Category: Technology

Yahoo has really sucked this week

So I use yahoo as my personal e-mail provider. I used to use Hotmail, a long low time ago, for quite a while, until Microsoft gobbled it up and in protest I started using Yahoo! I was brandonmoeller@hotmail.com – and now I’m brandonmoeller@yahoo.com.

Stick with the little guy, I thought. Of course, if I really cared about the little guy, I would have stuck with Juno. Does anybody remember Juno? I think it pre-dated GeoCities – and, yes, that was my first web space provider.

Juno was a dial-up ad-based system. You dialed up. It spat out your e-mail, then, disconnected. If you were lucky, and if the seven Houston numbers you had pre-programmed in weren’t busy. Man, those were the days.

But anyway, I remember having Yahoo mail back when you had, like, only a little bit of space. I was constantly deleting messages to keep from going over my limit. Then, one day, they opened up the floodgates … and now, size is no longer an issue. But I shouldn’t say that. You can only send like 20MB in one e-mail. Want twice that? You need to buy their premium product for like $20-30 a year, I believe. The premium product also allows you to export the e-mail into something like Mozilla’s Thunderbird and/or Microsoft Outlook. I’m pretty sure this used to be a free feature. Man, I should have configured it before they made it a revenue stream.

A screenshot of a Yahoo Mail fail.
A screenshot of a Yahoo Mail fail.

Today’s news that Yahoo will be incorporating Bing into its search system is likely what has my Yahoo mail on the fritz. It’s also probably why the search function on the Yahoo Groups has sucked for about a year or more … or, maybe like so many other Yahoo products, maybe they’ve just abandoned the Yahoo Groups Search function. It makes trying to moderate a group like VINELIST pointless … so I don’t, really, anymore.

Random thought of the moment: I miss San Antone.
Random thought of the moment: I miss San Antone.

Yahoo’s e-mail service is dead in the water so often lately – and so is it’s stock price, after today’s news. And I’m thinking about jumping. I guess it’s time for me to get a gmail account. Sigh. Maybe I’ll pay the premium fee for a Yahoo account, export all my e-mail to a client like ThunderBird, then I’ll get a free e-mail service that will also allow me to export to said client. With Google Wave coming up, and my current addiction to Google Reader, why the hell not jump onto the Google wagon. It’s not like they’re a large evil corporation or anything. Crap. brandonmoeller@gmail.com is already taken. What. The. Hell. Sigh.

Friday link post

It’s Friday, and it’s been a long week, and so here’s a collection of random links I’ve found this week that  you might find interesting. This week, I’ve the courtesy to break ’em up into subject areas.

"Them Navasota troopers ran me down / Escorted me right out of town / For cherry pickin squirrels and feedin dogs / And dreamin of Jamaica in a fog" -from "Cracklins," by The Gourds
“Them Navasota troopers ran me down / Escorted me right out of town / For cherry pickin squirrels and feedin dogs / And dreamin of Jamaica in a fog” -from “Cracklins,” by The Gourds

GEEK + TECH

ART

GARDENING

HYPER-LOCAL

MUSIC

MEDIA

RANDOM

End-of-the-week link explosion

Archive photo from July 22, 2007 : Today, when I picked Corina up for dinner, she asked if we were going to go get pizza, in that kind, not-really-asking tone. Why the hell not?
Archive photo from July 22, 2007 : Today, when I picked Corina up for dinner, she asked if we were going to go get pizza, in that kind, not-really-asking tone. Why the hell not?

Here’s a bunch of links I’ve found interesting this week.

I to dumb fer Opera UNite

OK. So, for the past couple of days, after seeing all the hype about Opera Unite, I’ve been trying to share photos between the two computers I use on a daily basis.

But for two days in a row, I’ve been failing, and today it looks like part of it is my fault and part of it is Opera’s fault. As of this writing, I can no longer see the homepage of my Opera Unite account at my primary daytime computer, but when I click on the “Photo Sharing” service, those photos pop up. So, I don’t know if some parts of Opera Unite is down or something – I was able to see my homepage of my Opera Unite yesterday …

Also, when I try to access the files I allowed it to share from home, those files are now unavailable because the “device (is) unavailable.” Now this one is my fault.

Lesson learned: the hosting machine must have Opera Unite up and running for the files to be shared (having the computer on and ready is not enough) and the receiving end can then insert the share link in any browser to access those files.

But that’s a problem for me. I’ve never used Opera before two days ago, when I heard about Unite, and I downloaded it on a whim.

