The four stages of CES

Stage 1: Denial

Set up every possible appointment you can. That's the whole point of a conference, right?

Stage 2: Shock

Sudden realization that you might not have much time to walk the show floor, eat or go to the bathroom because you've set up too many appointments.

Stage 3: Bargaining

Running progressively later for appointments, make apologetic phone calls, try to rearrange schedule.

Stage 4: Acceptance

Brazenly skip every other appointment; use the extra time to run to remaining appointments.

Ouch.

Making room for baby

Andrea and I just signed a lease for a bigger apartment and have begun setting up the baby's room. Figuring out the Ikea set-up manual will probably be the easiest part of parenthood.

Gmail IMAP is next to useless on Windows Mobile

I was aware that Google's e-mail service had a problem in which HTML mail accessed through IMAP on Windows Mobile devices shows up as blanks, but it never bothered me as much as it did today.

I got an urgent e-mail from work asking me to check a typo in a graphic I had sent last night sent -- it came in the form of a PDF (this actually makes a lot of sense when it comes to formatted graphics). Not only could I not read the message using Windows Mobile's default e-mail, I couldn't download the attachment, either.

Forwarding the message to my Yahoo account from the phone's e-mail software didn't work, because the message had been ruined by that point. So I had to log in to Gmail's Web interface and forward it to Yahoo from there. What a pain.

Maybe this is a Windows Mobile problem. But it doesn't matter -- a lot of people use the OS, and Yahoo has figured it out. Google engineers are aware of the problem, but apparently, don't consider it much of a priority.