So I made this permanent switch this week from Mozilla Thunderbird to web-based Gmail.

In the past, I’ve used web-based Gmail when I’ve been away from home, or on campus, or on a different computer, say in a library, but I’ve always maintained my e-mail accounts using an e-mail application. In the days of old it was Eudora (see above). In more recent years it’s been Thunderbird. Since as long as I’ve had the Internet I’ve always used an e-mail application.

It began with my Internet Direct and the e-mail account from my ISP back in the mid-90’s. It was a POP account which meant you needed to use a piece of software to access it, there was no website you could go to to read your mail. Included on the Internet software CD-ROM was an early copy of Eudora, which could retrieve my e-mail through POP, so that’s what I used. Later, when Hotmail came along, I had moved on to Microsoft’s Outlook Express because of its ability to access Usenet. Still, I avoided jumping ship to a web-based e-mail when Microsoft upgraded Outlook Express to be able to retrieve e-mail from Hotmail accounts—it even did so ad-free.

When Gmail came along, except for the early invite-only beta portion, I largely managed to avoid the move to web-based e-mail, again. Now using Thunderbird, I still relied on software applications to read newsgroups and to check my mail and with Gmail’s IMAP service I was again able to check my e-mail and keep it synchronized across multiple computers, ad-free. By this time I had racked up more than one e-mail address as well. Thunderbird allowed me to easily check multiple accounts and newsgroups with no fuss and so again I skipped the switch to web-based e-mail.

But over the years it’s been nagging at me. With everything going web-based—e-mail, newsgroups, word processing and office suites—I’ve been seriously wondering why I’ve been such a hold out. Thunderbird, despite being a Mozilla application, hasn’t really been improving over the years in the same way that Firefox has been. The recent addition of a robust search function has been nice but, as far as I can tell, its half-way broken. Maybe the signs have been in the clouds all along because whenever I’ve needed to search my e-mail in a pinch, I’ve gone to the web-based Gmail version. And since the latest version things have been slow. I can wait upwards of thirty seconds while it loads my IMAP messages, at which time it’s completely frozen.

And so it goes. I have no point, or purpose, in using an e-mail application anymore. Thunderbird has become too slow and lacks any compelling features. I realized the other day that the only thing still keeping me tied to a program to check my e-mail was tradition. It’s the way I always did it—but it hadn’t been working in a long time.

So I’ve made the switch that I’m that much happier for it. I’ve realized that Gmail can organize my e-mails better than Thunderbird could; it can search better; it’s address book is just as good, nay, better; and it loads quickly. It can also check my other e-mail accounts, too but I think that I’ll set those to forward to my Gmail nonetheless. The day when your popularity and coolness was gauged by how many e-mail addresses you had (there was a time!) has passed.

It’s funny that for so many years I’ve been doing things a certain way simply because that’s the way I’ve always done them. You’d think for someone who stays on top of breaking technology trends, who likes computers and the Internet and all that kind of stuff, that I would be with it. It’s surprising, then, to realize that I’ve been stuck in the relative age of the dinosaurs for such a long time without even noticing. Huh.

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Even if you aren’t a huge fan though, Twitter’s World Cup coverage is nonetheless very interesting to follow. They’ve set up a very ingenious website which displays soccer-related tweets from both countries while their teams play. Presently, I can watch live tweets from Greece and Korea, displayed head-to-head, as these teams play their first World Cup match. It’s neat seeing the tweets roll by from the two countries. Less interesting because neither of these teams, and therefore countries, speak much English so most of the tweets are in languages that I don’t understand.

Still, it’ll be interesting to see how things look for the USA v. England match up this afternoon. Should be very cool to see opposing tweets from either side of the Atlantic.

Another incredible use of this kind of technology.

I can’t wait!

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Apple’s new iPhone has been found, in a bar. Yes, you read that right. While it’s been known that Apple have been working away on a new model of their popular iPhone, no details, and certainly not any pictures or prototypes have been released to the public. At least, not on purpose.

Gizmodo, a popular technology website, has just released a complete run down of the new iPhone, an iPhone which, they allege, was found in a bar in Redwood City, California. Yes, you read that right, and it gets even more interesting. Not only was this new model iPhone found in a bar, it was found disguised to look like an older model iPhone. That is, this technology was so new, and presumably so secret, that whoever was using it didn’t want anyone else to know what it was. Interesting, eh?

Gizmodo has had it, they say, for a week and spent enough time with it to know for sure that it’s indeed a new Apple product. The fact that it was found in a bar, left there, I assume, by some Apple insider, is certainly going to rub the super-secretive company the wrong way. Whether they come out and admit that what Gizmodo has found is real, we’ll have to wait and see.

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In his article this morning on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, sci-fi writer, tech guru and University of Waterloo prof. suggests a series of very compelling reasons why he won’t—and we shouldn’t—buy a new Apple iPad. Clearly, he’s thought a lot about it and his article is such a wonderful breath of fresh air in a tech market that’s gone nearly out of control.

