And This Is Why I Don't Use Hotmail

...or Gmail, or any other 'cloud'-based email servers. One reason, anyway. Because things have this nasty habit of disappearing..

Not often, mind you. It's not something you can predict. Most emails sent to me from Gmail or Hotmail get through just fine, building my trust bit by bit until I feel I can rely on the cloud to rain on me every single time. And then, inevitably, something important goes poof.

Now, that linked story above is more serious: actual received messages going poof. Neat trick, that. Way to build my confidence.

Time was I used to have nearly infinite patience with computers. That was back in the days of BASIC. Between my place, my dad's, and school, I became relatively fluent in Atari, Commodore and TRS-80 dialects of Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, with a smattering of Apple and IBM BASIC thrown in just because. I still recall hours and hours of transcribing programs from COMPUTE! magazine, then, often, even more hours spent debugging my transcriptions.

Debugging never used to bot her me, much. I viewed it as a challenge. Okay, the computer's not doing what I'm telling it to. Why not? What's it doing instead? There's one wrong character somewhere in this eight hundred lines of code...what is it? Finding and killing bugs was immensely satisfying, a real accomplishment.

That was back in the days when machines required you to learn Computer if you wanted to communicate with them in any meaningful way. Later on, of course, machines learned English--

--well, no, that's not really what happened. Instead, the Computer language morphed into some strange pictograph system and the primary communication device changed from a keyboard into a rodent--

(have I ever mentioned how much I HATE mice?)

I pretty much gave up on the Computer language when it abandoned all semblance of English. Some rekindling occurred in second year university, when I discovered the Unix shell. One of my programs ran to over five thousand lines of code. It didn't do much except make it considerably easier to avoid going to classes where professors would read textbooks at me.

Then the Net came along and caught me but good. I abandoned all pretence of using a computer for anything useful, instead spending more time than you'd believe surfing. Search my name on Usenet and you'll discover almost fifteen hundred posts, many of them quite lengthy.

I said all that to say this: If a computer's not doing what I want it to, I no longer feel it's my fault. And I have no patience whatsoever any more. With any computer issue, my immediate reaction isn't gee, I wonder why this is happening and how I can fix it but Eva, what the hell is going on here? Can I scrub the bathroom and suck out the cesspool while you restore this to its proper state?

I'm a creature of habit, and one of the habits drilled into me by long years of dial-up access is: don't open any more Web pages than you have to. And since Gmail and Hotmail require you to open a new webpage with every action, that can simply be restated as don't use Gmail or Hotmail.

Honestly, I don't get the appeal. I've been told the best thing about Gmail is that you can log into your mailbox from any computer anywhere. Hell, I can do that two different ways--either directly, from my ISP's home page, or using a nifty-neato site called mail2web. It's kind of like buying bottled water when you've got a perfectly good tap. At least Hotmail's free. Then again, you get what you pay for, right?

I could maybe understand an auxiliary Hotmail account to deal with sites that contributed to spam...if I ever got spam. I think maybe I've seen maybe three spam messages in the past two years.

And now we've got Hotmail burning up messages. Definitely not my fault. Definitely not something I'd care to risk (although I have to say, leaving your only copy of something important way up in the cloud somewhere strikes me as--well, I believe the correct medical term is batshit crazy.)