After work I wanted to swing by Century 21 and pick up some more socks. My days of living with socks with holes in the are over. And to boot, my coworker wanted to go there to pick out some clothes for her daughter for Easter. I had forgotten that buying clothes for girls usually involves selecting different outfits, matching them up against one another, mixing the parts around, until after all that alchemy, a perfect outfit emerges. Until that magic moment, somebody has to hold the clothes. It's usually the guy. That would be me. Half an hour into it, and three more racks of clothing to go through, I realize I'm in a minor circle of Hell, and it's called the Juniors section. :: Sometimes I forget, in my rush from work to home to the computer to bed, that I used to be a pretty decent cook. And that raw ingredients aren't that hard to come by. Coming home from shopping, on a lark, I got myself 2 lbs. of eye of round, and made some steaks. They were simply delish. And cheap to boot. Of course, everything from the chinese supermarket is ridiculously cheap ... which makes me wonder where they are getting this beef from. If in fact it is beef. :: Lotus Notes only outputs emails as raw machine-friendly text files, without attachments. Which is to say, a lot of attention is paid to the headers, the footers, the routing, the tracking, the version, the security tags, and other management details. Not so much attention is paid to the actual content of the emails, and the attachments are simply dropped. (For those of you keeping score, this means Pine is a better email tool then Lotus Notes. Because Pine attaches your attachments as UUencoded text.) The raw machine-friendly text files are hard to read, and there are no programs I've found that can easily parse the code. I'm 30 megs over my email limit. Internal company policy explicitly states that emails are to be deleted according to the normal deletion schedule, which is 3 years. Anybody smell a problem? But ever the wannabe geek, I've come up with a workaround. I've exported the messages as raw machine-readable text files (for archival purposes only). I've detached and organized the attachments by date, sender, and subject. But what if I want to read the emails? I use the print as PDF option, and output the emails as I see them (although the wider ones with graphics are cut off ... but they are usually just internal rah rah rah type memos). But Lotus Notes doesn't have a pdf option, and Adobe Acrobat is too pricey, you say? Meet Cute PDF. It's free, it's spyware free (according to AdAware 5.0), and it works pretty well. Wish you could customize it a bit better, but then, you might as well spend the money and get Acrobat. So now I just print all my lotus notes as PDFs, store in a nice big directory, and all is good in the world.