open sesame. i've been waiting for gmail to become my primary account for oh so long. the only thing holding me back has been the lack of POP or outside access. for some reason, i just can't use browser based email. it feels so temporary to me. so unsafe. with the click of a wrong button, i could lose my entire email! this used to be the worst thing about telnet. you sit there type typing your life away and then you hit send and you lose the email. or worse, lose your blog after you hit publish (no longer a big problem). so now whenever i write anything, i do it in a word document or something that i can periodically save. call me email anal. but my time is precious and my words worth their weight in silver.



the other reason i need a mail manager is that i've saved 90% of all my emails since college. frequent emailers have their own folders, everything is organized by group, activity or date. it's quite an archived system. my greatest fear is that one day my computer will crash and i'll lose my entire music and email collection. maintaining this email archive takes some work and i must say, i've often wished for a way for everything to be saved automatically. welcome gmail. with one gig of personal space and the ability to quickly and easily search old emails, gmail was tailor made for me.



but i couldn't commit to it, not without POP access. i still wanted to convert all my gmail emails to my desktop, as a backup. what if beta gmail goes crashing down? tragedy. so, i've waited, and waited. until two days ago, when POP access for gmail was finally available. i'm sold, i'm in -- just in time too. gmail will now be my primary email address. and it syncs up perfectly with my sidekick. boo on microsoft, vote yes on google.



in more boo on microsoft news, mozilla's firefox 1.0 has been released. firefox is an alternative to the ubiquitous internet explorer packaged with all microsft products. mozilla is open source and is faster, more secure and has cooler features than ie -- tabbed browsing for example. i won't pretend that i found firefox all by myself, since christina and victor were instrumental in my adoption of it. so far i've downloaded this important extension and this theme. anything that has themes and a customizable look, i'm in. i've been interested in firefox ever since i read articles about its branding strategy but really had no reason to use it. but now with version 1.0 released, it's ready for mass consumption. get your firefox today. the only downside to firefox i can see at this point is that most of my blogs don't come up formatted. adopting firefox as my primary browser could make big waves in my online life.



i'm also addicted to wikipedia. it's a free online encyclopedia that has links to everything it talks about. i started off using it to find out about umberto boccioni and then was taken from there to futurism, to facism and then onto world war two. so pretty much wikipedia has more information that i'll ever know but damn me i'll try to go where the links lead me.



you have no idea how much joy these little things bring to me.