I hear their ads all the time on the radio, and now my washer is broken. I signed up on the web page and got a call today scheduling a "free tour" visit for tomorrow evening. Then they found out that my wife wouldn't be able to make it and she canceled the appointment. It's required that we both be there.

What the....?

Sorry, I want to buy an appliance, not join a cult.

I just had two very nice young men from the Mormon church stop by. They gave me their little presentation, and I mentioned what happened last time Mormons came by.

We met with them for 7 weeks, so I could learn what their church teaches. Questions naturally came up based on our discussion, which they couldn't answer, like

• Do they believe God has a physical body? (They said one thing, the book of Mormon said the opposite)
• They say the best Mormons can reach the best level of heaven, and be the god-figure over a region in space, like God is here. Does that mean they teach that God was once a human-like being, born to a family on the planet of another Diety?

Today I was told again that they don't know.

Now, I'm agnostic about many issues in my faith, but not something so significant like this. the question is: is God just a territorial spirit, like dagon was to the philistines? is God the creator of all things, or is he just another created being?

Mormons and Christians (Ok, Mormons call themselves Christians... Chrisitans who do not accept the authority of the Mormon church) use the same words but mean completely different things.

Windows desktop wallpaper is boring. For a year or so I've had desktop earth, which shows the current sunlight on a satellite shot of the earth stretched across the desktop. It's alright.

Just now, and just in time to be a Friday Freebie, I thought - why not have a program that could display random photos of your friends' photos of Facebook or flickr? Thanks to google, I found John's Background Switcher - a free program that can display and rotate randomly (if you want) photos from

• your computer
• Facebook (yours, your friends, or your choice of which of your friends)
• Flickr
• Picasa
• ... and several more online sources.

It's free. Its fast, it's really simple to set up on Windows 98 through Vista. (Sorry mac users, you'll have to stick with that photo of Steve Jobs with a halo. )

Check out my current windows desktop. It's 1/2 family photos from Facebook and 1/2 random photos from other Facebook friends. It'll change every hour. I can't wait! I think I'll refresh it now to see some more photos.

Ok, this is too fun. Here's the next two after I refreshed (the background b&w photo is also random from a Facebook friend)

[Warning, this is a techy post]

Finally.

Got it.

2GB of email transferred from my personal gmail account of 3 years to my domain email at google hosted...

• All dates correct
• All lookitsme@gmail.com changed to my real email address, so now my emails show that everything (for the last 3 years) was sent to or from my domain email, rather than a gmail account
• All labels stuck

The process:

• Install ubuntu as a virtual machine. Just go with vmware, it's so much faster, and you can download a pre-built ubuntu already installed. Don't mess with microsoft virtual pc like I did.
• Use the Synaptic package manager and get imapsync and it's dependencies.
  
• Run imapsync with a command like the following (thanks to this blog post). You may need to escape out the @ symbols . I also had imapsync delete the emails when I was done so when I had to restart it, it would immediately look at new emails rather than going over what it already did:
  imapsync --host1 imap.gmail.com \
  --port1 993 --user1 user@gmail.com \
  --passfile1 ./passfile1 --ssl1 \
  --host2 imap.gmail.com \
  --port2 993 --user2 user@domain.com \
  --passfile2 ./passfile2 --ssl2 \
  --syncinternaldates --split1 100 --split2 100 \
  --authmech1 LOGIN --authmech2 LOGIN \
  --regexmess 's/Delivered-To: user@gmail.com/Delivered-To: user@domain.com/g' \
  --regexmess 's///g' \
  --regexmess 's/Subject:(\s*)\n/Subject: (no--subject)$1\n/g' \
  --regexmess 's/Subject: ([Rr][Ee]):(\s*)\n/Subject: $1: (no--subject)$2\n/g'
• After that did all it could, I set my new google hosted email to download fromthe old account via pop3, to catch a few (well, a few hundred) missed messages that imapsync didn't get.

I had to restart the process several times over several days. imap sometimes just decides to take a break. There also seemed to be emails that made it choke. I ended up adding to the imapsync command to do specific folders at a time so I could keep a better eye on the progress.

So there you have it, or you can run the Amazon EC2 if you know how to do that (I don't).. or you can pay me to do it :)

Now to import my contacts...

After using Firefox 3 you'll suddenly realize that using Microsoft's Internet Explorer is like trying to walk through 3-foot deep jello.

Microsoft is sure to counter with a new version of Internet Explorer with even fewer menus, and even slower web browsing.

What I like:

• Javascript and AJAX are faster. I program using AJAX a lot. So does google, so if you use gmail (which should include everyone who has a computer or a cell phone), you'll like this.
• You can search your bookmarks from the address bar - just start typing.
• Password saving. I don't want firefox to save my password unless I know I typed the right one. Now the "remember this password?" option just floats at the top of the screen, so you can see if you get logged into a website before having Firefox memorize the password.

What I don't like:

• Windows Media Player Plug-in doesn't seem to work with it yet. But that's Microsoft being a pain, not Mozilla.
• When uploading a file on a web form, there's no way to delete a filename. You can replace it by clicking "Browse" again, but you can't empty out that field unless you reload the page.

Only 1,837MB to go!

Even though gmail tells me it will send my email "from" my main address, sometimes people hit reply and they see a personal (unprofessional) gmail address.

I was excited when Google hosted services came out. You can allow them to manage some parts of your domain name, like email. Great - except there's no tool to convert your account. No tool to properly migrate your account.

• I want my labels to transfer correctly.
  
• I want the message dates to be correct for when I received the emails.
  
• I want the emails to say they were sent to my main address, rather than the gmail.

Finally after searching and searching, I found a solution. But, you have to be a complete techie-geek to do it.

Imapsync connects to 2 email accounts simultaneously and compares and transfers emails.

These are my steps:

Step 1: Search the web for hours trying to find the solitary blog post about it.
Step 2: Download imapsync's recommended software and ActivePerl that says you can use it on Windows.
Step 3: Try and try, and give up on running imapsync from Windows.
Step 4: Go back to the blog post and find the blogger has created an Amazon EC2 image that can run this.
Step 5: Spend hours trying to figure out how to connect to EC2 and run an image, SSH in so that you can SFTP in, download Putty, give up.
Step 6: Install Ubuntu Linux on Microsoft Virtual PC.
Step 7: Find out that Ubuntu won't load on Virtual PC. Spend hours trying to tweak the right settings, enter in command line values in different places as Ubuntu boots.
Step 8: In Ubuntu's terminal, run imapsync, and get the error about Date Manipulation
Step 9: Search the web for the fix to Date Manipulation, finally find it in the Synaptic Package manager.
Step 10: Run imapsync. Run it again every few hours when it stops. Hope it will eventually get them all.