Last Updated 6/17/2004 by dickdiamond.com

6/17/2004

Dodged a Bullet

It's weird, but that's how I felt two nights ago when I finally finagled myself a gmail account. I was right on the verge of a panic attack, realizing just how disconnected and irrelevant I had become. There was a time in my life when I would have expected to have a gmail account on April 2, if not before (they announced the service April 1). There was also a time (not excluding roughly the last two months) when I would have spurned the idea of caring about such a thing. I mean really, what's so great about the bleeding edge? Bleeding usually hurts.

But I'll tell you what's so great: being one of the first to be able to leave the jokers at hotmail and Yahoo behind. Because you know, the state of web-based e-mail has gotten pretty pathetic as of late. Hotmail is virtually unusable due to size restrictions, spam bombardment, server latency and downtime, and pathetic page load times due to advertising saturation. If it wasn't for Outlook Express--and hotmail access via OE is still a "beta" feature that might go away any minute--hotmail would be literally unusable instead of just seemingly unusable. Yahoo is a little better, but not much. And since they've decided they have to play the game against gmail, they've given us freeloaders 100megs of space, and anyone who pays 2 gigs. And you know what, since they did that the web interface has basically stopped working.

In any case, this has sort of put the fire under me to . . . I don't know, do something. First step, maybe, convert this blog to blogger.

6/15/2004

Awaiting My Return to Media Whoredom

I don't know why, but I've suddenly become obsessed with getting a gmail account. Not so obsessed, mind you, that I'm willing to pay for it—though I did have a winning $0.16 bid on E-bay today for a gmail account, but the auction was cancelled by the seller in the last few seconds. Normally I'm happy to avoid the mass hysteria of these viral marketing gimmicks. My interested in Friendster fizzled pretty quickly, and I never even got invited to Orkut. And this has been something of a badge of honor for me—being able to avoid these tragically hip circles. But gmail is genuinely interesting to me. So, if you're sitting on one of these babies, please invite me.

6/3/2004

Apple's New Secure Keyboarding Initiative

Here's another one from the famous people suffering with Macs file. Check out this "feature" on the new iBook: disappearing key labels!

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