I wouldn't worry I rely on AOL as i know nothing
LOL

The site is brill as it is!!

Hey look! I'm really close! Hey, you need to get a mac!

Nearly Mel !!!

I just need to know what Wil is doing up at this hour!!
What time is it in america anyway

Quietly saying HA HA and points.
I'm just glad you're making the
mistakes first. Once you get
everything reasonable figured out,
I'm coming over to the dark side.

Naaah. Don't worry about it Unca Willy. Even the best of geeks shoot themselves in the foot occasionally. Believe me!

Happens to everyone at one time or another. Don't stress about it too much. =)

Oh no! You lost my email?!
It professed my love to you!

Heh. In fact, Wil, you get *major* geek points for trying and for being able to figure out what went wrong. Being a geek is at least 90% perspiration ...

I lose major geek points for this, don't I?

* * *

Oh, you betcha... =0p

But NOT because you deleted your email. But because you didn't do a data back up (as you noted).

Ah well, all's fair in builds and back ups.

-cece

get a mac, dude! :D

Uhm. Yeah Wil.

I'm gonna need you to come in to the film shoot on Saturday...yeah...

And about that TPS report...

It's all a learning experience. :)

:D

Grimace, swear, and start over.

One more mistake and you are going to be thrown out of the geek club, mister! ;-)

Well, don't be like Homer Simpson...the best way to never fail is: Never try!

Most geeks have not run backups as they should have... and had it bite them in the arse... at least once. Curse, try to recover your data or reconstruct it, and always run adequate backups from now on!

As a friend of mine says, about many things: Once is simply chance, twice is luck (good or bad), thrice is skill (or lack thereof)!

Sure, you lost geek points. But this last week you got beaucoup coolness bonus points for hobbing and nobbing with TV's South Park's Chef. What's losing a few emails compared to Mr. Cool, himself, Isaac Hayes telling you he admires your work?

So you've lost your priceless collection of Nigerian scam e-mails then?

Ma. Jor.

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

Just a quick suggestion about your mail...

If you're picking it up from your ISP via POP or IMAP (IMAP's betteer), I suggest you use Fetchmail (comes with your Linux distro) which picks it up from your ISPs mail server and then deposits it in the standard mail spool -- usually /var/spool/mail/username. You can then configure your mail client to either access access the spool directly (I *think* KMail can do this -- I've been using Pine) or if you've got an IMAP daemon running you can also access the mail spool that way. The advantage to this is that you can store your mail without worrying about loosing the contents of the inbox. Also, your mail client should store its fo0lders in /home/username/mail. Another tool you might want to look into is Procmail -- a very useful and flexible mail filter (can be used to screen SPAM)

As with all things Linux, read the man pages.

Hope it all works out for you.

Best,

Peter

Wil -does- have a Mac, he's talked about working on his iBook in the last few entries. Unfortunately with OS X it is quite easy to shoot yourself in the foot that way anyway. :(

Speaking as one who is gainfully employed as a geek and who once deleted her entire ... well. everything. rm -r *.* is not a good idea, let's put it that way. Speaking as one who's done that, I'd say you probably /get/ geek points for that kind of error. Just, y'know. Not the *good* kind of geek points. :)

My heart goes out to you, Wil.

I recently had to rebuild a Mac OS X server from the ground up, wthout losing the company's ENTIRE email database (whole things on IMAP), which had unfortunately been stored on The Hard Drive that Crashed.

Without recovering the email, this would have been, say, a 2-hour job. Just Yank drive, say Aw, Too Bad, and go from there.

Instead, it was a 3-day backup restore restore restore rebuild restore kind of operation, including transplanting the sick drive into an operational machine to try to suck the life from it.

Vulcans are probably immune, anyway.

I'll send you an email just to test it out.

Later.

Not to worry, Wil. That is, after all, one of the three foundations of learning: see much, study much, suffer much.

I've just gone through a mail transition of my own, moving from Postilion to Evolution. It was tedious (moving all those mail folders over), but I managed to avoid disaster.

