created Friday, 2012-06-22 T 17:18:03Z
updated Friday, 2012-06-22 T 17:18:03Z
So here I was using Internet Explorer for the first time in months or years. I noticed that, if you select some text on a page, it draws a translucent blue arrow next to your selection. I had seen it for years & never thought about it, but a few days ago, I clicked it to see what would happen.
What ho! It allowed me to do all sorts of nifty things with my selection, including sending via e-mail (or Windows Live or something like that). I gave that a whirl.
Beknownst to me & IE, I had a Windows Live account. Unbeknownst to me, I also had a Windows Live / Hotmail e-mail account. Yes, Hotmail comes with an "only non-techincal people use it" stigma, but I've been programming computers since before you were born, so I can survive a little non-technical stigma. So I gave Hotmail a try for a few days.
It's not bad. Makes it easy to slurp up all the messages from all your e-mail accounts (I have many, some of which are older than you). And it lets you send from any of your accounts, even from my preferred address which is really just a forwarding address, not a real e-mail account.
So here I was, kinda digging Hotmail for a couple of days, thinking that it might become my preferred e-mail reader. Then I tried to send an e-mail to my dad.
Hotmail asked me to prove that I was a human. Annoying, but my message was about the stock market, so I could understand that it might have triggere some of their spam alarms. Hotmail asked me to type the letters I saw from an image of distorted letters. In every case, I could recognize about half of the letters, but some (those in a second word) were always so distorted & overlapping that I will never be able to identify them; I don't see how anyone could.
After all those tries, I gave up.
So Hotmail wouldn't allow me to send an e-mail to my dad because I can't pass their Turing test. I'm a human, & I can't pass Hotmail's Turing test.
Screw you, Hotmail.