The World of Stuff .com

The archives

I’m pleased to announce that the Great E-mail Scare of ’08 has been resolved. My e-mail client is again able to download e-mail from the server. It must have been a server issue in the first place.

While the scare was ongoing, I had to check my mail on the web, which is something I rarely do unless I’m traveling without my computer. Before I switched to Thunderbird in 2004, I used webmail exclusively. After I switched, the old e-mails I had saved on the webmail interface had to be left behind. There was no option for me to move them to the inbox, where Thunderbird would be able to access them. And so, they stayed. But recently, all this webmailing got me wondering whether they had added that really obvious option — and alas, they have.

So, I sifted through a few hundred e-mails from 2000 to 2004 and decided which ones I would want to move to the inbox, and thus to Thunderbird. Actually, it was pretty amazing to look back and see reflections of myself as I was between the ages of 10 and 15. I had written e-mails to people I’d forgotten about things I’ve forgotten. And I’m usually someone who remembers a lot of things.

I decided to save a lot of e-mails not for their content (some of them are extremely short) but by the very fact that they exist. For example, if someone sent me a link, it doesn’t matter if it’s dead now; it’s just interesting to look back and see that they thought I would find it interesting in the first place. But a lot of the e-mails are really interesting to read. I found e-mails my friend Kevin sent me when he spent the 2001-2002 school year in Honduras. I found the first e-mail that Daniel, The World of Stuff’s #1 fan, ever sent me. I came across lots of discussions from my friends about our band, including what to name it.

I also came across this:

(I didn’t discover the words that spell other words in rot13; I just put the sentence together.)

What’s more, I found a lot of e-mails I had saved from my time at Where’s George?. I was a big part of that community even though I was pretty young. I mean, I had a lot of enthusiasm for it, and I made a lot of friends. I no longer talk to most of them, and now I’m wondering how they’re doing. Some of them helped me out a lot. One time, I wanted to create my own web site, and this one guy recommended a free host. It actually cost a dollar, and the only interface was a Unix shell. So here he was, describing Unix commands for me years before I would ever need them again. He also taught me how to use pico. In some later e-mails, I was talking to a “Georger” about her web host, which I soon signed up with myself and still use today.

It’s pretty interesting to see how those events have shaped the way things are for me today. Now if only I had access to my first e-mail account, which I got in ’98 or ’99. But alas, it’s long gone. And yeah, I just said “alas” twice in this post. And now it’s three times.

Mailbox Map is a cool Google Maps mashup that shows you the locations (US only) of post offices, mailboxes, and UPS Stores.

The movie industry is adopting Blu-Ray as its next-generation high-definition home video format. And if the movie industry does something, it probably sucks. Find out why Blu-Ray Sucks.

Here’s an article about people who attempt to master the art and science of picking locks.