The cliff notes:

If you can’t open it and take it apart, you don’t own it. You’re locked into only the content that Apple says you can have. It won’t save the journalism industry. It’s over-simplified. It takes away from what makes computers and gadgets great: being able to mess around and share them. It’s a fad.

A highly recommended read.

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The clip below, from a company called 13th Street is advertising a new kind of cinema, one in which the viewer can interact with the film and change the outcome. In this case, it’s done by phoning different viewers in the audience and changing the outcome of the film based on recognized voice commands. Is this the new step in immersive horror films or just another hokey Hollywood breakthrough?

What do you think? Leave a comment.

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Since they first came onto the scene in China, Google’s position in the communist country has been tenuous at best. For a company who’s mantra has been “do no evil,” censoring search results in order to hide and cover up dissension within the country seems to be pretty, well, against code. If you aren’t aware, China’s Internet policy is among the most strict in the world. The government actively filters out content which it doesn’t want its citizens to see online. That includes dissenting comments, protest movements, blogs, and, as far as I know, anything that’s overly critical of the Chinese government. (I’m probably blocked now, too!)

Even worse, Google has recently uncovered an enormous string of hacking attempts and successes on a number of its services—namely, Gmail—which it traced back to the Chinese government. According to Google, it was the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists which were the target and these accounts, it says, were routinely accessed by government officials in a kind of cyber-espionage.

Up until now though, Google has been pretty complicit. There have been ups and downs between China and Google and much, much, global criticism leveled against the search engine giant, but for the most part Google has gone along with the government’s Internet policies. The government hacking was the crack that broke the dam though, and today came the flood.

Beginning this afternoon, all traffic to the China search engine page, says Google, is now being redirected to their unfiltered servers in Hong Kong. Here’s a snippet of the press release,

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from [Hong Kong] is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.

What’s more, Google has set up this page to monitor exactly what the Chinese government is blocking access to. That means if China decides to block Google’s new unfiltered searches, the world will find out.

It seems like Google is finally taking serious steps towards a sensible Internet policy in China.

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Viacom is suing YouTube for not removing copyrighted videos from its website, videos that Viacom held the copyright to. It sounds straight forward enough except for a couple of important factors. First, under international copyright laws it’s the responsibility of the copyright owner (Viacom) to notify YouTube of infractions—not YouTube’s responsibility to remove videos of its own volition. And second, as it turns out, Viacom filed this suit all the while uploading its own videos to YouTube surreptitiously.

Here’s what YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine had to say,

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom.

And as if that wasn’t enough, YouTube alleges that some of the videos included in Viacom’s lawsuit against them were actually uploaded by the company itself,

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

The waters get exceptionally muddied at this point and you really have to wonder what Viacom was thinking. Remember, this was a company that tried several times to buy YouTube.

As clear as the result may seem, from the outset, it’ll be an interesting case to follow.

The brief goes on to explain that now, in the 21st century, most media corporations are working with YouTube and even finding monetary value in putting their clips up online. Of course. I guess, ever the evolution of technology marches on. But there’s a big difference between fighting against an emerging media platform and sneaking your videos up on there, and then suing over them.

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For the past week I’ve been working hard, behind the scenes, to bring back thecorch.com to it’s former glory, and then some. After wrestling with the purpose of having a blog, what I should and shouldn’t be writing about, and deep theological questions surrounding the meaning of life, I’m back.

Having a blog can be tricky. First of all, it’s a time commitment. Most blogs, according to the statistics, fall into disuse shortly after being created. Others last a bit longer before petering out. Mine was a on-again, off-again affair that was updated so sporadically its readership eventually fell to zero. In most of its previous incarnations, I lacked not necessarily the time, but the motivation: the drive to dedicate time to it. When my close friend Andrew recently launched a new, and innovative blog, he committed from the get-go to post a certain number of times—to commit to writing.

The second thing about a blog is figuring out what to write about, and what not to write about. As a teacher, and a public figure (in that way), I spent a lot of time thinking about my website. Sometimes I went to write something and thought, “Nah, that’s not something I want to share with the whole world.” Other times I didn’t know. Still, I even wondered about writing at all: who cares what I think about films I see, or music I listen to—who’s reading it anyway?

And that is to say that: We’re back in business.

Welcome to the new incarnation of thecorch.com. I’ve solved the first conundrum by deciding to write, and write often, and to commit wholeheartedly to it. And in terms of what I plan to write about I’ve decided, “Who cares!” and that my opinion on films, television, music, books and my mundane commentaries on life might not be interesting to everyone but if you’re reading them, then they’re interesting to you. After all, it’s good writing practice and that’s important too.

So here we go, on our own again. I hope y’all come along, too.