Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days

Sync on arrival, please

It would be quite lovely if someone were to port the Sync on Arrival extension to Thunderbird 2. I've finally had to leave behind Thunderbird 1.5 because there are no more security updates for it, but the lack of this extension makes actually using IMAP a miserable experience.

I'll trade either review time or money (up to $20) for said update.

Office supplies

I'm looking for three items:

1. Office chair. Ideally with either good height adjustment or a footrest so that it will actually fit me. I plan to do a lot of sitting in this chair.
2. Computer desk. Must have a keyboard tray, etc. More importantly, ideally either the whole thing or at least the keyboard tray will be height-adjustable, and in particular will be able to become shorter. Ideally I could put the keyboard tray at 24" off the ground or lower.
3. Phone headset, for use with both a phone and possibly skype on a MacBook or MacBook Pro.

Any recommendations would be much appreciated.

Working group fun

Microsoft finally published their specific concerns about cross-site XMLHttpRequest. Sort of. There has been some discussion about the publishing method. And more discussion. It's worth reading the entirety of both those threads--the second one has some analysis of the click-through license.

What I find funniest about this is that I suspect that everyone involved really is operating in good faith and that there is just a serious mismatch of worldview going on. But maybe I'm just an optimist.

Phone and Internet service in the Boston area, and VoIP

I've been looking at my phone + internet options in Brookline. So far, the options seem to be, in no particular order:

• Comcast, either for just cable or cable + phone. I don't want their TV service.
• Verizon, either for just phone or phone + DSL
• Speakeasy, for either just DSL or DSL + VoIP

Of course getting any sort of hard price or service information from those first two is pretty much impossible... So what I was wondering is whether folks have any experience with any of the above, especially in the Boston region. What I've heard so far are some horror stories about Comcast's service, especially when people start to push a lot of data (say hg repos) around, and some good things about Speakeasy (everything but price, that is, but they only do static IPs, which is something I might want anyway).

Also, and this is really important, how well do Mozilla conference calls work over VoIP? What if there are hg repos being moved around at the same time? How easy is it to use an existing analog phone (which I'm quite happy with) with VoIP?

Anything else I should be looking into?

P.S. Yes, I know I'm just trying to partially offload the research onto someone else. Thank you in advance for taking on some of said research!