My Technology is Abandoning Me

As most everyone who uses it must have heard by now, Google has announced that it is shutting down Reader. Sigh. Dude, that's my window to the internet! I will have to find another window through which to view the internet, and that's a hassle.

I remember there was some talk of Reader closing quite a while ago, but nothing came of it for so long that I had mostly forgotten about it.

I've also just been informed by my Hotmail account that Microsoft will soon be 'upgrading' this account to Outlook. This comes after several previous invitations to upgrade to Outlook, all of which I have declined on accounta I think the Outlook interface is ugly. And the only customization you can do is change from one glaring, dramatic color to another. I'm going to miss the little graphics you could put on your Hotmail account.

It's been a rough couple of days for my web habits. I suppose next I'll hear that Amazon is going to stop shipping to Massachusetts.

Clinging to Insecurity

I had the same password for my Hotmail account ever since I opened it, about 13 years ago. I know you're not supposed to do this, but I'd had it so long that it actually no longer met the minimum length requirements for passwords on Hotmail, so I figured anyone trying to hack it wouldn't guess an unacceptable password, right?

Apparently this logic was suddenly not good enough for Hotmail, after years of accepting it, because just this Monday (without warning!) I tried to sign in and it told me I had to change my password.

Sigh.

Again, I know you're supposed to change passwords regularly anyway, so this makes me more secure (I guess), but I keep automatically typing in my old password that I've been typing in for 14 years, and getting an error message, and it's kind of annoying.

That's my peevish comment of the day.

Everything Seems So Tainted Now...

It's funny how quickly one project can make you start seeing other things in a new light.

For example, I'm chugging away on this novel writing project, trying to get to 50,000 words by November 30 (about 18,600 so far), and today while writing an email, I had to remind myself that more words was not necessarily crucial in that context.

Because when you're aiming for a word count, all your normal habits of trying to be concise and find just the one right word for something go right out the window. Maybe normally I would say "unlikely," which is nice and to the point, but for NaNoWriMo, "not very likely" is much better. Three times as good, in fact!

So I was basically looking for the long way to say something to someone in a business email, which is not normally the recommended approach. My work emails tend to be probably longer than strictly necessary or desirable anyway, because I always want to explain everything in great detail, the better to avoid having to send another email later.

Fend off follow-up questions by smothering the person with information the first time, that's what I say.

It may not always be perfect for work, but it's an advantage in unreadable-novel-writing.

Bah!

Spam messages about unclaimed riches aren't even trying anymore. I received this convincing missive:

DEAR, I need you
for claim of
inheritance,
get back for
more details

Pathetic. Come on!

Where are the romantic tales about the uncle who was the prime minister of somewhere and died of malaria before dispensing his vast blood-diamond-based fortune? Or whatever?

I suppose it does have a weird sort of poetry. But if I'm going to get conned, I need more than weird poetry.

Bah, I say.

Also, blacklist. And delete.

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Email Failure

A couple of weeks ago I boldly waded in and dealt with my email inbox, by gum! I pruned that bristling thicket down to a manageable couple of screens worth. Just the things I still needed to pay attention to in some way, you know.

Now, a short time later, it's a bristling thicket again. I can't seem to master the fine art of immediately moving messages to folders, so I leave them in my inbox to remind me that I need to pay attention to them, and then sooner or later they're several screens back and I don't see them anymore to remember that I need to either do something about them, or, if the statute of limitations has expired, delete them or move them to a folder.

The weird thing is that I'm not incredibly bad at email correspondence. I generally do pay attention to the messages I need to pay attention to. I guess I just never get around to dealing with them afterwards.

Anyway, it's been a relatively minor but very persistent hinderance to my attainment of perfect workplace efficiency.

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Don't Email Me

Rob Lamberts, MD, on The Health Care Blog, writes about doctors receiving and responding to patient email: specifically, about why he personally doesn't do it.

Basically, it's because there's no way to be reimbursed for it, so he would be working for free, or worse:

Accepting emails from patients at this point would mean more time spent doing un-reimbursed tasks. Actually, it would potentially decrease our revenue, handling problems outside of the office (for free) instead of being paid for our services. Doing so would give us three options:

1. Working extra hours to make up for lost revenue.
2. Giving free care via email and just accepting less pay, seeing less patients total.
3. Spending less time with each patient to make up for the decreased revenue.

It's hard to argue with that logic. Many of us are in favor of getting paid for doing our jobs. I myself have been known to enjoy it from time to time.

One idea suggested by Dr. Lamberts is to charge a fee for an email consult (he suggests $20, specifying that it would need to be enough to discourage frivolous inquiries, could be applied to the cost of an office visit if one were indicated, and would have to be covered by insurance).

