Software grief

Turmoil is roiling my online world, if that isn't too dramatic.

A week or so ago, work upgraded my PC to Windows 7 and fiddled around with the network. As a result, I’m all over the shop on my PC and discovered that the mail client on my Mac (Sparrow) could no longer send mail. Some kind of firewall proxy security crap, I expect. Sparrow tells me it cannot send the message. Actually, it dumps the email into Drafts in iCloud and abandons it there. This is not a Sparrow problem. I proved as much to myself by using the exact same machine to send an email at home and to not send an email at work. I’d raise a ticket, but it just doesn’t seem worth it, not least because Apple's Mail encounters no such problems and in any case, Google's purchase of Sparrow does not bode well. Mail raises issues of its own, not least the question of where an email goes when you delete it. There’s Trash and there’s Archive, and the question of what goes where when you hit delete continues to befuddle me. Still, at least it works with the network I have.

Buying Sparrow was part of my effort to pay for the things I depend on, so that I -- rather than an advertiser -- am the customer. That’s why I switched to Pinboard, why I pay for Flickr and Instapaper, and why I’d like to pay for Newsblur. ¹ It's also why I recently committed to app.net.² Sure, it could end up a gated community, but if the people inside the gates are people I like, I honestly don't mind shutting myself off. I never really liked Twitter, and now it seems Twitter is repaying the compliment. In spades.

Add to this my internet server unilaterally terminating my lifetime and it seems like I am at some kind of threshold. A radical rethink is in order ... but who has time for that?