Last night, perhaps because of the rain and the typhoon (or maybe just because I think too much), I just realized the meaning of the bar mitzvah and the fact of becoming an adult at the age of 13. It is not for the boy to realize he is now a grown up, but actually for his jewish mother to understand it. Put back into this perpective, the significant value of this event all makes sense to me now. And the fact that no mother anywhere really gets it becomes more obvious too…

Ok, I am bitching, but deep inside I am still a big fan of Gmail. Especially since one of the only drawback of the system has been removed: Yep, it is now possible to change the “From:” field of an email. It is therefore also possible to consolidate all your email accounts (Gmail or otherwise) into one great interface. And of course, you can also specify a “Reply-to” address per account or keep the responses going to the main account. This just makes it harder for me to use something else. And to top everything, they verify the addresses you add, so that Gmail does not become spammers’ heaven. Brilliant.
Step-by-step how-to in Gmail help section.

Is it a hoax?
It doesn’t look very official nor serious to me, but who knows…?

I am getting a lot of spam these days on my Gmail account. I don’t like it, but usually, it goes to my spam box and i let it compost there… Today, it seems someone just left for an early week end and switched off the server with the spam-protection robot on it. How could any spam script let go an email that has “Sweet Anal sex with virgins” as a subject, and NO content at all?? WTF?? I am not even gonna try to understand how it could benefit a spammer to send such a message, because honestly, I don’t care, but could the wizz kids at Google realize that their spam script is not working anymore?? One of the reasons I loved Gmail (not the only one, but one of them) was that I had �bersearchwonder GOOGLE in charge of taking care of the spam for me. I get a lot of it, and I am happy they are doing the dirty work so that I don’t have to. But this “Sweet Anal sex with virgins” email just gives me huge doubts on their ability to handle any spam at all.

I am a bit disappointed by the fact that the spam handling has not been evolving with features such as “trust this person from now on”, or “add my own spam words list”. Right now, it seems they just give up.

I must say I still love Gmail for all the other reasons, and I am still a very happy customer. But this is such a big dirty spot that it’s impossible not to notice it and feel nauseous.

Dear Gmail people,
I am sure you read my mail because you have good taste. You know where to reach me if you want to discuss this further. Meanwhile, remember this, the real king of the Internet is the one who will manage to control spam. If Yahoo can do it, they will win. If it is Microsoft (ha ha ha!! I won’t even finish this sentence)… If it is an outsider, they will kick your butt before you even realize it! Spam is the Holy Graal. Don’t let this slip your mind.

Folklore.org has a collection of short stories about the development of the original Macintosh and the people who created it. There are 118 stories in total, but the ones I chose to link to are the Susan Kare ones. She was the designer of most of the icons and fonts for the Macintosh. She is the one who gave the Mac its personality and image. She then worked at NeXT (Steve Jobs business after Apple and the basis on which OSX was built) but I’m not sure what she actually did there. Anyway, she is a very cool graphic designer and I am a little bit jealous. For a little more of nostalgia, visit also Kare’s portfolio.