You might try Evolution yourself...if you've used Microsoft LookOut^H^H^H^H^H^H^HOutlook, you'll find it looks pretty familiar. But without the security holes. :-)

You slay me, Wil.

I use the email that comes with the glowing box in front of me. I just discovered Fire, so I'm a bit behind on your Techy stuff. LOL *wink*

Oh!

duh.

fetchmail+procmail+razor(spamassassin)^2= spam(null)

w00t!

whatever that was that you just wrote/typed/understood was geeky.

same goes for the rest of ya ;)

*sigh*
You mean I've got to send you all those messages from Hot Teen Bitches *again*?

http://getmoz.mozdev.org/
BASH shell to downloading nightly Mozilla builds (and archive old ones)
Can't say if it works or not as :
a - can't get my linux box to get online - doesn't work with my isdn box!
b - know bugger all about shell scripts anyway! - if it ain't got a gui I'm lost!

I'd give ya 10 points for effort. See, me, I prefer to wait until my computer kindly deletes all my email for me rather than initiate it myself.

Wil, Wil, Wil....

Three Easy Steps to Make Sure You Don't Lose E-mail

1) Leave your mail on the server for a few weeks/month. This way if you have a disaster, you can recover. Many e-mail programs give you the option to delete mail older than X weeks old.

2) Pick up your mail from more than one computer. Your iBook has a nifty mail application called, oddly enough Mail.app.

3) Write a shell script to back up your mail. You can use a similar script on your iBook.

Bonus iBook tip: You can keep your schedule/calendar in the calendar in Mozilla and read it on the iBook using iCal. They use the same file format .ics

No.

It happens.

Isn't that the best way to learn?

Ah well, yes.

F.G.

Hey,

I love moz, I use it to browse the net, but don't touch the email client.. I hope the loss of your email dosen't totally ruin your life

*hugs*

just use ximian evolution. it's a superb email client in comparison to mozilla mail or kmail. if you are using mandrake, just load it via the rpm. also using the getmoz script will help out enormously :)

Wil, you mentioned you have an iBook and were running MacMAME, so I assume it's not a huge leap to assume you're running Mac OS X.

If so, you may want to consider running Chimera:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/chimera/nightly/

It's a beautiful browser built on Mozilla, but far, far nicer on Mac OS X. More can be found about it here:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/chimera/

The nice thing about going over to Chimera is that there's an application that'll automatically take care of the nightly build downloading for you. It's called ChimeraKnight:

http://homepage.mac.com/chimericon/

Geekiest. Mistake. Ever.

;)

I don't think you loose points for that. You didn't loose a screw driver in the computer case nor did you NOT bring screws to put in the CD-R drive.

Hey. At least you can figure out kmail, even. I'm having a horrid time getting even Mandrake functioning properly - though you did inspire me to install it!

Yeah, lost several geek points. Now your at the level of the flamers on slashdot.

:-) bad wil for not backing-ur shizat up.

Oh yeah, guess that doesn't mean you got MY e-mail professing my love for you either. ;-)

~Tim

Writing a program that has unintended consequences earns you geek points, actually, as every True Geek has at least one story like that.

Actually you gain them for trying.
We've all been there one way or another.

BTW, good geeks read emails with emacs.
And truly real geeks write their own
mailers...

Have fun,

-B

Try IMAP :-)

Backups?? Hah! I know what I'm doing.

Everybody knows losing data isn't nearly as important as what you were doing that caused it. Automating getting the nightly build of Mozilla? You rock, in stereo.

Congratulations on getting the movie, meeting Chef, knowing when to STFU, and understanding that the temperature of a burrito is not as important as updating your website.

"Experience is what wise men call their mistakes"

E-mail is the devil ]:) You're always deleting something you wanted to save or neglecting to delete things you don't need. Deleting the mail doesn't lose you geek points. I would consider it a "feature" not a mistake :)
Ooh! is your movie...

"Book of Days," a tale of a man who tries to alter fate after discovering a book listing the dates of people's deaths

Yes? No? Still can't say? Did I win a prize?

