As a person who attends university, I have a problem. While I can use Mozilla Thunderbird to receive my email, I cannot use Thunderbird to send it, due to the blocks placed on their network…basically, they’re blocking port 25, and have no plans to open it up any time soon.

So far, I’ve been able to deal with the problem, but it’s been a bit of a pain. I get my email in Thunderbird, but then, for each account I want to respond to (and I have several), I then have to go to that account via webmail and respond there, meaning I have to login to several different places to get anything done. Well, that’s not why I moved to using a client a couple years ago. I moved so I wouldn’t have to do such a thing.

So, what to do? Well, in comes Gmail. They have a feature where you’re able to respond to email under several different email addresses. Input an email address, and they’ll send you a verification to that email. Confirm, and voila! You can respond to people via that email using Gmail. So, using this, combined with instructing my email addresses to forward to Gmail, the problem seems to be solved. I have yet to really see it work in action, so I’ll have to reserve my judgement. Using it this way, all my email will come to the same inbox, which makes it about equivalent to what Thunderbird’s Global Inbox does. I’m not exactly a big fan of that. For example, in Thunderbird, I have separate inboxes setup for all my email.

On the other hand, I have to do something. I want to be able to respond to my email without having to go elsewhere, and respond to it with the original message attached, and also avoid having to put in a subject line. I could copy the message to the compose email window, but I’m lazy in this respect. I don’t want to have to do it. So, hopefully, with Gmail’s labeling feature, this problem will be solved.

The other thing I don’t like is that Gmail is not bringing in the forwarded emails with the full address. Instead, it says something like, “something@something.com to mike”. Problem is that several of my emails are michael@something.com, so I don’t need all my emails saying “something@something.com to michael”. While you can mouse over the recipient or click “More Options”, with several emails now forwarding to Gmail, I’d prefer not to have to do that just to determine what email they mean. So, I’ll have to find a way to fix that.

Anyway, that’s it for tonight. Let the experiment begin!

I’m listening to the DJ Dan Live Podcast tonight. I’ll attempt to provide as much of an up-to-date summary of what’s going on, for those who can’t get a spot in the audience on iTunes or WMP.

12:53AM – Hanso is under house arrest, Mittlewerk is responsible for everything, and Rachel is Hanso’s daughter. The end? Only time will tell. But, one thing it is the end of…the end of the night for me. Time for bed.

12:32AM – Holy crap. Thomas Mittlewerk just blew up The Hanso Foundation building! Rachel gave us instructions to go to abc.com and view her final video, and with that, Dan signed off.

12:18AM – OMG!!!!!! Rachel!

12:10AM – Dan has been having some problems getting calls to air. He’s suggested everything from technical difficulties to The Hanso Foundations for reasons the calls are failing.

11:59PM – Dan feels that the Valenzetti Equation should be shared with the whole world, and that The Hanso Foundation should let the public see Gary Troup’s book.

11:44PM – The announcer, Johnny, just summarized TLE in about two minutes. 183 licks to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop. Dan will clearly have a mental breakdown if Rachel was The Man.

11:41PM – CONSPIRASPIES UNITE!

11:33PM – Top five mind-control substances in Apollo bars: 5)Lymon 4)Zantham Gum 3)Parsley 2)Donut Extract 1)Season 1 of MASH

11:29PM – Never knew how much of a jerk he is. 😛 Shut down three people so far.

11:24PM – Marvin the Martian? He claims he knows about TLE. And now Dan is about to take calls.

11:18PM – After discussing the virtues of roaches, Dan is going on a philosophical rant about whether or not Lost, Hanso, and himself are real.

11:07PM – Nothing we didn’t know, but Dan just confirmed Rachel Blake’s participation in the show.

11:05PM – He’s on!

11:02PM – Nothing Yet. A few minutes ago, some guy said they’re working out technical problems. Will update again when he gets on.

Sorry, I’m watching/laughing/partially agreeing with O’Reilly right now.

Today’s Dymersion is about a small piece of old news, that of the controversy over the Facebook mini-feeds. Now, while I agree that the feeds just make finding information all that easier, and Facebook has some responsibility to let people opt-out or remove themselves from the information, some of the things I saw during the period were just disgraceful. Campaigns taking what should be a good cause, and using it to complain about things that just don’t make sense.