I’ll keep trying, however, because I really like the ability to easily share content with someone by giving them a URL link. And at least the photo sharing service looks cool – so far, the media player service seems lackluster because though I can stream my home MP3 collection anywhere, I can’t shuffle it all. I can only shuffle each folder (album) at a time. Sigh. I bet that’s improved, soon, though for now – though I plan on not giving up on Opera Unite, I think I’m also going to check out DropBox (mac) and Windows Mesh thingy. I’ll fall in love with one solution, soon enough, and then, I will be one synced puppy … or something.

P.S. I’m also too stupid to know how to rename folders in Google Reader. Thankfully, Elena Santos ain’t.

MySpace: Good riddance or good luck?

MySpace is dying.

Which is sad, because Kim found me on MySpace but now we spend all of our time on Facebook and … well, Kim only found me on MySpace because I was smart enough to use my own name and she could have also found me through www.brandonmoeller.com but, I mean, well … man! I’m a geek.

Meanwhile, Facebook is gobbling up the audience of people who want to connect to their friends on a social network. It could easily be replaced by the next big thing that also can’t figure out how to make money, but that’s not Twitter because Twitter is useless.

Jeff, over at Broken Record, argues that MySpace should concentrate on what Facebook never figured out how to do: Music and performance art.

“I’ve thought for a while now that MySpace should consider focusing primarily on entertainment – movies, music, comedians, etc. There is a real opportunity to fill a void, particularly since they have the interface and the fan base already in place. It’s doubtful they’ll follow that advice, but a site with the size and resources of MySpace could dominate online music.”

I agree with Jeff (and I commented on his blog) … but one of the reasons I dread touching MySpace is because it allows its users to do some very uncouth (rhymes with Sonic Youth) things, like installing way too many bandwidth-clogging graphics and cringe-worthy design.

MySpace: A place for music logo.
MySpace: A place for music logo.

I guess we’ll just have to see if Murdoch’s MySpace can recover from its downhill trend in a Facebook world … and what it might mean for local indie artists like Chase Hamblin, who doesn’t really have his new album online and available anywhere but MySpace and a handful of brick and mortar shops in Houston. Sigh. And it’s too bad, I’d order his new one if I could, but don’t really wanna hear it thru MySpace at this moment. And, I won’t be able to make Friday’s CD release party at the Continental Club.

An exercise in randomness

There’s a lot out there today, and my brain is scattered across so many different things …

  • Did you know that cinnamon, cayenne pepper and Diatomaceous Earth may be great solutions to an invasive sugar ant problem? That’s according to Dollar Stretcher.
  • The torrent Pirates strike back with a pay-to-hide-yourself scheme that promises to not deter their jail time.
  • The Plantwoman – a favorite blogger of mine – responds to my comment and offers a suggestion on how to install a soaker system to ease up the daily watering chore.
  • Maybe I’ll go swimming Friday before my indebted servitude to my cousin’s wedding rehearsal dinner. I am her official wedding photographer. My fee: She pays for my babysitting Saturday night because my five-year-old daughter can’t come to the wedding because she booked her reception in a bar that doesn’t allow kids under the age of 10. The bar is, apparently, A-OK with hosting a reception for just-married couples who are 18. What’s up wit dat?
  • Opera Unite is freaking awesome.  …. I can’t wait to play with it some more, as I attempt to make my home computer more accessible – without depending on the cloud. We. Are. The. Cloud, it would seem, with Opera Unite.
  • As inspired by LifeHacker, I’ve created my own collection of my favorite Firefox Add-Ons … https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/brandonmoeller

That’s it. Enjoy.

Google Wave won’t replace newspapers

Here’s a comment I just posted on the Buzz Machine’s story about Google Wave.

Don’t know what Google Wave is? Check out a video of the Google team announcing it at some geek conference.

Here’s my comment:

This could replace Facebook – it allows for better communication with more ability to import/export stuff for users who are focused on what matters to them: The people they know.

It won’t replace news gathering … and I don’t think that’s its intention at all.

However, though it appears to be 10X more powerful than facebook and 20X more powerful than standard e-mail alone, the question arises: Can it draw the audience that MySpace, Twitter and Facebook has?

The great thing about the other three social networks I just mentioned are that if you join, it’s not long before old friends and acquaintances start finding you. The more you friend, the more you find/find you. It grows and grows.

I wonder how one would search Google Wave for their peeps?