Here’s how I moved all (?) my Thunderbird data from my Windows machine to my Mac, replacing the contents on my Mac.

First step: Make a back up of your Mac Thunderbird settings. You’ll find them in [yourname]/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles and then in a folder that’s a meaningless string of letters and numbers. Save all those contents to a new folder, just in case. And keep in mind the most important thing throughout this entire process: I am not responsible. In any sense of the word.

Now copy your Tbird settings from your Windows machine to your Mac, using whatever transfer mechanism you want. The Windows settings are in: Documents and Settings/[yourname]/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles and then some other folder with a different meaningless string of letters and numbers.

Delete the current contents of your meaninglessly-named Thunderbird folder on your Mac. (Remember, you’ve already backed it up. Right?) Copy in the contents from your Windows meaningless folder. Now the contents of your meaningless folder on the Mac are identical to the contents of that other meaningless folder on your Windows ,achine.

Start up Thunderbird. It should display the contents from your Windows machine.

If Thunderbird now refuses to download mail, check the account settings, of course. Mine still wouldn’t download. But then I looked in the pop.gmail.com folder in the Mail folder in the meaninglessly-named folder on the Mac and found a file called “popstate.dat”. I renamed it to “popstate.dat.bak” and restarted Thunderbird. It worked. Unless you use gmail as your pop server, however, the appropriate folder will have a different name. I have confidence you can figure it out. I believe in you.

Good luck. And remember: I am not responsible. [Tags: thunderbird macintosh gmail ]

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Pownce.com, a new social network, gives you the following choices on its “Gender” pulldown:

Guy
Girl
Dude
Chicky-poo
Bloke
Bird
Lady
Gentleman
Male
Female
Transgender
None of the above

Nice. [Tags: everything+is+miscellaneous pownce gender ]

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Her name is, famously, an anagram of “silvery bells.”

Rest in peace…but not in quiet.

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We saw Shakespeare & Co.s production of Tom Stoppards Rough Crossing last night. We always enjoy their productions. This one too. But it is slight. It’s 100% froth. Of course, it being Stoppard, it has its moments of self-reflective cleverness, including a hilarious exposition toward the beginning. But I was surprised that it didn’t do more with its genre, a drawing room comedy at sea in which the men are Cowards and the dame is Russian blonde who pronounces “Naples” as “nipples.” It is all very silly, exuberantly performed, and very funny, but just a little disappointing – the play within the play doesn’t really get reflected back into the play – given Stoppard’s usual standards of meta-cleverness

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I continued to be impressed by Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. More than impressed. Amazed. It has many, well, virtues, but you can’t read it without being astounded by MacIntyre’s grasp of Western philosophy (with occasional notes on Icelandic and Islamic traditions as well). The mere fact that the comments eruditely on Kierkegaard, Nietszsche and Sartre one one hand, on GE Moore and CL Stevenson on the other, the Scholastics on a third hand, and Foucaultishly (high praise!) on the Greeks from Homer through the tragedians, would be enough. Dayenu! Contemporary Western philosophy has become so fragmented that cutting across all of its branches is an achievement worth acknowledging. Just his command of languages — does the fact that he refers to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or by its Danish title mean that he reads Danish also? — is enough to turn your head.
So, ignoring for the moment the content of the book and the nuance of its argument, I am bowled over simply by his expertise – like being amazed by Rembrandt’s brushwork. We need people like MacIntyre who are able to spend a lifetime reading, learning, thinking and writing.

The point about MacIntyre is not that he is a professional. It is that he is an expert. Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur it seems to me sometimes confuses those two things. Keen is right to point out that we have a traditional “ecosystem” that enables people like MacIntyre to flourish. But that ecosystem — in this case, the university system — is not endangered by the new connectedness that is the Internet. The profession that enables MacIntyre to support himself through his studies is largely intact. Now, because of the Internet, we are able to benefit from experts who are amateurs or professionals. [Tags: alasdair+macintyre andrew+keen amateurs scholars ]

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