Which is way more cramped that living out of my car. Probably. I don’t have a car, but I can imagine it’s pretty cramped.

I’ve upgraded to Leopard, and the thing that I love the most is Mail. This might be a function of starting this tech support business, and my dissertation slowling coughing itself to life, both of which are putting more things I actually need to pay attention to in my inbox.

You see, it’s all about the to do list. In the before-time I’d get an email that said “hey dude, you need to fucking do a thing” and I would either
a) do it right away
b) put it off for later and basically ignore it
c) fire up iCal and make a to-do item for it

Now however, my route is clear. Mail 3 in Leopard allows me to highlight a relevant part of the message and click a button to turn the selected text into a to-do item, one that is linked to the email that spawned it. So if I forget who exactly I was supposed to “do a fucking thing” for, or some other part of the task’s context that resided in the email, I can find out immediately.

And of course, they’re stored in my inbox, so the fact that my iPhone doesn’t actually sync to do items is marginally less of a show-stopper. I can’t mark them as done from the phone, or trace them back to their context, but it’s better than nothing which is what you get the other way.

One problem with creating to-dos in this way, however, is that they remain bound to your email, unable to be assigned a calendar (they show up in iCal as belonging to a new calendar with the same name as your mail account.