Internet maladies

I don’t know if anyone else has shifted to the new Yahoo mail format but my personal experience so far can be classified under the ‘tearing hair out of the roots’ segment.

 

Frankly, I was not going to change. Then I was tricked into it. While contemplating something deep at work, I clicked on Yahoo mail and noticed an ‘Upgrade, you unsuspecting moron’ button but no ‘Don’t Upgrade, you cautious user’ button.

 

I upgraded.

And clearly landed in some beta version with yours truly being one of the first users.

 

Every single mail I clicked, I was presented with the message that the mail was temporarily not available. This would not have mattered so much had I been checking one of the ten forwards I get daily. Unfortunately these are also the last days for filing IT returns and I have been engaged in furious correspondence with my auditor. Not the best time to be a beta user.

 

Incidentally a friend sent a forward that assessed one’s personality based on one’s email servicer. Apparently Yahoo users are yokels who usually WRITE THEIR MESSAGES ALL IN CAPS. I protested but not anymore.

 

In other internet news, I have been alarmed by the levels of mediocrity to which Facebook’s entertainment value has shrunk. People have started bombarding FB with all sorts of random messages and posters. There was one that especially puzzled me

“Falling in love is like jumping off a high rise. Your head says you will die but your heart says you will fly”

At first sight this looks like your usual gag-worthy poster. Then you give it a second glance and realize it is quite Nietzsche-like in the bleakness of its message. Falling in love can have happy endings sometimes. But everytime you jump off a high-rise, chances are you find your innards splattered on a concrete floor or at the very least break a limb. No matter how much your heart is flying. Does that mean falling in love is a suicidal endevaour? I would have been admiring the person for this underhanded manner of laughing at people who produce mushy posters were it not for the fact that the person concerned is a leading perpetuator of this crime. If you are being mushy, atleast stop to think a wee bit.

There is also a new function on FB that allows people to let the whole world know what they are reading. Presumably one uses it alert the world to all the intelligent and interesting stories they are reading. Except that most stories are along the lines of ‘Will Saif and Kareena marry this year?’ thereby possibly destroying a carefully cultivated intellectual veneer. Unless of course you belong to the post-the-posters category in which case people will just nod their heads and say ‘what else will she read’. See, no happy ending again.

Luckily I have finally learned how to block updates from specific senders and also block specific messages. Suddenly my FB space has opened up to accommodate the less prolific but vastly more interesting people who post something that I actually enjoy.

Which means I am also tempted to be a lot more active on FB. However as a lot of FB users have realized, it is difficult to be a hands-on FB user without giving away a lot about yourself, whether it be by way of hard data or just preferences and opinions. So for now, I continue to enjoy the relative anonymity of the blog.

 

Or so I think