Fast & Secure
For the last couple months, we have had a weird issue with our home connection timing out every 15 minutes or so, which was not only very annoying, especially on wireless, but made it nearly impossible to play Xbox Live without getting lagged out. But today that was finally fixed! Comcast came today, nice and early (8 am), and replaced our router. The cool part though was the Comcast guy also played Halo 3, so we had a good 10 minute talk about matchmaking, and how your internet setup (using a router, wireless, etc) affects gameplay. Plus, he wasn’t just some noob; a level 40 like myself. Anyways, now my internet is “screaming!” (as he put it):
Yesterday I completed my switch to using all Gmail acccounts, after months of using the LPP server & Hotmail. Here’s why:
1. Interface: The hotmail web interface, while nice on the eyes, is a pain to use. The “program” would constantly hang, forcing me to close the tab and start again. Plus now, both of my Gmails funnel into Thunderbird (see below), instead of one email being browser based (hotmail) and the other through Outlook (LPP).
2. Security: By far one of the best features about Gmail is that it is encrypted (SSL for incoming & outgoing). I (and I’m sure many of you) do a lot of important transactions via email, from Paypal & eBay to simple CC transactions. I felt it was best to not take any chances of sensitive emails being read by someone else other than myself.
3. Custom Domains: One reason why I waited to so long to switch was because I really like having my own @lpprojekt.com email. It looked official and professional. Now I can have both, thanks to Google Apps. It’s Google’s new service that allows you to use your own custom domain and handle through the Gmail interface. For free, you get unlimited accounts, with 5 GB of storage/account. That plus encryption = double kill!
4. POP3: The most annoying feature about hotmail is the lack of pop3 support. This is of course because Microsoft wants you to be exposed to the main ads that clutter the hotmail interface. The beauty of using an email program (I recommend Mozilla Thunderbird aka the Firefox of email) is that there are zero ads, and you dont have to open up a web browser to view your mail.
5. I don’t care how many women will flock to me, I’m not buying your penis pill: The latest studies show that 95% of all emails sent this year were spam. My LPP email account was being absolutely assaulted by junk email. This is because I foolishly posted my email address in plain text form on the LPP website. For those of you who don’t know, there are millions of bots scanning the internet collecting email address and adding them to massive spam lists. So from now on, I will no longer (and you shouldn’t either) be posting my emails in text form on any website. If for some reason I absolutely have to, I will either make it an image (Facebook does this), or replace the “@” with “[at]”. Plus, Gmail has awesome spam blockers, so if my new addresses do somehow make it on a spam list, I will probably never see them.
Why is it that the messages in spam emails never make sense, and just look like a bunch of random words mashed together to make a “sentence”.
Favorite spam email subject: “Your baby-maker needs to be bigger in order to perform its functions well”
And oh yeah, Lupe’s classic, The Cool, came out today. Go cop that and support real hiphop.
-J
Filed under Halo, The Internet