Look, the fact is that most information on Facebook is opt-out. You don’t HAVE to provide almost any of the information on there. Likewise, you don’t HAVE to accept anybody as a friend. Heck, you can even set what’s called a “Limited Profile,” and let certain people see less information than your closest friends. Trying to blame Facebook for the information you can control is ignorant. They have two responsibilities in my eyes: 1) Not sharing your information without permission (see below) and 2) Not making that information easier to find than had been already possible.

Like I just said, Facebook has a responsibility not to share information with third parties without permission. So, I was a little angry when I learned of this “developers” program have me opted-in with even asking me. I never got any notice of it, or any screen asking me to opt-out if I didn’t want it. Now, while I understand these are not advertisers, once they have this information, they can do pretty much whatever they want with it. That is ridiculous.

However, other than that, only you can control what people see. Facebook can’t do that for you. What they can do is make sure the information is as difficult as possible to get, without making it too inconvenient. I considered the mini-feed too convenient. Otherwise, it’s up to you.

Time for some more plugging. Just found this guy out. He has some pretty awesome entries for the few I’vew read so far, and he loves to travel! Well, so I’m guessing, given the huge amount of places he seems to have visited. Check it out. It’s definitely going into the list at your right!

MySpace is under scruitiny again after a 14-year old was sexually assaulted by a 19-year old she met on the website.

It seems that MySpace is going under the microscope a lot lately, and its easy to see why. The whole idea of an open, easy-to-use community center is attractive for those who’d want to harm someone. Likewise, a website that lets you provide a lot of details about yourself is equally as attractive. MySpace is both. Luckily, they’re being smart and trying to protect kids.

They’ve already introduced the partial profile, meaning that kids under 16 only have part of their profiles shown unless you’re on their friends list. They also started introducing advertisments aimed toward these users, warning them of the danger of associating with unknown adults. This time, they’ve taken the efforts several steps further. Users above eighteen will no longer be able to request to be friended unless they know the person’s email address or full name. I’m a little skeptical on this one…it seems to me, that unless you are tons of miles away from them, finding out this information might not be so difficult.

MySpace also now allows anybody to use the partial profile feature, and they’ll be able to opt only contact from people in their age group. In addition, MySpace is going to change advertising to not show more adult-oriented advertising to kids. Good…maybe it’s because I’m already over 18 and they’re targeted at me, but seeing those “True” ads on a website known for its youthful userbase is a little creepy to me.

In the end, though, no matter what MySpace does, keeping yourself safe comes down to common sense. The website can only do so much – you must be proactive in keeping yourself safe. I don’t want to preach, but it’s true. The dark-side of the Internet is nothing new. It’s happened on other kinds of websites, and in Internet Relay Chatrooms for years. One thing MySpace cannot do is effectively stop a kid under 14 from joining. If there’s anything I know from my time on the Internet (and from personal experience), an age barrier is NOT really a barrier at all. So, nobody can really complain to MySpace about that. So, in the end, a combination of the technical, and the common sense, provides the most effective protection.

In his open letter to SixApart, Paul Scrivens writes about his recent transition from the Movable Type blogging platform to that of WordPress. According to Scrivens, his jump to another software came for two reasons, which are both related. The first was that he lost data from his database twice during his tenure using MT. The second reason, and possibly leading to the first as a result, is that he feels that now Six Apart is a corporate entity, they have become distant from the community that made them into what they are.

I’ve noticed that similar feelings have been expressed in other areas of the web quite apart from blogging companies.
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Quite the double entendre in the title, yea? *Cough* Get your mind out of the gutter!

But, really, I’ve had a link to the awesome Questionable Content to your right since at least January 6th, and have yet to explain it. QC is a webcomic by Jeph Jacques that’s all about the lives of an indie music listening, East Hampton, MA residing, early twenties (although a couple of the characters are still in the *-teen years) group of people. If I recall correctly, the comic was started as a commentary of the music the author has listened to, and this commentary still pops up every now and then, but the comic has since developed its own unique and complex story, full of love, heartbreak, life, the universe, everything, and a great deal of hilarity to fill the spaces inbetween. I rarely listen to indie music myself, but the rest of the story attracted my attention enough that I’ve been reading it since shortly before I graduated high school in 2004.

The comic has been going on since late 2003 and currently is running a smooth tenure with 533 strips. Definitely worth a read. I’d recommend it!