Incommunicado

Hotmail has been down for three days now, so if you've tried to email me there, I didn't get it. This is opposed to the usual times when I can access the service and didn't get an email because I couldn't find it amoung all of the spam that account receives.

If I remember correctly, Hotmail deletes accounts that are inactive for two weeks. Granted, three days is barely a dent into a two-week period, and this inactivity period may not apply for server outages, but it did make me think about what I would do if I did lose my Hotmail account: absolutely nothing.

I've had the account since high school, which makes it over a decade old. Who would have thought back then, in the mid-nineties, that anything internet-related would survive for a decade? Of course, given the current state of Hotmail, to call it a survivor is a bit of a stretch. Should I lose the account, I'd probably miss it briefly for sentimental reasons (my first email account...awww), but overall it would likely be a relief to be rid of that spam-magnet where real emails are few, far-between and usually lost in the shuffle.

Parcel ping-pong

I have no love for UPS. I am waiting on a proof for The Forever Syndrome, so I can justify spending the money to get a whole bunch of copies made, safe in the knowledge that everything will look and sound as I expect it to. I ordered the CD from Discmakers, who are based in San Francisco, California. A quick look at the tracking progress of my package on the UPS website reveals that:

• My package started in San Francisco on the 27^th of July, as expected.
• The package made it to Hodgkins, Illinois on the 31^st.

It was supposed to arrive on my doorstep this week. However, oddly enough, as of yesterday, it is back in California, with a rescheduled delivery date being sometime next week. What the hell is going on? Why did they send it back to California, which is entirely in the wrong direction of where it is supposed to be headed?

And you people all wonder why I've haven't set an official release date for The Forever Syndrome yet.