In Thunderbird, sorting by date with the newest emails at the top means the little arrow on the column header points up. But in Outlook, sorting by date with the newest emails at the top means the little arrow points down.

This vexes me. I never know whether I want the arrow to point up, or down, since I can’t remember which application does which. I always want the newest at the top (apart from when I’m sorting by name or something else for a minute, but then I want it back to normal), but the arrow is completely useless as an indicator, since there’s not enough info to tell which way is which. Anyone have any better suggestions for visual feedback?

I’ve got a new toy, and a new hobby. The toy is a Garmin Venture Cx GPS, and the hobby is using it to make maps, as part of the Open Street Map project - free maps under a Creative Commons license. My flatmate Dave has also bought a GPS, and together we’ve been wandering and cycling around Putney, gathering tracklogs to make the map.

On the map above, we lay claim for the bit around Putney only so far- click on the picture to see which bit is ours. We’ve been doing it comprehensively, rather than just riding around randomly, which makes the maps look really good - I’ll post a closeup of Putney sometime. One of the trickiest bits is when someone watches me cycle down an obvious dead-end, all the way to the end, and cycle back up, while Dave takes a photo of the streetsign - the way they look at you makes you feel what we’re doing is illegal! I haven’t (yet) explained to any bystanders what we’re up to, but I don’t think it would help much anyway. It’s just a pity that everyone, everywhere is so hostile to passers by…

As you can see from the map, there’s a way to go yet, so this will probably keep me occupied for a few millennia! Let me know if you want to help out - next up is Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common, and probably around Barnes too.

Yahoo mail, along with most other crappy webmail accounts, puts a little tagline at the bottom of all the emails you send. Free advertising for themselves, and a good way to annoy anyone else having a conversation with you - you rapidly start pushing around loads of nested adverts whether you like it or not.

However, this amused me, from the climbing list I’m on - Yahoo! put the following tagline in a poor guy’s email:

All New Yahoo! Mail – Tired of Vi@gr@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you.

… which then got promptly munched by the anti-spam filter on the mailing list. Nice work, Yahoo!

So if you use Yahoo!, or Hotmail, or any other crappy free email, and every now and then you emails don’t get through, maybe this is the reason.