A slight case of overblogging

We'd intended to go to a leaving-do, a housewarming and maybe a gig last weekend, but on Friday night Mike was still suffering from the dodgy innards he'd had all week, so we stayed in and watched Stand By Me on DVD and had a pleasant quiet night in.

The other plan for Saturday was to bake Christmas cakes: I promised one each for my mum and grandma. The cupboard had everything I needed except for glacé cherries, and enough eggs and butter, so we headed out to the shops. Not entirely surprising but the local mini-tesco didn't have the cherries, so we headed further afield to Budgens and discovered them selling steak and kidney together, and also shortcrust ready-rolled pastry, and hence the idea for Sunday lunch was born. After an afternoon of cake preparation and lazing around waiting for it we decided we were just too worn out to go anywhere, so ordered pizza and spent the evening in front of the telly, watching Strictly Come Dancing (sorry), the first bit of Robin Hood (it's still appalling) and then both Touching The Void and Underworld - which were quite a contrast.

And on Sunday we spent the morning preparing the next cake, making steak and kidney pie and apple crumble. The pie came out fabulous (with mashed spuds, mashed swede and carrot, and leeks, yum), and we were all stuffed afterwards, despite not getting lunch til 3:30. Mike left after lunch leaving me to a quiet afternoon and evening of reading, and by teatime I only had room for a bowl of crumble and custard - a bit disappointing after the success of the pie. I also put the second cake on, and forgetting to set a timer when I thought "just half an hour more" it got about 2 hours overdone. Thankfully at gas mark 1 this isn't a complete disaster, but it won't be quite as nice as the other one.

Monday night was the last bit of our anniversary, a year since Mike asked if he could call me his girlfriend and I agreed. So we went out for dinner to Charlie Chan's since Mike hadn't been before. To be honest I found the mixed hors d'oeuvres to start were a bit disappointing by usual standards, but the rest of the food was great and we had a lovely time. Then we retired to Mike's, where he was sweet enough to not mind me spending the rest of the evening playing Nethack. He's a darling.

Tuesday was a bit of an odd day. Staying at Mike's means I get to my desk at about 8:10am, and instead of getting straight to work I decided to carry on with my nethack game. I've been playing in the /dev/null annual tournament, which takes place over the whole of November, and I was desperately close to ascending (=winning). Despite some setbacks I made it (I've posted about it over on rec.games.roguelike nethack, Message-ID: <3xm*-wWwr@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk> , Google Groups link). This left me feeling high as a kite and wobbly with excitement. It's a good game OK and I've only won it twice. Later though I got an email back from Microsoft explaining their side of the Hotmail problem I've been talking about in earlier posts, so I passed it on in the local newsgroup thread on the subject, expressing how disappointed I was that the problem couldn't be solved. Ian took this as a personal dig and rather shouted at me in his response, which left me feeling all weak and wobbly and upset really. Still, when I explained it wasn't meant to be a dig at him and pointed out I had in fact thanked him for his help he did apologising for snapping at me. Serious emotional swings and roundabouts, and on such silly subjects. I really do need to learn a thicker skin though, especially to stop feeling so awful when my friends disagree with me about something.

Still, the fact that nothing can be done has provided the impetus to change, and now all my outgoing communications have my new email address on, I've sent a change-of-address notice to all my hotmail correspondents, and I'll update my contact details post too. If you want to update address-books I'm now on eleanor@the-blairs.co.uk - though unless you're on hotmail all my other addresses should continue to work too. For the avoidance of doubt this address does not go to or via Gmail.

And yesterday was pretty ordinary, with a pleasant quiet evening at Mike's of veggie chilli and nachos, nethack (him), reading (me) and cuddles. Tonight is the regular university computer people gathering, and then we'll probably head over to the pub for a bit to help celebrate Mobbsy's birthday (Happy Birthday!). And tomorrow we're back to Friday again, and Dirty Pretty Things at the Corn Exchange supported by Larrikin Love.

Lets first make it clear that I'm not a gmail-is-evil person. It seemed quite a few people commenting weren't sure which side of the fence I was on. And it was interesting watching people trying to convince either me or each other of each side of the argument. I'm partly sorry I asked, because it has led to people getting worked up about it again which isn't what I was after.

Basically I'm aware that some of my friends are really genuinely unhappy about communicating by email when that email is going to end up in Google's database. Especially so when it's not obvious: like mailing lists or people who forward their email from another address. I was curious just how far this strong feeling goes because to be honest it's a complete bloody nuisance, and I'm sorry if it makes me selfish to feel that way.

At the moment I basically have three mailboxes, and none of them is good enough.

My work mailbox is reliable and has fairly good anti-spam measures too. It's a stable reliable mail system under the watchful eye of admins I know and trust who are paid to keep it that way, and no-one dislikes it. It's rare to unheard of for mail not to get through, and it's always been possible to fix any such problems. But it's for work, I'd never find personal stuff in amongst it, and it's not supposed to be for more than minor personal use anyway.

My main personal mailbox has an admin I know and trust, and does a pretty good job of filtering out spam. I read mail on it locally with a unix mail client I'm happy with, I can look at the logs and see what has actually happened to mail, and it has an email address which I've been using for some time and which is in everyone's addressbook. The problem is it's very strict about what mail it accepts. To a certain extent you can turn off the most aggressive bits and work around it, but basically now and then something happens and some people just can't mail me. At the moment no mail from hotmail can get through. My boyfriend and my sister can no longer send me mail. And the admin just doesn't have the time or effort to work out how to work around it, and has admitted he doesn't have the inclination either. It's just not good enough any more, which is a real shame.

And my third mailbox is on gmail. I'd rather I could access it by IMAP instead of only webmail, POP or by forwarding mail to another address, but the webmail is actually pretty good. The anti-spam is really good, considering the deprecated lnr@lspace.org address now goes there, and has been on the web and usenet for years and gets lots of junk as a result. I've not yet found anyone who can't mail me there. But some of my friends just don't want to communicate with me there. And specifically the admin of my main mailbox is one of them, and would be extremely unhappy with me forwarding that mail there.

So that's why I want to know just how many people feel strongly about gmail.

I'd really love any suggestions about what the hell I do now too. I don't want to keep changing email addresses. I don't really want to use a forwarding address that I can move around between suppliers either because that adds one extra layer where mails can get stuck and it's one where you have much less chance of being able to get at the logs and work out what's going on - especially as informal forwarding services tend to be run by friends who don't have the time to chase things down for one awkward user. And I don't know how the hell to *find* a mail provider who is not going to turn out to have one of these problems or another one altogether. I'm completely frustrated by the whole thing.

</rant>