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davidnSomewhere in the depths of my Internet past, there's a Hotmail account that went unused and unchecked for about a year. Even though I used to retrieve emails from three different accounts in Thunderbird, I was forced to stop when Microsoft shot themselves in several of their own feet and disallowed all outside access to their accounts by anyone (not just new accounts as before). And their brave attempt to become the most patently useless email provider in the world was a success, because GMail was coming up at that point and everyone was beginning to realize that it was miles better, so many people left. And since then I've been trying to switch every Internet identity of mine over to "DavidN" and point them to my far more usable GMail account.
Yesterday, though, I finally discovered a workaround (not that I'd been searching all that hard before) - I'd used Thunderbird successfully for a while until it suddenly stopped working with Hotmail, but it seems that if you're using the WebMail plugin with the Hotmail extension, and you put your port number up above 1024 and switch to either "WebDav" or "New" as a way of retrieval, then you can magically access your Hotmail inbox again (not the sent messages, but let's not hope too much from battling with Microsoft).
And what came tumbling into my inbox was a year worth of spam that I had been quite enjoying not getting. Most of it was DeVry university offering me a useless degree - one of which was been going to be sent in 2009. The others are for unspeakable things in both English and a variety of foreign languages.
The rare cases were the ones that people meant to send to me. I had set up a "vacation reply" on my Hotmail account ages ago telling people to send things to my GMail account instead because that one was never checked any more, but either nobody listened to that or it just never worked anyway. The majority of them were from GameFAQs, because in my great refactoring I never bothered to update anything I wrote for that site with my new email - nobody ever contacted me about anything anyway until I wasn't checking it any more.
There was one from a forum member asking me about my maps for Unreal Tournament. When I wrote the tutorial for UnrealEd, it was at a point when I'd never seen a decent complete beginner guide (though the Unreal Wiki came along shortly afterwards and was a lot better), and my maps weren't exactly stellar, but I had a look for them all the same and linked him to what I could salvage from what I'd uploaded to Nali City years ago.
I didn't answer any of the others because they're too old to bother with, but they were all questions or suggestions about what to add to the guide - somebody mentioned some details about the barrel-on-wobbly-bridge section of Tombi, where I'd detailed painstaking instructions on exactly where to stamp on the bridge to tilt each section so that the barrel rolled all the way down to the river. He pointed out, quite rightly, that you could just push it.
Finally, there were a couple asking about the silliest-named game in the world, Syphon Filter - the first guide I ever wrote, and the only reason it's significant is that it details how to get past a common game bug that nobody else had worked out at the time. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quadralien is also good at this - see this giant summary of what went wrong in Hexen II.) One of them was asking about putting tags on crates, which does tend to confuse a few people. But the other one was an email saying that the sender's son had been stuck on the first level for "close to a year". As far as I could tell, he could get into the bar that contains the first objective, then couldn't find the "communications array", which is a laptop sitting in plain view on a table with a giant arrow saying "Communications array" pointing to it. I think the only help I could have offered there was to advise her son to get a new hobby.
Yesterday, though, I finally discovered a workaround (not that I'd been searching all that hard before) - I'd used Thunderbird successfully for a while until it suddenly stopped working with Hotmail, but it seems that if you're using the WebMail plugin with the Hotmail extension, and you put your port number up above 1024 and switch to either "WebDav" or "New" as a way of retrieval, then you can magically access your Hotmail inbox again (not the sent messages, but let's not hope too much from battling with Microsoft).
And what came tumbling into my inbox was a year worth of spam that I had been quite enjoying not getting. Most of it was DeVry university offering me a useless degree - one of which was been going to be sent in 2009. The others are for unspeakable things in both English and a variety of foreign languages.
The rare cases were the ones that people meant to send to me. I had set up a "vacation reply" on my Hotmail account ages ago telling people to send things to my GMail account instead because that one was never checked any more, but either nobody listened to that or it just never worked anyway. The majority of them were from GameFAQs, because in my great refactoring I never bothered to update anything I wrote for that site with my new email - nobody ever contacted me about anything anyway until I wasn't checking it any more.
There was one from a forum member asking me about my maps for Unreal Tournament. When I wrote the tutorial for UnrealEd, it was at a point when I'd never seen a decent complete beginner guide (though the Unreal Wiki came along shortly afterwards and was a lot better), and my maps weren't exactly stellar, but I had a look for them all the same and linked him to what I could salvage from what I'd uploaded to Nali City years ago.
I didn't answer any of the others because they're too old to bother with, but they were all questions or suggestions about what to add to the guide - somebody mentioned some details about the barrel-on-wobbly-bridge section of Tombi, where I'd detailed painstaking instructions on exactly where to stamp on the bridge to tilt each section so that the barrel rolled all the way down to the river. He pointed out, quite rightly, that you could just push it.
Finally, there were a couple asking about the silliest-named game in the world, Syphon Filter - the first guide I ever wrote, and the only reason it's significant is that it details how to get past a common game bug that nobody else had worked out at the time. (
quadralien is also good at this - see this giant summary of what went wrong in Hexen II.) One of them was asking about putting tags on crates, which does tend to confuse a few people. But the other one was an email saying that the sender's son had been stuck on the first level for "close to a year". As far as I could tell, he could get into the bar that contains the first objective, then couldn't find the "communications array", which is a laptop sitting in plain view on a table with a giant arrow saying "Communications array" pointing to it. I think the only help I could have offered there was to advise her son to get a new hobby.
