Is MS going down the right track?

Microsoft (MSN/Hotmail) just sent me this email:
Recently, Hotmail® announced that in order to improve customer experience and reduce spam and junk e-mail abuse on MSN® services, Hotmail will no longer allow new e-mail accounts to be accessed via Microsoft® Office Outlook® and Outlook Express.

We are pleased to inform you that because you are an existing and valued customer, at this time your current Hotmail and MSN account(s) are exempt from this restriction and you will be able to continue enjoying access to those accounts from Outlook or Outlook Express. However, any new Hotmail or MSN accounts you create will not be accessible via Outlook or Outlook Express.
(red, bold text mine)

Now, I have no intent of paying for an email account, and if Microsoft decides that they'd like to charge me and make me stop using Outlook Express one of these days down the road, two things are true:
1) I won't do it - I'll use only my GMail account, which allows me to access the account using POP anyway.
2) MS becomes truly evil in my mind. I will admit to some level of dependency on my Hotmail account. I use it for almost any purposes except personal/professional ones. Anyone who might spam me, Hotmail. Anyone who needs my email for their frequent flier club, Hotmail. To make consumers dependent on your service and then, several years later, to start charging, is both a brilliant and completely unethical idea. I love it and hate it!
More on this subject if that highlighted red text above ever goes out of effect!

Also, if you want a GMail account (www.gmail.com), I have 50 referrals to give away now, so just drop me a line!

AMAZING Times!

Well, I'm almost done with my events (I swim in the 800 free relay tonight), and both have been amazing. I swam the 500 in 5:10.72, which breaks way past my previous personal record of 5:13 or so. Similarly, in the 200 free this morning, I smashed past my previous 1:51.82 to drop down to 1:51.52. Hopefully a relay start will give me an incredible split tonight. Thank God for an amazing end to my season despite my lack of fitness at the beginning of this semester!

Conferences are here!

So... Since I'll be completely shaving my head tomorrow night, I let Carolina have a little fun with it tonight. She went pretty much all out, doing a flower on the back, and stripes on the side :)
...Enjoy the pic :)

Central Asia girls

Just IM'ed with the girls from central asia! It makes me miss being there a little bit more than I did just 10 minutes ago :( Praise GOD for what he's doing over there with the Student Conference, where a crazy number (143!) of students had the opportunity to hear the gospel... How awesome to hear it!
I learned that the LXG title of the CD I bought means League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a conference at which the band played last year. The band's name is "Special Opinion". It's so funny because I had just put on their CD when the girls started chatting with me. I'm glad to hear that everyone's healthy and happy, and we are missed as much as we miss them :)
...Maybe I can go back sometime :)

I've sold out to free stuff : )

Haha... So, I'm making such quick progress toward my free iPod Shuffle that I decided to sell out and sign up for the free desktop PC as well, just in case you're not a Mac mini fan. We'll see if I actually make much progress on the PC - you have to get 10 referrals, same as on the Mac... only three for the iPod Shuffle.

Irony

It's funny that, in my last writing, I was talking about patching Windows using a ISO-to-CD program, when I'm now running in Linux (which I burned with that program). BU Linux 4 (Bossanova) is based on Fedora Core 2 Linux, available from RedHat. Of course, it's not Fedora Core 3, which I did think looked very pretty. But this will do :) Anyway, I've been slaving away at figuring out how to make my own static library that plays with BFD (binary file descriptors) on an x86 machine (mine) for CS410. It's been a journey. Also working on getting something like the Mac "dock" going, but that's been a pain to try to install. We'll see. Have a good week :)

Patching up Windows

I've got to give props to Alex Feinman, who wrote this utility, which allows you to capture and burn ISO images from/to CD-R/RW's. Weird that Windows would have such a shortcoming, huh? It's no shortcoming - Windows uses image files itself - MS just didn't want us to have access, I guess! The program runs like any Windows wizard (a "Power Toy"), and is accessible by right-clicking ISO files and CD-Drives... Enjoy.