Every few weeks, I tend to experience a span of multiple days where I am incredibly creative in some project, or type of projects. They usually involve very few people, and are generally things I can accomplish basically alone.

It’s the time in my life where I simply have no tolerance for petty bullshit, especially what I deem to be other peoples, and I am absorbed into my work. Often that manifests in photographs, or knitting 7 scarves in 4 days, or painting something large. Last month I made my self a wig. In recent years, I’ve learned to allow witnesses. Still, though, I like small amounts of interaction at best when I’m doing this stuff.

This month, I’ve delved back into my roots.

Inspired by a link I posted on twitter recently about going google free, I started playing with sup on neevita.net, which is a debian box. Sup itself is too beta for my skills. I generally need a fair bit of documentation and example code to make anything I think up happen. Plus, I don’t know ruby. But I’ll surely be keeping an eye on it, mainly for the labeling/tags.

Alpine/Pine, however, is well on its way. I remembered pine to be pretty limiting back in the day, and stopped using it entirely in 2005. But it turns out, I can basically make Alpine do everything gMail showed me that I want – Coloring (aka, labeling) based on message origin, sending from multiple email addresses, default reply From address being the address the mail was sent to, archiving, and even threaded conversations. And if I want it to be like gMail, saving my replies to the thread, all I have to do is save my sent mail to my inbox. Boom.

In fact, when I thought to store my sent mail and incoming mail in the same place, I came up with what I consider to be an even more elegant approach to threading; I started deleting the source mail when I reply, since my sent message goes to my inbox and I like to include the original messages in replies anyway. Then I told Alpine to mark my sent message as read, and created filters to color the sent mails from my email addresses as well as incoming. Boom.

So now, I am using my proper email, and I am bidding gmail and their information hoarding ways aidu. It’s back to a simple life for me. Now if only the stupid IMAP app on my Helio Ocean didn’t force outgoing mail creds like a dumb bitch, I could check it on the go and actually reply to people. Let’s face it, though – it’s not like I’m ever long without computer access.

But what about gTalk? How on earth can I survive without that? Welp, Mcabber is working just dandy. This is what my gTalk looks like now. Just try to tell me that’s not fucking sexy. Just try.

While I was at it, I pilfered a small shell script to update my twitter from linux command line. Additionally, I’m checking facebook and twitter through links (formerly lynx, I would imagine) and loading the mobile sites, so it’s about the same as when I check from my phone. Except fucking COOLER. :)

All of this is wrapped lovingly in a screen session, which I have updated to show the window names and date and time in a status bar at the bottom of the screen. I even left it in .mil time, so I can work on my arithmetic whenever I have to check the time. How.. dangerous.

I had forgotten how fun, creative, and satisfying it is to configure applications on linux. Just making a gTalk buddies name turn yellow when they set away is a small, glorious victory. I don’t know what makes unhashing and editing a line in an .rc file so much more satisfying than clicking a radio button, but it really, really is. Every once in a while, it’s nice to spend a day (ok.. two.) tweaking things and learning/relearning cool stuff. Not to mention how much I enjoy fresh starts and change.

I was actually pretty surprised how quickly I re-adapted to key bindings and shortcuts. I guess you can take the girl out of the slack, but you can’t take the slack out of the girl.

As always, many continued thanks to Llarian, my admin, for dealing with lots of stuff I’d rather not.