Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

People are sometimes surprised to hear that I have a Hotmail account, but I have two answers ready for them. Firstly I tell them that when I signed up, it wasn’t owned by Microsoft (which, looking at the dates, seems unlikely), but perhaps it would be true to say that it wasn’t running on Microsoft technology, as Microsoft famously had to dogfood the servers from FreeBSD to Windows. The other thing I say is that I only have the account so that I can chat to people using MSN, although I do have a moratorium on adding new MSN contacts and am slowly trying to move the rest of my contacts over to Jabber/XMPP-based services like Google Talk. Whatever the excuse, and no matter how excusable it is to have an account with them, what is not excusable is to have the continued availability (not to mention the privacy) of a collection of emails, controlled by the whims of Microsoft. This is not mere paranoia, though. I’m sure at one point Microsoft introduced a new, lower, inactivity-timeout period within which you were required to log in or forfeit your email backlog, and it was just after this change that they started advertising their paid accounts as not having this artificial limitation.

So, it turns out that the wonderful import process didn’t quite go according to plan. If it hadn’t been for some very obvious changes in the way the syntax highlighting plugins working between the two platforms (“obvious” if you remember to check a page written under the old system after switching to the new system) then I might not have been bothered to go back over every one of my blog posts and bring them up to date. I’m glad I did, though, not least for reasons of nostalgia, but also because I managed to spot a few other mistakes made by the import process or by my former inexperience with blogging. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be obsessive about rewriting my old work to fit my current ideals, since then I wouldn’t get the benefit of having the blog as time capsule of my writing preferences and character, but there were some long-standing issues I had been meaning to fix to make my blog more readable.