Down and out. Quit. Exit.

When in doubt, step out. I used to be persistent at one point of time. Very persistent. Dogged. I won’t take failure in my stride. I would keep trying. Hitting my head against a determined wall of resistance. No more. Now I quit early. Cut my losses. The sooner the better. That’s why I quit Window Live Beta yesterday. Got back to good ol’ Hotmail. Window Live just did not work for me. I couldn’t figure out how to write e-mails with it. There was no Compose button. Also, once I put an e-mail in a folder, I couldn’t figure out how to retrieve it. In other words, I could not open the personal folders. Also, the Help button was no help. Every time, I clicked on it, it would give me an error/try again message. This must have happened at least two dozen times. Then I simply gave up. Abandoned all hope and quit. But before I could go back, Microsoft put me through the grind of a questionnaire. Their drift seemed to be to make me see the error of my ways, I guess. Fair enough. I had my say and quit. Before letting me go, they even offered me the option of rejoining the queue for the Window Live Beta all over again. Thank you but no, thank you. I’d rather be Dead than Live.

What’s your favourite conspiracy theory?

Do you believe in conspiracy theories? Like the one that got Mel Gibson into hot waters in Conspiracy Theory? You know, the "there's a big cover-up involving the US Government and a ham-handed, bumbling CIA" sort?

In the fifties and the sixties, there used to be stories that G-Men in Black cropped up out of nowhere every time there was an "incidence" involving UFOs and aliens and muddied the water so much that, in the end, no one knew what had really happened. (In the 1997 hit, Men in Black, Jay/Will Smith and Kay/Tommy Lee Jones had to wield their neuralyzers to deal with the scum of the intergalactic space, remember?) Read the script: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Men-in-Black.html.

Now let me point you to the once-familiar Internet conspiracy theory with Microsoft as everybody’s favourite villain. At http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2823588,00.html, you'll find a typical conspiracy theory scenario. It's about the control of – no, not intergalactic space – the Internet. The secret weapon – Windows XP and the bundled IE browser – were to be allegedly used by Microsoft in cahoots with the US Government to help it control the distribution of information over the Internet. (Don't forget Congress had by then already given the US Government unlimited electronic surveillance power.) The article, Microsoft: Too much control of the Web?, was written by the well-respected CEO of UserLand Software, Dave Winer, who kept a daily blog, "Scripting News," at http://www.scripting.com/.

Hey, Groucho. No giving up Casablanca, eh?

Remember Groucho Marx’s battle of wits with Warner Bros’ shysters over A Night in Casablanca in the late forties? http://www.infoanarchy.org/story/2003/9/5/211917/5941. It came to mind when I read what happened to 17-year-old Mike Rowe of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He registered his name with a ‘Soft’ added at the end for his website last August. This attracted the wrath of Microsoft as well as a cease-and-desist e-mail (19 November 2003) from its Canadian lawyers, Smart & Biggar, saying he was infringing copyright and offering US$10 for his name. In sheer pique, he asked for $10000. In retaliation, they accused him in a 25-page letter (15 January 2004) of harbouring all along “the intention to sell my domain name to Microsoft for a large cash settlement”. http://www.mikerowesoft.com/. Mike seemed to have emerged the winner from this David vs Goliath encounter. He got worldwide attention and fame and 250000 visitors to his website as of 19 January. For a hilarious (though fictional) view of the
row(e), don’t miss out on what’s at http://www.thedailyfarce.com/technology.cfm?story=2004/01/technology_mikerowsoft_01200400027. Point to ponder: If Microsoft puts a notional value as low as $10 on mikerowesoft.com, surely it doesn’t see it as much of a threat, does it? Then why spend several times that puny sum on lawyers’ fees to bully Mike? Is it, as he writes on his website “just another example of a huge corporation just trying to intimidate a small business person (and only a 17 year old student at that) to get anything they want by using lawyers and threats”? But, hey, guys. For all his brave talk, Mike finally caved in and ended his ordeal with a ‘not with a bang but a whimper’ settlement. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/35113.html. (‘Mike Rowe goes soft, hands over PR victory’ by Kieren McCarthy) P.S.: Two other Mikes – Mikerosoft.net owner Rushton and Mikerosoft.ca owner Morris – too had fallen afoul with the software giant earlier. Also take a look at http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/20/rowe.fight/ for good measure.