Problems with Hotmail...

This post is unrelated to Japan, teaching, and my life here, but it's something that has been bothering me. I posted almost the same post as this as comments on Ejovi Nuwere's blog (www.ejovi.net) but I wanted to post it here, too.

Has anyone noticed that features have suddenly been disappearing from hotmail?

Like the ability to arrange your mail by something other than from newest mail to oldest. You used to be able to click on the: "From, Subject, Date, Size" links and arrange it in either of the 2 possible directions. (like oldest to newest versusu newest to oldest, or names A-Z versun Z-A) Now they aren't links. You can't change the order. It is just from most recent to least recent.

And "Junk mail" used to give you a little number by it on parenthesis with the number of new messages. (ie: Junk E-Mail(3) ) If there was no number then you didn't need to check. This is important because messages in there are automatically deleted after a short period. Well, the number isn't there anymore... and I've missed checking it because it didn't say that it had any junk mail. (and I had mail in there that I wanted to recieve.) The number isn't there for "Inbox" either anymore, but I always check that.

Not only this, but there used to be a drop down menu that allowed you to chose which page of your inbox you wanted to go to. Like, page 23 of 55. Since we now have over 1GB of space it is likely that we'll have many pages of e-mails. Well this feature is also gone. So now the only way to get to page 23 is to click the forward arrow 22 times. :(

That's all I've noticed thus far, but it's happened fairly recently because I've been using these features until very recently. With these features gone, hotmail has truly become unusable. My guess is that thay want to squeeze everyone out so they can make them switch to their new Live Mail Hotmail whatever... (Windows Live Hotmail, is it now?) But the fact that they would go this far to do it is really infuriating. Now I have no choice but to join live mail (which I've heard many bad things about) or find a new mail account which means a new e-mail and telling all of my contacts that I have a new mail address...

it really is unusable; the other day I needed very desperately to find info in an e-mail from about 3 months back. Well, I new who it was from, but I couldn't arrange my mail by name. And I could guess about the page it would be on, but I still had to click 20 or 30 times to get to that page. And when I e-mailed the site and submitted my info which got me a reply e-mail with my password or username or whatever, this e-mail ended up in my junk mail which I never checked because it had no notification that there were unread messages there. Only when I had requested the info again and was getting desperate did I venture into the Junk Mail folder and find the e-mail. (incidently, it was there along with the RSS feed e-mail for Ejovi's site, which never used to be junk...) Hotmail... grrr...

My life is a Happy Ending

Been a while again. Seems that I'm becoming good at lying online. I post about how I will be posting very often from now on and then I don't post for 3 months. Well, this time I'll not say anything of the sort and maybe I'll just happen to post more things in the near future.
One of... no, THE biggest reason for my break from posting is because I had a specific post that I wanted to write, but I wasn't sure if I should write it yet because I didn't want to post this big news online until I'd properly informed everyone close to me. That being:

I'm getting married.

Yeah, it's true! If you've been reading my blog for a little while you might remember when I wrote that I had found my soul mate. I didn't go all out and write fuzzy wuzzy stories of how perfect we were for each other and how fate had brought us together... but those stories would have been true. And thus we're engaged. Both of us are absolutely thrilled. It's one of those things that I was starting to question; you see the romantic comedies and read novels where true love occurs, but then you wonder if it's just a fantasy. I mean, we're here on Earth for the basic purpose of making children and living a happy life with our family, but this can be done without true love. (Don't read too deeply into the "we are on Earth for the purpose of..." bit, I'm generalizing, of course.) But it would not be outlandish to consider that the real key to a good marriage is to just find someone who you find attractive and date them long enough to find that you can stand being around each other all the time, and then you marry them. Well, I'm not saying that it'd be wonderful, just logical and functional, which --- really --- is more than we can say about some love-marraiges. BUT, the point that I'm trying to make here is NOT that true love doesn't exist. I had begun to ponder that possibility in a little corner of my mind... But I was so completely wrong. When you meet that one person who just completes you, who just gets you and matches you and makes you a better person... well, if and when that happens to you, you will know at that time that true love is real. Yeah, I do realize that I'm spouting cliches and telling you about true love when I've not even been married for any short amount of time yet, but the thing is... well you know how some people say that "you just know"? Those people are right. I've dated a number of women and felt like it was something special, but when I began seeing the woman who I am engaged to marry, it was completely different; it all just clicked. And I'm a logical fellow. Being one, I wouldn't let myself fall victim to the first feeling that said "this is the woman who I'm going to marry." Or the second. Or the third. Or the throbbbing of my heart, or the pain of seeing her go. It was just infatuation... or a romanticism created by the media... or I just wanted it to be... these are the possibilities I considered. So I waited and tried as hard as I could to find problems with her. I looked for problems with us. Having served boyfriend in several long term relationships I had seen how any small problem can grow and fissure over time into a deal breaker. For instance, if you are of a different religion with your partner it might seem as no problem on the first date, but when you have dated 2 years and you have to decide which church to go to or one of you wants not to go to church and then you start questioning how the other person can think the way they do... Or one person has a small habit that annoys the other. No problem at the beginning but then over time it develops into fights and arguments and comes up in the most inexplicable conversations... Anyway, I'm just saying that I picked apart our relationship in every possible way to find the flaw which was absolutly certainly definitely there somewhere.

...only that it wasn't.

So. We. Will. Be. Married.
My life is a romance.
My life is a Happy Ending.

I know, I know. I've gone and written about things which cannot be expressed in words. Gone and gotten mushy. Written about feelings and love and scary things that shouldn't be spoken of with a serious face except between two lovers. I've gone and said things that can't be tested and can't be proven. And I've said it with a straight face and meant every word.

I love my fiancee.
I'm getting married.
Just thought you'd like to know. :)

~Sven~