Adventures of a Man Mountain

On my previous post I mentioned that it took Google a long time to release themes for users of their GMail service.

With the following post Hotmail took 10 times  as long to release POP3 and SMTP access to free customers especially if you consider that Hotmail has been a free email service since 1996!

So without further adieu Hotmail has come out and released POP3 and SMTP access to people that have either:

1. A Hotmail Account
2. A MSN Account
3. A Windows Live Account

There is a catch though you need to have signed up for your account and set your country to one of the following:  United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

I have been hearing rumors from other people on the web that if you didn’t set it to one of the country’s above you can sign in to your current account and change the country properties to that of one of the above and that will give you access.  Not sure how true that is.  Bear in mind also though it is likely you will need to know a state and also the postal code of the country you are changing to in your account settings.

Alternatively you could just use Windows Live Mail which I’m currently using to check my Hotmail account without having to login to the ugly web interface.  It acts a lot like Outlook Express, thinking about it.  I would say it is Outlook Express but for Windows Vista and it works really well.  I prefer to use that, than Thunderbird and have been using Thunderbird for quite some time.  You need to have a Hotmail account to sign in to it, but you can setup other accounts on it that don’t have anything to do with Microsoft or Hotmail - your ISP account or your GMail account and Windows Live Mail supports IMAP just like Outlook Express does.

For more information about POP3 and SMTP with Hotmail follow the below link:

http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!32413.entry

Google have at long last released GMail Themes for their email service.  Very overdue IMO, it’s not often that I use the Webmail interface anyway, as I usually just use Mozilla Thunderbird to POP my mail or sync my emails over IMAP.

On those occasions that I would use the Webmail I found the default interface a bit bland for my liking, sure it looks clean and all but it really needed to have an option where you could add color to spice up the interface a bit.  MSN Hotmail has that option, Yahoo!Mail has that option, and GMail have only just added that option.

It’s the only time I have seen Google a step behind the other 2 giants in regards to anything.

You can read all about how to spice up your GMail account here and have a look at what themes are available at the moment.

It’s been the talk of the office for the last week to see whether or not Barack Obama would succeed George W. Bush as the next United States President.

Personally I think its a highlight for everyone in the United States and the world as a whole. Hopefully he can bring on the change that is needed in that country in so many different areas.

Last week I had the whole week off, lucky for me From Sunday night through to the following Monday. Was awesome, just relaxed and chilled out for the most of it. Had to take some time off to try and reset my body clock as it’s sooo used to the graveyard hours I was working.

Anyway On Saturday and Sunday ended up playing a bit of poker Got to the final table at one event out of about 40 people and there was about 9 of us on the final table. Was interesting to say the least.. getting reads on people, and just trying to figure out how my hand stacked up to the rest of the people on the tables I played on before getting to the final table. My stack was small compared to the other 8 people when reaching the final table, so got bullied around a little bit by the big stacks :/ All good I thought, part of the learning process some of these guys have been playing for at least 2 years.

And on Sunday got an invite from a friend to attend the North Shore Regional. Which was very interesting, as only the top 10 players from each bar on the North Shore (6 Bars) get to compete for a prize of $600 and the people that come 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th get bar tabs.

One thing I will say is that poker, or rather Texas Hold’em in itself is exhausting. I was just so tired mentally, which I think has alot to do with the mental focus on different aspects of the game and what is going on at the table. They did have breaks every 20mins or so and that was good, it didn’t really hit me until the showdown going on at the final table for the North Shore Regional.