I linked the URL to the site I got it from, in case I'm right and someone says you spilled the beans.
Keep on Farkin'
-SR

Any geek points you lost, you can claim back after your meeting with CHEF!

http://www.startledfrog.com/beretwearingelitist

Back to TechTV, I guess? :-)

kmail is definitely the way to go :)

~A

backing up is for sissies! Real men and real dykes NEVER back up!

just kidding..i know that too....sucks but it just happens.

Eh. Wil, just about every computer geek makes this mistake from time to time. For instance, I once ran "tar czvf mail.backup.tgz .mail ; rm .mail ; touch .mail" because my inbox had grown to over two megabytes in size (and no, not from attachments, from years of not deleting things I needed to "get back to"). Of course, the tar failled, and I was left without any mail. Including about a month of unread mail because I had been away.
It sucks, but it happens.
One doesn't lose geek points, the hit to your ego takes care of everything necessary.

Hey, guess what? Wil's site got a mention on MSNBC in their article about Blogger's hack attack. I'm terrible about posting links (they all come out garbled) so just go to the site and look under TechScience, Hacks, Viruses & scams.

Dude,
I still use Hotmail and Yahoo, if ain't Broke don't fix it.....

either way you are still ahead of me in the geek points. :P

now, how will you able to get a U.N.I.V.E.R.S.I.T.Y. Diploma!...all the details were in your e-mail....never mind...they'll send more.

Yeah, well I just reformatted my computer and forgot to back up outlook - I had an unexpected email from you saved in there. I thought - well hell if he ever makes it on this side of the country - I'll get him to autograph it instead of a mug shot. Not to mention I have to try to remember all my email addresses I lost. So, uh, I'm feeling your non back up pain.

p.s. don't you sleep?! I thought - eh he's filming they'll be nothing to read here.

I have intervened on your behalf with the Uber-Geek committee and they have decided that you will be allowed to live...this time. However, you are required to do the following:

Write 1000 times (with a pencil on paper): Thou shalt remember the backup set and keep it wholly!

See...real geeks never make mistakes such as this...yeah, that's it...we never ever screw up....that's the ticket...just ask my wife, Morgan Fairchild...yeah, that's it...

mozilla = teh suq

Wil > all > Monzilla

you rule dude no matter what! you are so the shyt on Arena! Keep up the great work ;) and.. cya on tonight at 3am heh.

I r teh d0rk 2!

You lose major Geek Points.

43.9144339999223344555112 of them to be exact.

Wil, dear boy, after going from meeting Isaac Hayes to blitzing all your email, the appropriate word is not "geek" or even "dork"; the word that strikes me as being appropriate is "DOO-FUS!!" That is your just desserts for being too full of yourself. You are now hereby sentenced to a blistering rebuke at the hands of none other than Patrick Stewart, followed by similar rebukes from Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, AND LeVar Burton! You will then be subjected to being publicly slimed on Nickelodeon--not once, but TWICE!! Finally, you will be delivered into the none-too-gentle hands of Steven, the Dell Dude, who will gleefully outfit you with the very latest in PC (that's right, IBM-compatible, Microsoft Windows-running) hardware, then--of course!--tell you, "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell!" After which, you will wake up and realize that it was all just a bad dream caused by eating too many breakfast burritos. You will then give yourself several well-deserved dope slaps in rapid succession, and, upon completion of your current film, you will pack up your wife and children and take a month's vacation at Walt Disney World in Central Florida.

All kidding aside, Wil, that sort of thing really does happen to every computer owner or webmaster at one time or another. Just remember the old song line, "Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again," if that's what it takes. Take care!

Wowsers...Isacc Hayes...that is cool! I use to love to boogie to the remix of the song Shaft back in my club glory days.

Sounds like the movie is going well for you and that it's making you very happy.

I'll have to look for it when it comes out on Pax.

Wil! Wil! He's our man if he can't do it NO ONE can!!!

Hey Wil?

You're the greatest! I know, I know you hear these things all the time... I shall now go flog myself for the repetitive nature of this msg. Yet, I couldna help but to tell ya!

