We're breaking up

It's difficult when you're in a relationship where one partner just doesn't care about the other. No matter how many times the one in pain tries to get the offending partner in line or to logically discuss the issue, the behavior just never stops. In fact, sometimes it gets worse. It's this type of scenario in which I recently found myself. I had been tolerating it for months, and finally I just went ahead and bit the bullet and ended the relationship.

Goodbye Yahoo Mail. It was fun while you didn't serve me up annoying ads or load my computer up with impression cookies. We had a good run. Finally, even though you provide my broadband connection, I just can't bring myself to continue using your self-serving and crappy interface. I'm tired of all the visual spam. I couldn't understand why you continued to blast me with all those horrible Flash ads even when you get money from me every month. Isn't being a phone, mobile, and broadband customer enough for you? Do you really need me to shell out more money to enlist in your ass-raping Mail Plus service? You apparenly don't care. I know you can't be monogamous, and you have relationships with other people, and you treat them the same...even though they don't appreciate your spam in the same vein I've communicated to you.

Well, I've found someone else. Someone who supports IMAP for my mobile device (should I ever need it). Someone who has a cleaner interface, someone who I was actually seeing on the side. Someone who understands that you don't have to clutter the page with shite in order to make your advertising dollars. That's right. I'm with Gmail now...100% all the time. I've already fetched my mail from you, and updated my settings on my Yahoo account so I don't ever have to come to your mean-spirited page ever again. Gmail will take all my Yahoo mail and display it nice and cleanly for me. I might still take advantage of your email aliasing tool, which allows me to create dummy email addresses that pipe to my main account, but again...Gmail will pull all of your tainted content for me, and I never have to see a gaudy ad on your face ever again.

It feels good to be rid of you, Yahoo Mail. I hope you can walk away from this relationship and take something useful with you: listen to your users. They are getting more savvy every day, and they won't continue to settle for your sub-par environment. And by the way...size does matter. Gmail gives me more storage space. I'm up past 6 gigs and counting.

Yahoo Mail users who are in the same abusive relationship and ready to get all 'Farrah Fawcett on a Burning Bed' can find instructions on how to migrate their contacts over to Gmail by exporting them and then fetching your existing Yahoo mail.

End the cycle of violence.

Peace in the middle East, and although I Heart Huckabees, I don't like Mike.

Yahoo-Microsoft and Google cookies with 2 year old milk

The San Jose Mercury News c/o Bloomberg News reports that Yahoo! is poised to be purchased per industry analysts...

The chance Yahoo will put itself up for sale has increased after the most-visited U.S. Web site lowered its revenue forecast, according to Stanford Group. Microsoft is a candidate to buy the company, analyst Clayton Moran said, reviving previous speculation.

...whoa.

Does that mean that all the ATT-Yahoo! email domains change to Hotmail after the merger? Gosh darn golly that would suck.

Google is also changing its cookie retention policy. Cookies are little bits of information stored on your computer when you visit a website. They allow sites to customize content for a user, help shopping cart technology remember your order, keep track of various credentials by uniquely identifying the user's point of contact, and other covert things that lull you into a dreamy complacent state of perception.

There have been some concerns surrounding privacy since the inception of cookies, but with the meteoric rise of the Googleplex PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER folks have been clamoring that the search/ad giant stop becoming big brother. I don't think they really set out to be big brother...it's just that everything they offer and provide is web based, and customization at this point relies on retaining information about the user...by using cookies.

Under the new policy, the cookies would expire automatically after two years, instead of in 2038 as is currently the case. However, the two-year period could get automatically extended when users revisit Google's search engine, so one might have to avoid Google for a full two years to see the cookie automatically expire.

This really doesn't address much in my opinion, because what about all those petabytes of server log data the Google farm stores? The best way to defeat cookies is to remove them from your machine. This process takes about 30 seconds to 3 mins in my humble estimation, depending on how active an internet user you are.

Running Microsoft? Here are the steps to delete cookies.
Mozilla Firefox? Bing!