I could see this possibly working, although you'd have to work out how the fee would be collected. An online Email Order Form where you have to give credit card or insurance info before the message is sent would work fine, I imagine.

I found the post interesting because it acknowledges the theoretical value of email for medical practice (he is busy and would be happy to take care of questions remotely and not make patients come in if they didn't have to), but still finds it financially impracticable.

I guess the lesson is that even useful technology is no use if it costs too much.

Many of us, especially those who are familiar with both exciting technologies and economic systems in which money is exchanged for goods and services, have probably run into this concept before.

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Email Quirks

Random note on something about my work email system that's always struck me as weird: when you 'blacklist' a sender, it doesn't automatically delete the message.

So you have to select the spam message, blacklist, then select it again and delete it (then, if you want to be technical, you have to hit 'purge deleted' to actually remove it from the inbox, but that's a step I can live with since I see value to being able to recover deleted messages for a while).

It just seems like an unnecessary extra step. I mean, sure, I guess there could be times you want to blacklist a sender, but still keep the message (maybe you're forwarding it to your IT folk to say "hey, check out this ingenious spam" or whatever), but it can't happen often.

I'm used to Hotmail, where if you mark something as "junk" it automatically moves to the deleted folder.

Ah well. Different systems have different designs.

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Good News for Archives

As part-time guardian of a small archive, I am excited to hear (via Shakespeare's Sister) of the recovery of millions of email messages from the Bush Administration.

Politics aside, it would be a shame to lose so much information. This sort of thing will be gold to researchers and historians in the future (if they can sort through it all; 22 million emails is a lot!).

In the name of archives everywhere, I celebrate.

Save it! Save it all! Preservation rocks!

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Email-Inspired Musings

I got this friendly email message from the Windows Live Team thanking me for "using Hotmail for 10+ years!"

Wow. I guess it has been that long. I will now reflect briefly upon my history with the communicative medium of electronic mail. 

I first opened a Hotmail account as I was getting ready to leave college and the .edu address that was the only one I'd ever had. I spent a fair amount of time forwarding key messages to my new account so I could have them later. Ever with an eye on personal history, that was me.

Then I got my first post-college job, complete with a .com address, and of course there was no way I needed more than one email!--so I abandoned Hotmail for a while.

I later came around to the notion that having more than one email account was OK, particularly if one was personal and one a work account. The fact that the company owned the work account was not immediately important to me; I just wasn't thinking in those terms. If it had my name on it, it was mine, right?

When I decided that having a personal account as well made sense (there's no dramatic story there about how I got in trouble for sending personal messages from the company account or anything, I just gradually started to think more about the lines between the different parts of life), the Hotmail account I'd set up was still there, so of course I went back to it.

Unfortunately, it had been more than 6 months, or a year, or whatever the time limit was, since the last time I'd logged in, so all my carefully forwarded messages had been deleted. (Storage space was a bigger deal back in the day, you will recall, and they had these rules to keep things lean and tidy.)

Siiiigh. There went my extensive college correspondence, with all my youthful ramblings about classes and work plans and what family members were up to back home and so on. I still regret losing that. 

The lesson is, make backups. Or don't trust technology. Or log into your email accounts at least once every six months. Or that memory is fleeting. Or something.

But despite this crushing disappointment, I kept using the Hotmail account because it seemed to work OK and I already had the address set up. I was still interested in keeping the number of accounts I had to check low. 

Later I added another address for listservs and such, and a Gmail account when those were new and exciting, and I picked up a couple more .edu addresses, and changed jobs, so at the moment I have at least seven email accounts for various sections of my life that I check...sometimes, anyway. 

One of them remains this first Hotmail account, because habit. Also I have about a zillion saved messages in it, and everyone has the address in their address books already and it's so hard to send an update to get them to change it! 

Besides, Hotmail has served me well enough for the past 10+ years. We'll see if I'm still using this account after another 10+.

Perils of Distractedness

Know what I've just realized I hate?

I hate when I neglect to check my SLIS email account for, oh, about two and half months, because looking at Outlook is weird and poky and difficult on a Mac, and then I finally do check it and there's something I really wanted to have received and responded to, oh, about a month ago.

Yeah.

Serves me right for not being on top of my email accounts (or, I know, setting them to forward somewhere so I can check them all at once, but I kind of like having separate addresses for different things, if only I'd remember to look at them all).

Let that be a lesson to all my adoring followers: check your accounts on a regular basis whether you use them much or not!

This goes for social networking sites as well. I should really look at LinkedIn a little more often. Also, I suppose, ye olde Friendster. Second Life. Goodreads. And so on.