For years now I have been using abbeyworkshop.com for my website and abbeyworkshop.net for my e-mail. Well my service provider is shutting down their e-mail service for individuals as of 2/28/07. So all my e-mail addresses will be changing from .net to .com. I'm trying to e-mail everyone I know and update all my site registrations to reflect the change.

I will be tranferring the abbeyworkshop.net domain to godaddy at the end of this week. So my email will be down for a week or two at a minimum. Hopefully I will be able to mirror the e-mail domain on dreamhost. However, there is no guaranty this will work. So if your e-mail to me starts bouncing, change the .net to .com.

As I migrate all my mail to my new mail server I am again reminded how poor e-mail is for storing large file attachments. The attachments suck up all the space in your mailbox, slow down IMAP mailboxes (as the message has to be downloaded from the mailserver every time), and thusly just mess things up. It would be much better if each user had a tool to store files on that could be linked to. That way, only a link to the file gets sent around, not the file itself.

Yahoo Briefcase is such a service, but you have to buy the premium service to be able to share your folders. There used to be a number of free sites that offered the same thing, but my experience with them was they were always slow, clunky, and practically unusable. So I have thought about developing my own tool to do this.

But being a good open source citizen, before getting started on a new project, I checked to see if someone had already tackled this problem. And someone has, woo hoo! Check out Boxroom at http://boxroom.rubyforge.org/. This looks to be exactly what I'm looking for. A web based file manager that allows you to share and setup passwords for individual folders. I haven't installed it yet, but I'll post a note once I do.

Well I found out last week that I didn't get the Google job. So I'm back in the job hunt again.

It would have been fun to experience that environment. Being a fan of open source software, it would cool to work for a company that no only embraces open source software, but uses open source software to gain a competitive advantage.

Oh well, I did my best. I will just have to settle for partnering with them via adsense and using some of their cool tools.