Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with repeating

Thunderbird and Lightning, very, very frightening me!

maudlin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:23:02 -0800

My Thunderbird/Lightning combo has been behaving oddly ever since a failed attempt to create a repeating event yesterday. It wiped out all events for March and stalls whenever I launch it now, although once launched, it seems to work smoothly. I've been able to add non-repeating events back into March and they are staying in place. My profile is backed up. What next? I'm running Windows XP SP3 and Thunderbird 2.0.0.19, the most recent update.

I tried creating my first repeating event in Lightning yesterday (every Thursday, starting March 12), set all the parameters, and clicked Save and Close, but nothing appeared on my calendar. I tried again with no results. I closed, relaunched, and found all my March calendar data was gone, although everything else seemed fine.

Now whenever I relaunch, my usual setup of panes in the Mail view do not appear immediately. I can see the folders on the left and the list of mail headers in the center, but my Events and Tasks panel at the right does not show. Then the entire screen goes white for a couple of seconds, then redraws and shows the same view I saw when I first launched. If I switch to Calendar view, then switch back, after a moment's lag, I finally see my three column layout. I have tried one more time to create a repeating event and it still doesn't work.

So my inclination is to get a final backup of my profile and reinstall, but I'm concerned that there are one or more failed repeating events lurking inside my profile that would just cause this to happen again.

Is this a known issue? Is there anything else I should try before I reinstall?

How to Integrate "Repeating Tasks" Into a Text File To-Do System?

WCityMike — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:46:41 -0800

I recently switched over to a plain text file as my to-do list; I can structure it the way I want, it is an absolute cinch to access in any one of a hundred zillion different ways, it's crossplatform, and so on. However, I am running into one methodology I can't figure out how to translate into the "plain text" world, and that is repeating tasks. I am wondering how people who also keep their to-do lists in text files handle repeating tasks. I'd like to specifically exclude the solutions of loading repeating tasks into a calendaring program or employing a third-party application to create them (i.e. Taskpaper & AppleScript, or Remind). I'm really looking more for how you handle it in simply in the world of plain text.

Also, to open it up a little, I'm curious as to what little mechanisms or mindhacks or systems you may employ within your text-file to-do list, so please feel free to share that, too (although I am primarily interested in the repeating tasks question).

Thanks!

People who repeat themselves

yorick — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:41:43 -0800

I know a few people who repeat themselves quite often in conversation. They are doing me no explicit harm, yet I get impatient & sometimes a bit angry. In an effort to be more relaxed about such behavior, I'd like to know more about what drives people to be repetitive, and why it might strike a nerve with recipients such as myself. The most severe example is when I tell someone that I've already heard the story/comment they're about to tell me and they proceed anyway. I'm sure part of my diastase is due to them dismissing my "I heard this before" statement.

Some milder repetition that pushes my buttons, despite seeming harmless:
-- Describing the same thing/event repeatedly without adding new detail, just reiterating the same information with different words
-- Perfect memory is an unreasonable expectation, but after the 3rd/4th time being told something again, my buttons get pushed.

Any insight on this behavior & the reactions it inspires is appreciated. I want to make good on that live & let live thing.

How can I get the effect of a Dreamweaver template without the template?

sevenless — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:34:19 -0800

How can I make text in one cell on one html page appear in the same cell on a different subpage? Live and learn I guess. I have a website where every page has a table cell in the same place. Originally it was designed so that information, links, images, etc. could go in that space that was relevant to the information in the main part of the page--sort of like a sidebar. Now it appears that this is only going to happen on some of the pages.

My boss wants to maintain the page layout as it is, but we don't want that "sidebar" cell to be empty on some of the pages, so he wants to put the "news" content from the front page (which also has this sidebar cell) on all the pages where the sidebar is empty. Of course all the pages are more or less done now.

My website making skill is pretty limited, clearly. I'm using Dreamweaver 8, and I've determined that I probably could have solved this pretty easily with nested templates if I had started with them from the beginning. Now that it seems too late for that, is there a simple Dreamweaver way to change the text in one place and have the change reflected wherever else I say without wrecking the existing content on a subpage? Or, is there an HTML way that I could put the same code in each cell that then somehow grabs the text from somewhere and puts it in the cell (nicely formatted)?