Giving in to change

For as long as I have had Internet access, I have been using a Yahoo e-mail as my primary e-mail address. I initially signed up for a Hotmail e-mail address, but soon switched to Yahoo because they offered more storage. Nowadays, storage space is hardly an issue as most free e-mail providers offer near unlimited storage.

Sure, when Gmail was released, there was much hype surrounding it, and I did eventually get an invite to create a Gmail e-mail address, but I didn’t like the webmail interface and found it frustratingly slow on my poor Internet connection. And so I continued on with my good ol’ Yahoo mail.

Over the years, I did end up creating other e-mail addresses with various e-mail providers for various reasons, most commonly to create multiple game accounts, but Yahoo remained my mail e-mail address. When I was job hunting two years ago, I signed up for a domain name so I could have a more professional looking e-mail address to use when looking for jobs, but because I don’t like checking more than one e-mail address, I had most of my other e-mail addresses redirect to my Yahoo one.

The time has come for change.

Yahoo has served me well for my e-mail needs, but as the little changes over the years pile up, not to mention the casino and Viagra spam, I feel like I want more control over my mail. And so I have decided to use the e-mail associated with my roxybudgy.com domain as my primary e-mail.

The change will take time. Over these ten years, I have signed up for a variety of different things using my Yahoo mail. Both important and unimportant mail comes through. It reminds me of a year ago when I moved house. I had to make sure the government, bank, insurance companies, etc were aware that I had moved address. The fact that many websites use an e-mail address as ID will not make the change easy.

My e-mail is not the only change I am making. I have decided to give in and use the latest version of Opera as my preferred web browser. I have been using version 12 of Opera ever since it was released. But when a newer version was released lacking many features that I love, I decided not to upgrade and continued to use version 12.

But as time went by, I was noticing more and more bugs and hiccups with version 12. When I worked on a Javascript-based website, I was finding that things were not working as I intended, but when I test my site in the latest version of Opera and Internet Explorer, everything works fine. And the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I found that many of the websites I visit regularly run much more smoothly on the latest version of Opera.

And so I give in. I will force myself to adapt to life without traditional bookmarks, without Opera Link, without a built in mail client (oh the horror, I have to use a separate program to access my mail D:) In return, I get a smoother Internet experience.