For obvious reasons of confidentiality I have to be non-specific with this gripe. I cannot understand how a major international corporation (not my company) can actually conduct business when their own offices have inferior technological capabilities. Imagine a multi-billion dollar company like IBM, Microsoft, Disney or General Motors having trouble browsing the web on a regular basis. It would never work. Yet somehow this unnamed corporation continues to have issues with e-mail and pages implementing SSL (which is used for their protection, no less).

My favourite part: my organization gets to hear about these issues while this other company attempts to assign blame for their incompetence on us. Uh, I do not think so.

Argh!

I cannot believe what I just did, and on purpose no less. I have always been a sort of packrat. Not so much the kind that keeps thousands of mementos from throughout time cluttered in my house, but in the way that I had every e-mail I sent and a transcript of every online conversation I had since 26 November 1999. Until now.

I decided to delete every e-mail sent before 2004 and remove every chat log that had not been updated in 2004. This may not seem like a big deal to some, considering the fact most people do not retain such records. It was nice to be able to refer back to a time, place or event and recall things or look-up information since forgotten, but in the end I have realised recently my live can be simplified greatly by leaving a lot of my historical baggage in the past.

I have spent a good portion of my weekend doing the same thing to my house; purging my life of things no longer used or wanted. I have really never been one to like a lot of "stuff," but you could not tell that by looking at all the things I have uncovered. Bags and bags of junk now sit at the curb, like all those ones and zeros now entering the electronic hereafter, a shadow of life now discarded.

I have also started to apply this refined view in my interpersonal relationships. Holding on to things to the point where years later they still bother me is unhealthy. So I hold no more ill-will and no grudges; I have forgiven all sins.

Next I will attack some remaining boxes, a closet, my documents partition on my hard drive and my mobile telephone address book.

Letting go feels so good.

I am starting a new web-based e-mail service called WGAFMail. That is, "Who Gives a Fuck Mail." I am so tired of reading about GMail on countless websites. I cannot really fathom what the big deal is still. Wooo… one gigabyte. If you need that much space to store e-mail messages, your mother did not teach you how to throw away things when you are done with them. I also do not understand why anyone who has their own domain name would want a third-party e-mail address so badly anyway. I have one for emergency use in case something on my server goes pear-shaped, but this obsession in the blogging community over GMail and the precious goddamn invites people crave so badly is ridiculous. Get over it already and resume writing interesting stories about your life, work and day to day experiences.

The people around here are getting an early start launching fireworks tonight left and right. It sounds like I live in a bad part of town where rival gangs are having a major disagreement over something and have decided to solve the problem with bullets.

Anyone doing anything exciting for the three-day (for many) holiday weekend?