Empty Progress

I know I'm aging, and not all that gracefully. It disturbs me that an increasing part of my life revolves around afflictions and even more that I sometimes find myself lapsing into "when I was growing up..." thinking and questioning change.

I don't like to think of myself as stuck in the past, but sometimes the reasoning behind progress leaves me scratching my head (and being thankful for the hair that remains there).

Just the other day my Internet provider, AT&T, sent me yet another e-mail discussing upgrades. I say "yet another" because this is the kind of thing I've received regularly over the years going all the way back to when Pacific Bell was my provider.

This latest notification, once again, as always, promises that I'll have to do nothing to continue receiving the quality service I've enjoyed in the past. That's a good thing because when it comes to doing nothing, I'm right up there at the top. It's one of the few areas that I can honestly say I excel at, so it's great to see that this update is one I can master.

This update, however, reminds me that many people use the Internet, or their ISP, much differently than I do. They're making some changes to their web e-mail client or server, a feature I have to admit I've never used. As long as I've had any ISP I've done all my e-mailing through a client that fetches the mail from their server and deletes it. What mail I've gotten has always been stored on my computer, and I see no reason to change any of that.

Most of my e-mail now is sent to my host, half-dozen, and they've screwed me up by no deleting messages they forward, but that's another story for another time. That service, by the way, is one I can enjoy again if I wish to upgrade my account and spend more money, something I'm loathe to do.

The other big change that AT&T is rolling out is a change to my homepage! As long as I've had them as my service provider, and Pac Bell before, I've had available to me the possibility of creating a home page. This goes all the way back to the Geocities days, and while I *did* have a Geocities page, I've never taken advantage of this generous offer.

When it comes to home pages, I guess I have to say this is it.

I've never met anyone who has some AT&T hosted page for their home page, but I guess there must be enough of them out there clamoring for new features that AT&T is answering their gripes. Maybe the new one lets you embed YouTube videos or something, and I'm sure the kids will be all over that.

There's more than enough real stuff to do. These upgrades that do absolutely nothing I'm interested in either remind me that I'm missing something or make me think I'm out of step with the current, hip world.

Still, I guess any effort on my ISP's part is some indication that they're not totally ignoring their market. But instead of home page advances, I'd rather have reduced costs or increased bandwidth.