Adventures of a Man Mountain

This is a very sad blog post.

I have encountered people in the past that are ashamed (whaka maa) to be of a certain ethnicity. Whether that be Russian, Spanish or Polynesian, it should be something to be proud of, as it is where your whanau (family) and ancestors come from and also a greater part of who you are. Some people I have encountered like to suppress it and act like are not of a particular ethnicity to close friends and work colleagues.

In my personal opinion it is a loss of your identity as a person, culture and heritage. In the public eye I can think of one person who has lost his identity Winston Peters. In saying that though I don’t think he is whaka maa to be Māori. He definitely has lost a part of his identity though, you can see it in his numerous speeches and talks about politics within NZ.

It really is no surprise that some people struggle to pronounce properly some of our of national locations around NZ.

Even when I’m just helping to correct them on the correct pronunciation of a location, then without warning everyone turns on you and makes a big deal out of it. People who make snarky comments about pronunciation of Māori areas and locations from people who are not Māori does not really offend me but people who are Māori making those comments, makes me feel sad and a little sorry for them for them to be honest.

Over n Out

Been using Cloud storage for quite sometime now. Started off with box.net which at the time was free 1GB - Upgraded to 5GB now for free accounts, which is alot better than some of the other alternatives out there like: Mediafire and Rapidshare.

What I like more than Box.net though is Dropbox as any files you put inside your Dropbox syncs those same files to any other dropbox clients linked to you account. Excellent for using for other work I do with design (images/scripts) and need to use them at home or somewhere else, just put it in my Dropbox and by the time I get home, that same file has synced to my Dropbox client on my desktop machine.

I also like SugarSync, which is similar to Dropbox but people have differing opinions on that service, some would say not as good. They give you 5GB of free storage where as Dropbox only provides 2GB. You can get more storage with Dropbox through referrals though, 250mb per each referral with up to 12 referrals.

If you are thinking of signing up, use my referral link! You will get 250mb as well for using my referral

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.