Dopp Juice Archive

A few weeks ago, I found myself completely locked out of my Gmail account. My password just stopped working. This was not a matter of me misspelling my own password — two separate email programs that have my password stored in them (and that have been accessing my email just fine for years) agreed with me. I was really locked out. This meant one of two things:

• My account got hacked.
• Google screwed up.

I tried to recover it. The first step is to have Gmail send a link to your secondary email address. Unfortunately, my secondary email address is a three-years-dead hotmail account. No amount of negotiating with MSN could reconcile it.

They make you wait five days before you can move onto the second step, which is the security question. And my security question, apparently, is:

What is your primary frequent flyer number?

I tried all of my frequent flyer numbers. None worked. Upon further research, I’ve determined that I opened my Gmail account before I acquired my first frequent flyer number. Great. (As a sidenote, MSN also offered to let me answer a security question in the Hotmail Negotiations. It was, “Where was your mother born?” I don’t actually know where my mother was born.)

The third step, of course, is to email Google and beg for help. I tried one of my contacts “on the inside” and he directed me to the customer service address. He also didn’t offer much encouragement, reminding me that if Google can’t connect my identity with the account, they’re not going to let me back in. From the customer service address, I received an automated “We got your message!” email, with no follow-up response.

I cut my losses. It was really over — me and my Gmail. We were done. I emailed everyone who used that address, told them to use a different address from now on, and left daunting doom-ridden reminders that they should go check their email accounts NOW to make sure their secondary email addresses are functional and their security questions are current, lest they be suffer the horrors I am experiencing. I was just sayin’ is all.

A week later, I realized this is Google we’re talking about. They don’t just run my email, they run the world. In addition to losing my email login, I had also lost access to my Google Reader, Google Analytics, and Google Adsense/Adwords accounts — none of which I use too frequently, but all of which have important history logged in them. Great.

Technological detachment is a traumatic thing. I’ve been trying to take the Buddhist approach, embrace the impermanence of everything, accept that the lack of backup access is probably my fault, and get on with my life. But this voice in the back of my head occasionally keeps me awake at night, telling me that some very important email is sitting unanswered in my Gmail inbox, and that my unawareness of it is going to destroy a relationship, or kill a business deal, or ruin a small country, or cause a small puppy to die.

Today I made a new account. I don’t feel the urge to become Gmail-dependent again anytime soon, but I did miss my Google Reader, and couldn’t go another week without it. To set the system up clean from the start, I lumped all feeds into only two tags/folders: ALWAYS and SOMETIMES. This is a Gina Trapani trick that I learned at BlogHer07. Start with the ALWAYS folder every day, and make sure you see all of it. If you have more time, move to the SOMETIMES folder. If something in your ALWAYS folder starts to bore you, move it to SOMETIMES. And never, ever feel bad about hitting “Mark all as read.”

And that’s the story of my Googletrauma. It hurt, but maybe it was a good thing for me… to realize I don’t need my really organized, long-time inbox to survive in the real world. (::sniffles::) I mean, really, I haven’t died. And as far as I can tell, no small puppies have, either.

…But there is also an epilogue to this story.

I lost my Treo this weekend.

And I can’t. find. it. anywhere.

Jeesh.

This just made my day:

http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html

Impressively simple, yet disturbingly relevant.

How can I put this?

As I write this, I’m vacuuming. (Well, that’s not entirely true.)

As I write this, my home is being vacuumed, and I’m the only one home. (Well, that doesn’t feel so true, either.)

As a write this, an artificial intelligence robot is running amok in my living room, gobbling up everything in its sight. (Yes, that’s it.)

I bought an iRobot Roomba Scheduler (not an affiliate link) from Woot.com as a birthday present to myself. I set it up today and am equally impressed and entertained. It’s so cute, running around my floor going “gimme! gimme! gimme! gimme!” to all my dirt (no, it doesn’t actually have sound effects — I just feel so connected to my Roomba after the first twenty minutes that I believe we now speak the same language).

(It just found my kitchen — look at it go on the linoleum floor! How long has it been since I’ve swept over there?!)

Every creative genius has an Achilles’ heel. Housecleaning is mine. Still too stubborn to admit defeat and hire assistance for the task, I tend to just let the dirt just pile up. I can already tell that the Roomba and I are going to be great friends. This model comes with a scheduler, which means I can program it to clean every day (or less often, if I’m feeling lazy) while I’m at work. And since vacuums can’t clean under scattered laundry, this will force me to pick up more regularly, lest I anger my new AI roommate. Hey — double victory!

(Right now it’s navigating the underside of my futon, choking on electrical cords and freeing itself from the madness without crying for help.)

The other thing I’m proud of — I bought this puppy for $130 when it retails for $330. Have you heard about Woot.com yet? (If not, don’t feel bad — I just found out about it last week). It’s a geek-oriented shopping site that only sells one item per day. “One Day, One Deal” is their motto. The item is almost always super cheap and super cool. They’ve got an impressive business model:

A) Negotiate with companies for a low price on a really cool item that you can guarantee to sell a lot of in a really short period of time.

B) Build a community around a promise to provide the coolest, cheapest products on a daily basis through a really user-friendly and focused website.

C) Put non-obtrusive ads on the site.

If you’re a twitterer, you can find out about the latest buys on woot via tweets (wow, out of context, that sentence sounds really strange).

Expect a more critical review of the Roomba after I’ve played with it more. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a heckuva lot better than what I had going for me before.