Why I Set Up My Own Webpage and E-Mail

Warning:  Longwinded and Stultifyingly Boring Content Below!

     For a long time, I used the e-mail address that came attached to my Internet Service Provider (ISP), and so my very first e-mail address with something @ prodigy.com, way back when Prodigy was owned and operated by Sears.  Yes, the same Sears that will sell you socks in their stores!  Prodigy was a joint venture of Sears and IBM, of all the unlikely corporate pairings.  Then I switched to a dialup service called Earthlink, and had an e-mail through them until my cable company came a-callin'.

     After that, it was all cable for me!  The speed was blazing, and the reliability was great, and the e-mail came with the package, and so I was mcmelton@adelphia.net for the longest time.  A side benefit was that I now had cable television for the first time in many years.  Our family has just not ever watched much television, and so we never subscribed to cable since we could never justify the value.  But the cable company required me to carry the basic cable television package in order to have cable internet access - you could not have just the internet access alone.

     So I've had some fun watching college and pro football, and actually got hooked for a time on CSI: Miami (now long past - I missed just enough episodes to lose contact with the characters), and I've also got a thing for Denis Leary's "Rescue Me" firefighter series shown on the FX channel.

     Again, I was happy with the service except for one aspect of it - the e-mail address inbox was small in size, which meant that as e-mail content expanded, the e-mails that got sent to me quickly filled my inbox to overflowing.  If I didn't unload my Adelphia inbox and download my e-mails to the Outlook program on my computer fairly often, then the inbox would overflow and not accept any more incoming e-mail.  It even sent "rejection" notices to people who were sending me stuff, which would confuse them until I cleaned out my inbox and the space would reopen.

     This wasn't much of a problem early on, but especially with the advent of Powerpoint slide shows and even video files, then the size of each individual e-mail jumped up dramatically, pushing my inbox's limits more and more often.  My longtime and very dear running friend Lorraine Evans, the publisher of Florida Running & Triathlon magazine, was particularly adept at stuffing my inbox beyond its overflow point, since she is a clearinghouse of sorts for all kinds of people who e-mail her all kinds of stuff, which she kindly forwards on to a list of e-mail buddies that very nicely includes me.

     I was considering changing e-mail services just to get more space, and for a short time had a "Hotmail" account, especially after my divorce when I tried the internet dating services.  Boy, have I got some hair-raising stories to tell about that!  Anyways, I was considering changing services when Adelphia introduced its DVR service - the digital video recorder - Adelphia's answer to TiVo.  What a fun thing to have!  Now I could watch a TV show when I wanted to, and not be tied to some arbitrary schedule!

     I found that I could also watch a one-hour show in about 42 minutes just by fast-forwarding through the commercials, and for a control freak like me, it was heady power indeed!  I still only watch "Rescue Me", but now I see it whenever I want to, and it's awfully fun and helpful to back up and replay something that wasn't clear the first time around.

     So other than that one e-mail space problem, I was happy with Adelphia.  Until recently, when the Rigas (the family that founded Adelphia) family's decision to loot Adelphia of its money a few years ago finally pushed Adelphia into bankruptcy.  Riding to the rescue was Comcast, which bought much of Adelphia's assets, including the cable accounts in my service area.

     As I pondered the changes, I also noticed that the cost was becoming a much bigger part of the equation.  When I originally contracted with Adelphia for cable and internet services, my monthly bill was something like $80 per month.  Over the years, Adelphia had pushed it up to a bit more than $100 per month, something like $103 or so.  And remember that I have just the most basic cable package available - no premium channels whatever!

     The change to Comcast forced me to re-evaluate my internet needs, as I no had no choice but to change my e-mail address, since mcmelton@adelphia.net was going to go away.  At least they gave me six months' carryover to make the switch!  And Comcast has not been shy about re-pricing my services, and so my current service costs $123 per month.  Since I watch so little TV, that's an awful lot of money for internet access!

     For example, throughout all this I've maintained a telephone dialup internet account with a service called Copper.net, and they have been a VERY slow but reliable alternative to my cable account, and the price is definitely right - I pay $9.95 per month to keep the service active.  I use it almost exclusively when I'm traveling, since I can always hook my computer up to the hotel room telephone and connect to the internet that way.  And it IS deductible as a legitimate business expense ;-)!

     Another factor that came into play was that Sandy, my wife of  a year and a half, wanted her own computer access now that we were both living in the same house.  I of course offered for her to use my setup, but she really wanted something that wouldn't clash with my usage.  When Sandy's Mom bought her a new Toshiba laptop, then it seemed the right time to institute a wireless network in the Melton household, and that's what we did.  I set Sandy up with a Google mail e-mail address (gmail.com), as I had recently set one up for myself as an experiment in breaking my ties to an ISP-related e-mail address.

   So when Comcast forced the e-mail change on me, I figured it was time to look at the whole way that I approach internet access and e-mail.  If I'm not making good use of TV, why pay the high price for cable?  And what do I do about changing e-mail addresses?  Do I want to switch to a comcast.net address only to change addresses again a short while later when I pull the plug on the cable?  Should I use a "free" e-mail  service such as Hotmail, Juno, Netzero, Yahoo, or Gmail?

     I decided to experiment with gmail, Google's answer to Yahoo's e-mail service, and so I set up mcmelton57@gmail.com.  I have to say that right away I was put off by it, because it was a different format from my long-standing use of Microsoft's Outlook program in handling my e-mail.  Lord knows I have my issues with Microsoft products and services, but at least I knew how to use Outlook for what I wanted, and I wasn't really up to learning all about a "new way to e-mail", as Google so perkily describes its service.

    Gmail is scary, because it illustrates some of the potential uses of the internet in an Orwellian way.  Here's what I mean - the "main page" of your gmail account (and I guess all the other pages as well) is surrounded by advertising, much as any free website is.  I have learned over the years to simply glide by these free ads, so much so that often I don't even notice them any more.  I did, however, begin noticing my gmail ads, and it was because they were NOT the same ads all the time!  In fact, the ads were very cleverly selected to match the information contained in my e-mails!

    So Google is scanning my e-mails, and picking out key words or subjects, and then placing ads around my content that relate in some way to that content.  For example, when an e-mail contains anything running-related, each ad surrounding my page is running-related, including a particularly obnoxious ad for "Ultramarathonman" Dean Karnazes, one of my favorite "love-hate" subjects.  When my e-mail is technical in nature (for example, I recently bought Sandy an MP3 player online), the ads are completely different, focusing instead on technogeek stuff and online shopping sites.  When the content is business-related, I get another completely different set of ads.

    This, for me, is not an example of the web operating at its best - it's instead an example of the worst the web has to offer - and here's why:  I didn't get asked if I wanted this to happen.  It just happened, and my guess is that I can NOT opt out of it - otherwise, Google has no reason to provide me with free e-mail service.  So in effect I've traded my privacy for a bit of free services - not a great trade, in my humble opinion!

    On second thought, I probably DID get asked - when I had to check "Yes" and agree to Google's conditions for allowing me to use their e-mail service.  So I guess the issue is really mine, after all ;-)!

    A conversation with my computer guru Eric Keene of C&W Computers (No Financial Interest for in C&W me, but I'd highly recommend his firm - www.cwnow.com), the guy whose radio show follows mine on our local tiny little AM station WSTU-AM1450, prompted him to ask me why I didn't just buy my own domain name and set up my own e-mail address, and so that's just what I did!  And here we are today!  I'm master of www.mcmelton.com, and I own several e-mail accounts as a result of that, including mike@mcmelton.com, which will be my e-mail address for now and (hopefully) into the long-distant future!