one pile. (Not all AJL email contains the text ‘AJL’, so searching for it does not necessarily help.)
- Configurable Views: I’d like a “virtual” folder of everything labelled “AJL.” When I’m collaborating with Person X, I’d like a virtual folder containing of all of my email to or from Person X. And so on.
Now, different mail clients out there have some combination of these things. The scary thing, when I think about it, is that what I’m asking for is iPhoto for my mail archive. (Though without the rating feature. I don’t think I need to rate my emails from 1 to 5 stars!) Maybe Apple will add these features to the venerable Mail application. Maybe someone else will build a robust mail client for Mac OS X with the combination of fast content-based search, arbitrary labels and configurable views. If you hear of one, please let me know. My 660MB ~/Library/Mail/ folder and I will thank you.
News Archive
2002 | 2003 | 2004 | Reboot – Zachary at Hanging Rock – Teaching, teaching, teaching – Black Mountain Tower – AJL Volume 2 – Are God's Hands Tied By Logic? – Study Window – Revisiting the past – The Wind is Blowing – Publishing a Book – Zachary Scribbling – Kai on Book Publishing – Monday comments – Zachary with a chocolate moustache – Research Quantification – Brandom on Philosophy and the University – Busy/Quiet Period – What the universe looks like from the inside – Research Project – Shootings – Hedge – Technical 'Support' – Funding Changes at the University of Melbourne – Knowability – Busy/Quiet Period 2, and email – Help Wanted – The AJL is on the Register – Knowability 2 – Max Cresswell at the AJL – Winter Stylesheet – Great Moments in Logic – Knowability 3 – NAD C521BEE – Haskell and Logic – Knowability 4 – What He Said – Inference & Meaning – Who are Boole, Fitch and Tarski? – Grading – Tree Totaller – Ancestors – The Geometry of Non-Distributive Logics – Assertion, Denial, Paradox... – The Twelve Apostles – No writing implements? – Musical Taste – Slow Period – Organising Academic Papers – GMail – Off North – I'm so not here – Parent/Teacher Interview – What's been happening around here – Itchy to redesign (a bit) – October 9 Election – In case you were wondering – Well, that didn't go as I'd hoped – Headphones – Travel Plans 2005 – Sheet Music – Take these shoes... – What's going on around here – 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 |
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About
I’m Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Email: greg at consequently.org; Post: School of of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.
Start at the home page—a summary of the site. The left column is news, archived on the news archive page. The central column contains recent items from the writing page, which lists my publications. These are also categorised by topic. You can follow my links at my account on delicious and occasional short snarky remarks at @consequently on twitter.
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Thought
I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious — You write backward Es!
— Hilary Putnam The Philosophers’ Magazine, Summer 2001.