...some things never change.

The Internet has come a looong way. I was too young to remember its early years what with the IRC stuff and all that, but I was right there in the thick of action during its teenage years, and that was when people still used to go to chatrooms, and use ICQ (uh-oh!) and all that.  I had been the first person to register my Hotmail account in my name. Yes, the Original Gangsta, the non-extra-numbers-attached-to-my-Hotmail-address person. All that 2 megabytes of space, belonging to the first doremish to ever claim the account.

I have to say, I am glad that my lack of originality for a clever name is now indicative of foresight. Talk about dumb luck... As any geek would understand, there's always a bit of pride when you are the first one to get your name registered. Forever and ever a big eff-u to all the people of the same name.

Then, slowly, everything required registration. Hotmail's ironically puny inbox started filling up with dozens of emails per day questioning the size of my manhood. If not that, then it's this distressed Nigerian prince that seems to constantly get himself in trouble (well gee if you can't learn from your first mistake, I can't help you, there's no bail out in my book of principles... all about tough love). Next thing you know, Reader's Digest tells me I'm winning millions every day, too. Done are the days of eagerly waiting for one new unread email to pop up - new mails were popping up everyday, and most of it was junk.

An then GMail came along with, gasp, one whole gigabyte. So guess who again eff-u'd all the later-adopters-of-gmail-of-the-same-name? Yeuuuup. So the perfect arrangement was born. An email was sent out to all the 15 whopping contacts in Hotmail to officialize the transition, and it seems to be responded by as many people requesting the sought-after-Gmail-invite.

And Mish called the new gmail account legit; 
and the old hotmail account garbage bin: 
and Mish saw that it was good.

Alas, insert that same stupid cliché about history repeating itself (if you are bored, wiki Historical Reccurence like I just did, that's another interesting time sink). Even with my best effort of keeping random registrations to Hotmail and real life impacting registrations to Gmail, there are all those "subscriptions" that end up going through Gmail. You want to create a profile on the career website? Sure, we'll send you a Newsletter for some crap every week. Honestly, I think the best way to ensure people don't read the content of your email, is by having "Weekly Update" or "October Newsletter" in your subject line.

My problem now is that, after finding that minuscule link buried in the 176523 words disclaimer that says "unsubscribe", and doing what is necessary to tell them to stop, I keep receiving some of those boring crap.

For me, lately, Internet has been lackluster. There was a long drought of more of the same stuff, and BAM prolification of user-generated contents and everybody's grandmother is on Facebook and following your tweets. But really, except for going to reddit and reading wikipedia, there's hardly anything that gets me excited to go online anymore... my routine became that of cleaning up my inbox (gotta be diligent or otherwise it gets 716523 groupons and travelzoo deals) and a quick scan of facebook (that replaces calling up friends to catch up), maybe the frontpage of reddit.

Maybe I am just getting old and grumpy, and change resistant. It's sad to see that with all those changes, the only thing that stayed with me through thick and thin is that my email inbox is still questioning my manhood (but now it's actually grown to 7GB - the inbox, not my manhood), and Nigeria still has very distressed royalties. Gone are the wild wild west days of Napster and easy p2p sharing, the intimacy of an ICQ Chat (not the uh-oh! one, but the real time one), dingey home-made HTML angelfire websites and the anonymity of your online persona (damn youtube celebrities breaking the 4th wall!).

I kinda miss the good ol' days. What do you miss the most about Ye Olde Internet?