You Rawk!

that guy posting as lumberg... that's classic. lol

Nah, don't worry about losing geek points. I could make a joke and say that you're still running way ahead of the pack, but it might be taken as an insult so I won't ;)
Nobody really learns a lesson without messing up. It's great to read something, but when you do something you get a much better handle on it.

Loyal Monkey #24601

While you might lose or gain a few geek points, I have to give you high marks for posting the good and the bad online.
It's nice to see that the subject of one of my teenage crushes is quite human, after all. ;)

sucks for you, ;)

btw i use chimera

Don't be too hard on yourself Wil. After all, it IS the best way to learn. :-)

You're still earning mondo geek points in my book. Geez, before too soon, I'm sure you'll out-geek me.

--Ian...
www.iansweb.com

Actually Wil I had filled your inbox with rants and raves about the state of evil people in the world, because, naturally, you have all the answers, as well as a 30 page diatribe on how parking meters suck.

Too bad I didn't save backups either. :P

Chris
WW Psychogroupie

All your scripts are belong to us!!!

(sorry had to do it)

d00d, you get bonuses for writing scripts, period. People coming from Windows OS don't know the power of the CUI or scripting for that matter.

You do, however, lose major points for running a slow, bloated, cruddy browser. Redeem yourself and get a sleek, fast and small footprint based on the same technology: Phoenix http://mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-release-notes.html

So I was flipping through an issue of Macworld magazine and I see an ad for Mac Mania II. It's a Geek Cruise. So I jokingly check out the website, review the itinerary and send an IM to a friend with the link saying how I want to go on it. I was totally being sarcastic, until he types back: "Wil Wheaton's going to be there?" I did a double take and checked the speaker list only to see his name at the very end(it's Alphabetical).

So yeah, now I kind of do want to go. I would be so outclassed though I'm sure by powerbook/iPod toting rich geeks. I'd probably still have the hottest girlfriend though...

So yeah, Wil, Sign my guestbook(you bastard!). ;)

This posting really has nothing to do with your last entry...

-Jeffery

The cruise info is here:

http://www.geekcruises.com/home/mm2_home.html

-Jeffery

There are way too many comments here to read them all. Who has that long of an attention span? oh-vey!

Hi Wil! didnt send an email but it was good to know you are thinking of others? How are things going? Book is coming along I see...cant wait!

Eh, I sure can't throw any stones, I've lost more email over the years than everyone in this comments section put together, probably. Of course, usually when I lose my email it's nothing crucial - crappy forwards and penis-enlarging cream offers. What's MORE disturbing is how many times I've reformatted and forgotten to back up my address book. Now that's a full-on pain in the ass.

Thats almost as bad as the christmas when you burnt a hole in dad's recliner with that dork-ass
chemistry set!

Just Playin' Love You Wil!

Wil, you're my hero nonetheless.

Don't feel too bad. I had a rather scary moment installing Mandrake a few weeks ago. When I rebooted after doing all the installation stuff, it gave me an error that said it didn't recognize my hard disk. I panicked, thinking I'd really screwed up when creating my partitions. So I reinstalled. Turned out I forgot my floppy in the disk drive.

The best part? Even though I had to "repair" Windows XP with the boot disk, I didn't lose any files. I now have a Windows XP/Mandrake dual-boot system working just fine. It's nice because I can learn Linux at my own pace and not have to give up Windows.

Losing data like that is garunteed to actually increase your geek points! However you then get colored with some 'doesn't-know-what-he's-doing' points.

Thats ok, once I
rm -rf ~
ed without thinking about it. (Stupid JEdit install didn't recognize the alias so it created a ~ directory in my home dir. So I deleted it. Sort of.)

Son, I sent you an e-mail. You & I *really* need to talk. Seems you have issues with a war in Iraq. Call me. We'll do lunch.

Will;
Sorry you had a Linux "moment". I am running SuSE 8.0 Pro myself. Just a thought or two. In Mozilla mail you can tell MO to keep your a copy of your e-mail on your server,this is under "mail and newsgroups account settings, then server settings.
Also you could create a special user account on you Linux box just for fooling around i.e. beta testing.
That way if things go south just switch to another account.
John :)