>It pays to jump on tech opportunity –

As I was enjoying my MSN account today, going through the calendar and such; I realized that all the cool stuff is what they charge for. I’ve been receiving it free since about 3 years ago when they had a 6 month free initiative. You’d give your credit card info, it wouldn’t be charged for 6 months… then at the end of that time they’d charge you for the remaining 6 months and you’d have a year’s worth of internet access. Having no money at the time, I signed up. Wallet was stolen in the meanwhile… card was cancelled, and had to move shortly after. Without meaning to I had skipped town on paying my internet access bill.

I eventually paid them, but I didn’t renew once the year was over. I didn’t cancel either – but it kept working. Finally, 6 months down the road they confirmed they were shutting it off. They did… and since I never used it to dial up with, it didn’t effect me. I suppose if I installed the “MSN explorer” it wouldn’t work, but my email is still @msn.com and I get all the added content and features of MSN online. Yay!

It’s a glorified hotmail account, I suppose… but let that be a lesson on the benefit of not paying your bills (the non-life threatening ones, at least). =]

I’ve been able to test XBox live 3 months before it was released, played with the prototype of the Palm Tungston (I can talk about it now, they haven’t answered my requests to be in any subsequent beta tests), and I’ve been with the Windows beta since Win98. I haven’t heard a word on Longhorn, so I guess that I’m out of that loop as well. I used to have a lot of time to work on bug reports, but suppose I didn’t return as many as they wanted/required.

The opportunities are out there, have been since the very beginning (for me) when I was using Mosaic… then Netscape, and MS slapped the “IE” label on Mosaic. When all there was to do was email, gopher, and newsgroups, and the news gave me all the info I needed to find “the good stuff” on the newsgroups. They had flashed a “…binary.pictures.” address as the background for their dynamic graphic opening for the story. Ahh, good ol responsible reporting =]

I get all nostalgic when I think of the ‘old days’ of the net. Sitting there for hours on end with my state of the art 486DX4 (100mhz!) and 28.8 Cardinal modem.

IRC and running an FTP over a 28.8, convincing people it’s a slow ISDN line. =] Those were the days…

side note on the msn thing:: I actually just read that the calandar thing is exclusive to MSN8 as of a week or two from now… oh well, the ‘explorer’ application for MSN8 is far too intrusive for me to install at home, and it won’t install on WinNT4 – so looks like I’m completely out of the loop (other then email) in a week or two