A Repost from the Secret Blog
Photograph by Brian Skerry
Reposting this for my friend Aimee in Portland.
Remembering Piglet and the Right Whale
Feb. 1, 2011
Many years ago, I ranted about Yahoo Mail in a previous blog. I think it had something to do with fees, not so sure now. At any rate, a few months ago, after more than a decade having a Yahoo e-mail address (from Rocketmail at that), some intern decided to delete my account due to some errant video I had uploaded on Yahoo Video. I was angry at Yahoo again -- but this time I think it's forever. I hope they burn.
It's a bit ironic and frustrating because for one, Yahoo is terminating the Yahoo Video service in March. The company also had a round of layoffs recently, and I wonder if the person who deleted my account is still employed there. Finally, with the deletion, all my Yahoo-related accounts and data got deleted: my e-mails, my Yahoo Groups, my Flickr pictures, etc. With Flickr -- my account was still "active" for a good two weeks before the pictures disappeared. I was very livid at that point because I couldn't access my pictures which I own, and yet Yahoo still had them up without my consent. The most frustrating however, was the e-mails that I lost particularly from people who have now passed -- and the loss of my early online journals which are stored in Yahoo Groups.
I plan to e-mail customer support again in March to see if Yahoo will re-activate my account. Apparently, my Yahoo Calendar is still going -- and I've been getting e-mail reminders to my alternate account. Since I've always been redirected to Yahoo Video for copyright violation -- when the service no longer exists in March -- maybe some intern will switch the re-activate switch. Let's just hope.
Meanwhile, I mourned the loss of my e-mails and journals. For the e-mails, I've given up. For the journals, I tried to find some backup -- which unfortunately, was incomplete. I didn't have the latter half of my writings.
Since these journals were written via e-mail mailing list, I contacted a friend of mine in the Philippines who I knew got these e-mails when I was writing them over a decade ago. By some miracle, he responded back: "I have them all -- shall I forward them to you?" Wow, it was unbelievable. He had kept all the e-mails because Rocketmail (now Yahoo, ironically) had unlimited storage.
So now, all my journal entries have been forwarded to my Gmail, and I've been reading some of them.
Some are very painful to read, others are just trite -- but a time marker nevertheless in my life. Right now, I'm at an entry where I wondered if buying a laptop would make me happy -- then realizing that it wouldn't really. Years later of course, I bought that laptop I wanted to buy -- and then another, and then a desktop, and then another desktop. I'm about to build another desktop for myself in a couple of days -- this time with a 30" monitor.
I must say, I am happy now. But it wasn't buying the laptop that did it, just as I wondered in my journal. It wasn't the other computers either. Instead, back then -- I didn't think my life could change. But slowly but surely, it did. Now I know I can: I changed my life.
I should be happy. And I am.