Ever since Sparrow Mail went the way of the dodo,¹ the search for a good email client has been on. Sparrow continues to work, but it never fully matured as an email client and will never again be supported. Sparrow therefore is not a good long-term option. I still use Sparrow on my laptop and on my iPhone, but I’ve moved back to Apple’s Mail.app on my desktop system.

This morning’s email includes an email by the makers of my favorite email client for the Mac and for iPhone: Sparrow Mail. At the top of this email is a simulacrum of Sparrow’s logo, but drawn with Google’s trademark colors. The email starts off with this cheerful news:

We’re excited to let you know that Sparrow has been acquired by Google! You can view our public announcement here, but I wanted to reach out directly to make sure you were aware of the news.

On the heels of last week’s death of the man who turned Unix into a popular consumer product, I am sad to learn of the passing of Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system. He was a 1998 laureate of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his part in the invention of both C and Unix.

Steve Jobs died today.

Today’s news says that Rand Paul is opposing legislation that purports to make gas pipelines safer. Many are jumping on this as an example of Tea Party resistance to any measure that might cost business some money, even if it will save lives. A brief look at the bill raises some concerns about whether it actually addresses any safety issues. Regardless of the merits of the bill itself, it raises the question: how do we go about ensuring safety? If it is not the job of the government, how would market forces prevent tragedies like the San Bruno explosion last year?

Like many Americans these days, I’m hunting for positive cashflow and investigating ways in which I can trade my time and effort for paper I can turn around and trade for food and lodging and art supplies. And in this day and age, the way to do that is through a variety of websites that connect job seekers with employers.

I was teaching myself C out of the Kernighan and Ritchie book (second edition, so you know I’m a poseur johnny-come-lately) when I tried to pick up Java. This was 1996 and my head was filled with «what if» scenarios that are still as absurd today as they were then. You know, like «what if all applications were OpenDoc components written in Java?» Which is second only to «why can’t we all just get along?» in it’s naïveté. But anyhow, I had nothing better to do than buy computer books and pretend that someday I’d have some use for the knowledge they contained.

For background, please read the article from news.com.

I don’t know why I care much about the fate of Apple, but I’ve been trying to follow this story along, and I am hopeful about Apple’s future. Although I still wouldn’t buy a Mac for myself (we’ll see how their NeXT-generation machines look? I’m keeping an OpenMind on this issue :-) ), I think that Apple has been a great presence in this industry and that it would be a real shame for them to just disappear.