Alec’s first injury

Today my son has his first real injury. Earlier today, my wife heard a bang followed by screaming. She ran and found a hysterical Alec with a bloody tooth.

It appears Alec ran into or fell on something and bumped a tooth. If you look carefully in the picture below, you can see that the right incisor is pushed back a little from the left one. (Remember that his right tooth shows up on the left in this picture.)

I called our dentist, and he said that unless Alec is severely injured or having trouble closing his mouth–and neither are the case–then the tooth will most likely be fine and should migrate back to its proper position.

Well after Alec fell asleep, I tried to see if I could gently move the tooth back to its proper position without making things worse. It felt well secured to the gum, but I couldn’t get it to just “snap back” using gentle pressure, so I wasn’t able to move it.

I’m gonna leave it and see what happens.

SCOOP: First 80 mph speed limit sign pictures on the web!

Even though Texas’s new 80 mph speed limit signs have been up for 6 days, my repeated searches haven’t turned up a single photo on the internet. Today, I emailed a staffer in the office of Pete Gallego, the Texas Legislator whose bill allowed these speed limits, and got the photos. I present you the first known online photos of Texas’s 80 mph speed limit!

They are apparently of Gallego unveiling a new 80 mph speed limit sign near Fort Stockton, Texas. (Location assumed from a prior news article, not the words of the staffer.)

This is proof that democrats are occasionally able to do good things.

By the way, you may have seen Associated Press articles that say that Texas adopted 75 mph speed limits in 1999 (example article). This is incorrect. Gallego introduced a bill in 1999, HB 3328, that would have allowed 75 mph limits on all roads numbered by the state or federal government and 80 mph on I-10 and I-20 in any county with fewer than 25,000 residents. (Interesting point: the wording of the bill may have forced the 80 mph limits instead of just allowing the Texas Transportation Commission to set them.) However, this bill died in conference committee immediately before the end of that year’s legislative session. (I.e., it never went into effect.)

Gallgeo introduced a modified bill only allowing 75 mph limits in counties with fewer than 10 people per square mile in 2001. This was HB 299. That one passed and was signed by the governor.

Then in 2005, Gallego’s introduced a third bill, HB 2257, that allowed 75 mph limits in counties with fewer than 15 people per square mile and allowed 80 mph limits on I-10 and I-20 in certain named counties. This bill went into effect on Sept. 1, 2005. It took the TxDOT several months to amend its Procedures for Establishing Speed Zones to allow it to recommend these limits, then another month or so to get the recommendation up to the Texas Transportation Commission for approval.

Anyway, enough talk. The 80 mph limit signs are up, and here are the pictures, courtesy of Pete Gallego’s office.

What you are seeing below the sign is a NIGHT 65 speed limit sign. Texas is the only state with a blanket night speed limit.

Google Mail fails again with an idiotic “sender” field

I am chomping at the bit to get off of POP3-based email clients. I am tired of being bound to specific machines to handle email.

Two days ago, I figured out how to get around the biggest shortcoming (for me) in Google Mail. I had over 20,000 email messages accumulated from when I created the account (explanation), but Google gives no easy way to mark all of these messages as read. I figured out a workaround: just download them via POP3 into Outlook Express, being sure to configure Google Mail to archive downloaded messages.

With that problem fixed, I committed to exclusively use Google Mail. It worked well. It’s very nice to have all your email available in a well-designed, efficient interface no matter where you are. Even the PDA interface was usable!

However, a major design flaw screwed up everything.

I send my emails as aren@cambre.biz. I want to hold on to that email address for life. Google can send emails using a non-gmail.com address with a caveat: Google adds a “sender” field to the email’s header data, and this “sender” field gives away your actual gmail.com address.

This stupid sender field totally screwed up Google Mail for me.

First, anyone using a sophisticated email client will see my gmail.com address immediately. This is how Outlook shows my email address to the recipient of my emails:

I don’t want my gmail.com address published because I don’t want to be attached to it.

That isn’t the worst.

I am subscribed to a few email lists. Less sophisticated mail list programs like majordomo don’t care about this sender field. However, better email list programs interpret the sender field as the actual sender of the email. Why is this a problem? Smartly-configured lists only accept emails that come from subscribed addresses. In my case, the sophisticated email list software sees that the email was sent by my gmail.com address. Since I am subscribed as aren@cambre.biz, the email list software rejects my emails.

In a stroke of genius, Google does not provide a way to disable this feature.

Gee, Google, thanks again for arrogantly making dumb design decisions that don’t work well.

Apparently, I’m not the only person with this problem, and this is not a new problem (link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4).