Review

If you’re ever tempted to purchase something from Tiger Direct….don’t.

Try your best to overlook their gigantic and shiny marketing campaigns budget trick you and steal your money festivals in print. Even if they have the BEST price.

Refrain. Pay someone else an extra $4.

This is two thousand and fucking eight. It doesn’t take 12 days to get a box from Indiana to Tennessee.

I have been a hardcore mac user for a long time but I have to say the mail client offerings are lame, at best. This year, we added a PC to my workstation area so I could become even more familiar with the various desktop environments (Kubuntu, Vista, WinXP) and so I could have a mail client that would interface with our new Exchange server. I installed Outlook 2003 and had been pretty pleased with going a step up, but there were some features still missing. Features that would take Outlook from a good mail client to being a great mail client.

Specifically I was looking for an e-mail scheduler. I like to email myself and others reminders and had been using a web based service to do this, but sadly it went from being a freebie to a pay service. I decided if I was going to pay for something, I might as well find a robust solution that would meet my needs.

After poking around online a little I found MAPILab’s Toolbox. I had been searching for an email scheduler but I ended up finding SO much more. I read their list of features and found myself thinking “Yeah, that would be a great thing to be able to do,” or “I never thought about doing that, but now that I know I can, I really think I need to be able to.”

There are 18 (!!!) components to this toolkit which overwhelmed me at first. Thankfully, MAPILab has apparently done their homework. You can enable all 18 components or only the ones you need so your toolbars/menus don’t get cluttered unnecessarily. I found the interfaces to be intuitive and extremely functional with advanced settings that other more expensive and less useful plug-ins/add-ons didn’t offer.

MAPILab’s website also has something that I was missing from other offerings: lots of screen shots. I could see right away before I had even installed the program that it was going to be a powerful app that was going to solve all of my mail client woes.

Here is the part where I will feebly try to distill my experience with Lolita down to a few paragraphs and maybe some trite insights. I had seen parts of the movie with Jeremy Irons loooong ago, so I knew sort of what I was in for. I needed to experience it myself in it’s book form to truly appreciate it.

First my main problem with the story was I couldn’t find someone to side with. H.H., you poor doomed nutcase, I don’t know what to say about how you handled things. Lo, you sure seemed to be a devious little shit…I do heart you.

At that age I would have given anything for someone to pay me any attention and done anything for someone to be in love with me. I suppose that is what pisses me off about the story most…that I would have condoned this sort of thing with the help of some serious emotional issues.

The sexual side of the book really didn’t affect me because I remember myself at that age and given half a chance at an older man, well…we’ll leave it there. The psychological insights Humbert produces near the end of the story about Dolly’s behavior in certain situations softened me up towards her. The story is written from his point of view and you only get to hear from Lolita when he lets her speak. It wasn’t until the middle of the book that I realized he was probably a rather miserable waste of flesh.

You don’t kidnap kids you’ve just become related to and then have sex with them on a cross country road trip. I don’t care how romantic you try to make it sound.

He denied her her own identity and sexuality. She was an orphan and she depended on him. She probably milked it for all it was worth. I hope she did. The whole way through the book I kept being led to think that Lolita was the stronger of the two. Until the end when it was her or him and I was happy to let him go. For Lolita to not need him or Cue anymore and find her own way.

I think Lolita will be the first book I can tolerate to read a second time. For some reason, I don’t believe that I could have absorbed it all one time through. There it is. I might change my mind later, but for now…that’s how I feel about it.