I’ve started playing that bass a bit. I picked up an amp, tuner, new strings and a strap yesterday at Guitar Center, and then I downloaded several tabs from MXTabs. It’s pretty fun, but as I’ve only been playing for a couple of days now I can’t play very many songs, but I do have down Zombie and Something in the Way. Some things are much less complex than I thought, others are more. I like it though, I’m having fun with it. I wonder why I’m doing this.

Heard about GMail? GMail, that ultra exclusive invite only mail service by Google offering 1GB of mail storage. It seems that everyone’s popping up with one. I got one for me and for Mike the other day. An old friend suddenly popped up with one out of nowhere. There’s the GMail Machine, which will randomly give you an invite, or you can buy invites on ebay. Oddly enough (or not so odd) that other free e-mail providers (Yahoo!, HotMail, and others) are blocking GMail invites to their users. Afraid of losing customers, Bill? You should be.

But what is the deal with this? Companies offering a service are blocking customer access to said company’s competitor? Is this legal? Is this moral? This is one reason that e-mail is dead. This new turn of events makes e-mail almost completely useless for any type of communication needs. You see, there is an unwritten rule that we SysAdmins, though we have the power to nuke any ammount of data that passes through our hands, that we should not. Sometimes we have to make administrative decisions for the good of our userbase (such as removing mail for defunct accounts). But here, Microsoft and Yahoo! are removing mail that simply conflicts with their own business interests. This is why every message you send should be encrypted. When I recieved my two GMail invites at first I was going to forward one on to Mike, but then thought better of it. Had I sent it he clearly would not have gotten it. I have long been a proponent of encrypting e-mail. Even though every e-mail sent is as private as a post card, it should be sealable, tamperproof and secure. Why is there no technology that can accomplish this? Ah, but there is. PGP is designed for just such a purpose. Get it. Use it. Protect yourself. This isn’t about having something to hide. Corporations deleting mail for their own greed is just plain evil. Don’t subject yourself to it.