BLOG

I have a couple of GMail accounts that I use. I also have a Yahoo account that I don't use do much. The main reason being that I got on to the GMail a few years back and happen to like it. It's really a matter of preference over anything else. Of course, once traveling, all of this changes.       From what I've seen (and really, I don't use my Yahoo all that much), GMail really flounders when you're outside the US. I don't know if they don't have enough servers in various countries or any number of reasons. All I know is that doing simple functions like checking my email or pulling up a list of contacts takes anywhere from five to ten times longer. When in Western Europe, the issue is a little less. When in Eastern Europe, the issue is a little more. It doesn't make it stop functioning of course, like friends who have been in Africa have witnessed, but it does make it a less enjoyable system to use. Do I hop right back on it when back in US America? You bet I do. For here, it is very, very fast and (for the last year) reliable.       All of this really makes me wonder why it is so slow because last year when I was traveling it was a great deal faster; only bogging down when messages sent back and forth started getting long. This year however, it was noticeable slower and if messages were long, much slower. Is there some great firewall around the US that screens everything or is it just a matter of Google not keeping up with the user base overseas?       In the end, I suppose it doesn't matter and even at its slowest, GMail still beats the hell out of the old days of email on dialup. Oh and it's free too. Can't hate the freebies.

As I was working on some code the other night, I started to wonder, "Who owns www.test.com and what on earth do they do with it?" You see, for myself and a great many others I know, when you need to test out something on a website, you'll often do things like enter an email of test@test.com. You don't do this to get a result, but more to test a mechanism. We all kind of do it without thinking and it's never for data that we really want to keep.       So, when you actually visit their site, you'll see that there is some kind of business running there. There must be no way that they are able to use their email though, since their server must be constantly inundated with all kinds of spam due to the age of the domain name and miscreants like myself and others who just toss addresses at their space without really giving a rip.       I sorta almost feel bad and might make something of an effort to stop this practice and use something non-existent like flark@flark.flark which simply can't be an address. But, as I look at it, it appears that the test.com people have only had their name for the last three years. I wonder who much they paid for it and if they realized what they'd be in for once they bought it. Maybe it's not so bad. Maybe they came by it through inappropriate means. I don't know. What I do know is that their website kinda sucks and that test@test.com is such an easy email to remember that maybe in the end, I'm musing about nuthin'.

Pretty awesome really. I've been doing this for over three years and finally someone gets pissed at me. What did this girl get pissed at you may ask? Yesterday's griping about Tom Ammiano? Nope. Dreadlocks and being a white person with them. Will her torrent of profanity make me rethink my stance on how digustingly lame I find these things? No. Not one bit. In fact, her complete craze about how we have a lot of the same feelings on things (environment, anti-consumerism, etc.) and shame on me for not seeing how "good" dreads are makes me realize one more facet about dreadlocks; they're a religion. Yeah, that's right I said it. A religion. Sure, you could say it's wrapped up in this whole rastafarian thing, but actually the white folk that grow them have got their own thing going on and I'm sure incredibly, radically, wickedly stoked not to be part of it.

I was rather shocked to find that when browsing through old messages that it's been just over two years I've been using Gmail. It's been a good journey to see it migrate from this clunky, somewhat unreliable system to the pretty damned smooth setup that they have now.       Obviously it and Google Maps are the main reason for the AJAX craze and with good reason. They're tight, efficient applications. As a recent visit to my mom's house with her dialup connection proved, they don't run all that fast outside of broadband, but such is life I guess.       I'm trying to think of all the things that have come about in the last two years of this system, but I suppose that beyong small feature requests, the two that were the most remarkable were the chat function and the recently released, improved phone client. Neither of these I use of course, which goes to show that even for a total web geek, just having a basic email system I can rely on, is all that I really need.

GMail is a pretty damn good webmail system. I've been using it for some time and have been quite happy. To have automatic virus scanning is great. To have automatic spam blocking is even better and has been a very useful thing for me to have.       Like any good quasi OCDer, I used to delete all the spam that would collect in my spam folder as soon as it was there. Then, upon realize that they deleted it after 30 days, I just thought, "Screw it. That time could be spent laughing at fat squirrels trying to climb trees." I started letting it collect and it was pretty amazing to see how much spam I would have received had I let it pass through. As it sits currently, there are about 1,010 spam messages sitting in that folder. Yeah, that's right, I get over 1,000 spam emails a month. And this is to an email that isn't listed anywhere. It was brand new about a year ago and this is how much junk hits it a month.       It's proof that you really need some kind of spam filter on your email and also proof that every piece of spam legislation (specifically CAN-SPAM) has been a waste of time and tax dollars. At least we get cutsie names for said programs.