Bye-Bye HOTMAIL For the past few years my wife has had an email address on HOTMAIL, which served her well as I changed ISPs from dialup to Cable, and finally (happily) with dsl on Earthlink. The SPAM level on HOTMAIL finally got unacceptable, and no amount of diddling with their filters seemed to help, so I created an Earthlink address for her (free) and that is now working great. Earthlink (last year?) added a web interface connection to email. She can use a POP client at home and any Browser away from home, and Earthlink's spaminator does a credible job of elimianting junk email (ie 1 per week, instead of the 10 per day at HOTMAIL). Did I mention that one of the SPAMMERs on HOTMAIL is HOTMAIL/MSN which you are not allowed to filter?

MASS TRANSIT My employer will pay for a bus pass for me to Bus to work, as my parking lot is going away. I live a mere 6.5 miles from my office, I have always worked close to home, or lived as close to work as possible. No transit plans take that into account; one seems to be rewarded for living 30+ miles away from ones office. So I filled out a form for the bus company and they suggested a route. Coming home: 3 buses, 2 transfers; one hour 10 minutes total, about the same time a fast walk of 6.5 miles might take.

New Macintoshes The new Macintosh's I had half expected to be intoduced on July 17, are now rumored to be coming out on August 24. Apple says they will work in a Windows Centric World. For me that boils down to "Can it load a Verisign Digital Certificate to be used by a Cisco VPN?"
If the answer is no; I may not buy it.

YAHOO EMAIL If you have a Yahoo email account; Yahoo may be changing your email, and in ways that could embarrass you.

MACWORLD CONFERENCE I was very disappointed by Steve Jobs keynote speech at MacWorld today. No new Desktop Macintosh was announced; so I'll save $3000. Lots of vaporware, and at least 2 failed demos, and another time it looked like Steve reached under the desk to throw a switch to switch which Mac was displayed when one failed to respond. What was probably the worst for Apple is that Steve seemed to go out of his way to be picking fights with Microsoft. That has proven suicidal for others. I do love that iCal will work with my "Palm Pilot". Maybe I'll get a new iPod at CompUSA with one of their extended warranties, the internal Hard Drives apparently are not as rugged as one might hope judging by comments at Macintouch. I'll certainly wait until after August 24th to buy a new Mac so OS X 10.2 will come preinstalled and on CD. Now if only I can remember my iDisk username and password so I could save $50 on .Mac.

Microsoft Makes An Offer You Can't Refuse - Thanks to Richard F. Forno for this latest piece of Microsoft arrogance. Microsoft sets its self up as Judge, Jury and Executioner for Digital Rights.