according to anna

The next big thing

I’ve been kinda bored lately. Bored and moody actually, which is not a good combination. At work this is probably due to the training that I am in all week. It doesn’t quite keep me on the edge of my seat. At home however, I think that I still need a hobby or project or something.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about life lately. All our lives we’ve been preparing for the next big thing…when in grade school they warned us about high school (”You’ll have to write 15 page term papers!”…never happened!).
When in high school, we are preparing for college and surviving without our parents.
When in college, we are preparing for our careers, our first big job, and the “real” world.
After college, things get a little less structured, but again there are big events ahead…your first real place (outside of college life), or your first real experience getting paid more than you’re used to.
Then sometime after college then boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, and then boy and girl get married.

Now, you are out of school. You have a “real” job in the “real” world. You’ve met and married your knight in shining armor…now what? Granted, there are the future children, but lets just assume that you don’t want to have those right away, or you don’t want to have them at all. What exactly are you preparing for? Another year of doing exactly what you are doing now? A promotion in the distant future? a new job? buying a house?

I have a good job, great friends, and a wonderful husband, but in a world where all we seem to do is prepare for the next big thing, I can’t help but wonder what it is.

US divided by superhighway plan

Kansas City is in the plan to become a major hub used for transporting goods on a new superhighway, or the “nation’s most modern roadway,” mapped from Mexico to Canada.

Read the article

Coldmail

I imagine in an attempt to compete with good email providers, Hotmail has been upgrading their user interface, now called Windows Live Mail.

My first email account was (and still is) at hotmail.com. I use gmail mostly now and don’t know how I lived without it. Still, I’ve always held onto my hotmail account. I can’t help but think that if I get rid of it, I’ll lose contact with people or they won’t have my gmail address. Not only that, but sometimes it is handy to have a couple email accounts. I can sign up for something and not worry that my main account will get spammed.

Up until this point, I could live with hotmail. It was not gmail of course, but it was functional. Now it just seems like they have overextended themselves.
First off, it won’t even load in firefox. If their plan was to compete with gmail then they have already lost.
Second, assuming that you are using IE, you will have to click through 4 (count’em 4) security warnings.
Once the page actually loads, you’ll find that it takes way too long to navigate around. And you may notice the continued presence of banner ads, something that is not cluttering up gmail’s clean interface!

To truly be fair, I should give it a good shot and look for the good changes they’ve made (surely there are some). But to tell you the truth, I’m not that interested. I’ll stick with my gmail and continue to complain about hotmail…that is until I feel bold enough to stop checking it altogether.