Thursday December 10
 
09:20
 
40+ days later

After 40+ days, Google has restored my gmail account. No mail to say it was restored. No explanation as to why it was taken offline.

Logging in, there is no mail or spam from Oct 31st to Nov 4th and from Nov 12th until Dec 9th. The gap with some mail in the middle would suggest that my account was restored in that time, though I have never been able to login anytime I tried, and if it was restored, why would they ban it again Nov 12th?

In any case, I’ve lost any mail sent to me between the dates above – with no mail and no explanation – and since it looks like they suddenly banned it again mid Nov, who is to say it wont happen again?

I’ve lost all trust in Google’s “cloud”. No way I’m trusting my docs and stuff to them.

Friday November 27
 
10:30
 
Black Friday

Does anyone else see the irony in “Black Friday Deals All Week“?

Wednesday November 18
 
14:45
 
Somebody please tell me how to erase this!!

“Thank you too, Michael, I had a great time as well. I’m glad you enjoyed my OTHER pussy ;). I must admit, I haven’t had sex in a while, so getting mounted by such a strong and powerful man was a pleasant surprise after so many long months of abstinence. I hope this message doesn’t scare you off…”

“Oh no! Somebody please tell me how to erase this!! I wrote inside the wrong box! How embarrassing :(“

Monday November 16
 
10:59
 
Gmail account disabled by Google – no response to support requests

One of my gmail accounts was suddenly disabled by Google at the end of October.

I have save submitted three times now to the Google page “My account was disabled in error” but get zero response from Google. I’ve been without my account for 16 days now.

I’m not a spammer. I’ve not done anything wrong. I’ve not violated TOS.

It’s shocking that Google can disable a Gmail account at any time, with no warning, and doesn’t repond when they do so. If you use Gmail – beware!

Wednesday June 17
 
17:11
 
Opera Unite Has Awesome Potential

I set up Opera Unite last night. It’s very easy to set up, but you can see it’s an alpha. Here are some of the limitations I found:

• No https so passwords for password protected sections are clear text
• There’s no way to hide which services are running, which leaves you prone to hacking. ie. If you tell someone you’re running a chat service, they can automatically see you’re running other services also.
• There’s no way to administer remotely – eg, if you want to change an access password or add a new lounge.
• Names of services can be changed, but after renaming The Lounge, a “broken” version will remain in the services list.
• If you close the browser, all services stop – there’s no option to leave Opera running in the background, and you can’t iconify the browser to the system tray. This means Opera always has to remain running and take up space in the taskbar
• Photo browser doesn’t handle RAW files – would be good if it displayed the embedded JPEG
• Can’t play music to an iphone because there’s no flash
• Doesn’t work properly on the super modern IE6 (which I am forced to use at work)
• On Firefox 3 (portableapps.com version), after starting to play a song you are returned to the top of the music tree
• Photo folders are large icons only and filename gets truncated, which makes it difficult to navigate. There’s also no search.
• Webserver doesn’t have PHP or MySQL

But, this is alpha – you expect issues. All in all, Opera Unite is very cool and very promising:

• You can write your own Opera Unite services, which means you can bet your bottom dollar that other services will be coming soon, ala appstore.
• You can hack customise services easily. For example, the home screen can be “customised” by renaming installdirectory/unite/home.us to have home.zip, unzipping it, editing the files, zipping, and renaming back to home.us. Cool, huh? By doing that I can hide the list of services running (#2 above)
• Can run it on multiple machines – once you have your operaunite domain name (same as your my.opera.com id), each machine becomes a subdomain named as you choose. eg. party.myname.operaunite.com, work.myname.operaunite.com
• You can install the same service multiple times – so you can have multiple chat rooms, or share multiple directories, or have different passwords
• With minimal setup – pointing it at the right directory and adding a password, I have access to my entire photo library wherever I am. I’ve just renewed my Flickr Pro account but maybe I wont need to next year.

Now all I need is the iPhone to get Flash or someone to hack the media server so that it links to MP3s, and then I can stream music to my iPhone. I tried pointing the file sharing service at some MP3s hoping that would get the iPhone to play, but it didn’t seem to.

Some see Opera Unite as a gimmick that will drift into nothing. For me it’s already useful – I now have access to my entire photo library without uploading it to Flickr. And next time my brother can’t send me videos by Gmail because they are too large, I’ll just get him to install Opera Unite, start the file sharing service, and give me the URL.

If the services expand and Opera sets-up Unite to run even when no browser window is open, Unite could really change the web. You’ve got to try it.

Funnily, it’s not made me use Opera as a web browser though. I’m still using Chrome :)