My, my, my. How far Hotmail has come. How far down…
My, my, my. How far Hotmail has come. How far down, that is. Remember back in the day, when Hotmail was a useful email tool where you could check your email from anywhere, quickly, simply? Then other online email services came around, and spam became a problem, and while the other services took steps to deal with it, Hotmail just bent right over and said “Take me”. Why? Who knows? Perhaps they were promised large amounts of money by the spammers. Perhaps they made a pact with the aliens. In any case, they’re useless now. The service Microsoft paid US$3 million for all those years ago has become worthless garbage. My old hotmail account from 1997 was spammed over even at the highest “anti-spam” setting, so I opened another, which was overrun within about a month, and I used up my auto-blocking of 250 entire domains in a couple of weeks. There’s no use trying to open another. It’s history. Nice going, Bill. I know an entire IT department that would be perfect for you. I called them up yesterday to ask when our Internet connection would be fixed. “What’s wrong with it?” the IT guy asked.
“Oh, nothing. It’s just been cutting off every few minutes for the last three weeks for every single computer in the building,” I volunteered. “You might have heard about it.”
“No, we haven’t heard anything about that.” Sarcasm, of course, went right over his head. “What websites are you visiting when it does that?”
“All of them.”
“Are you sure? You might be visiting some strange websites…”
“Oh, forget it. Go back to your blocks.”
Today just sucked, job-wise. I was filled with loathing for my place of employment and anything else that kept me indoors, stuck in an office all day today. And the motorcycle downstairs is gone. Apparently they were doing research on what people thought of it and how much they would pay for it. Unfortunately, the people didn’t think to let people ride the thing, just look at it. For all I know, it’s crap to ride.
After work I rode up through the upscale neighborhoods to the southeast of us, to the edges of the mountains, parked my bike and just walked around listening to the cicadas and barking dogs. It was nice, but a little spooky; hardly anyone was around. Living up there would be nice, but I’ve been wondering how it would be to live by oneself in one of those places. Maybe it’s a little less lonely in the city. Perhaps the noise of cars downstairs is the one thing keeping me sane.
My roomate, the guy at the English Digest place, left me a list of questions for the interview, with instructions on how to write my answers so that beginning students could understand me. That’s a bit much, I think. I’ll do the interview, but they’re going to have to simplify it themselves, I think. Either that or pay me to do their job for them. I could certainly use the extra money. I’m supposed to meet with the head guy there, a Canadian, on Friday after work.
