Today being the first day back, I spent most of the day responding to email. Too much mail. So after work I started a new project. The first part was get the mail servers to send udp packets to me whenever I get mail. That was easy, as was a command line receiver for those packets. Command line is fine and all, but for interactive notifications when you're doing other stuff it doesn't work so well. So since I've played with qt only a bit and gtk never, I decided java would be good and started trying to relearn Swing. It took a few tries, but I managed to hack out a program that instantiates messages in a box which hide themselves after 8 seconds. The box automatically resizes to fit however many visible messages there are, and hides itself totally when there are none. The multi-threading was relatively easy, the inter-object notification was a bit tricky. It's in a usable state and should be interesting to test tomorrow. I have to stop starting such insane geeky projects and trying to finish them the same night...