Category Archives: Internet

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.

RIP My Opera

In December last year, I received the following e-mail:

When My Opera was launched in 2001, it quickly became an important place for us to meet with you. We have had much great interaction with you in our forums and blogs. This whole idea of giving you a place where you could blog, share photos and send emails turned into an interesting, and very large, side project. Over the years, we’ve seen social media, blogging sites and new messenger services pop up that offer more and better features than we could possibly maintain. These offerings are their sole business. You all know their names and you probably use their services already.

The explosion of these sites and the amount of resources we need to maintain our own service has changed our outlook on My Opera. We had a good run for many years, but we believe your content could have a better home elsewhere, so we have made the decision to shut down My Opera as of March 1, 2014.

Your My Opera email account will also be discontinued on this date.

I had been using the My Opera blog to make the occasional blog post, with my first post made on August 2009, and my latest post was in November 2013. As My Opera is shutting down on 1 March 2014, I decided to take the plunge and mess around with my first WordPress website/blog. And here it is!

Now I’m going to attempt to migrate my My Opera blog posts to this WordPress blog. Fingers crossed…

…and done! After Googling how to do it, it took no more than 10 minutes. Still have a bit of cleaning up to do though.