Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Flag Trivia

So, I got an e-mail about American Flag trivia, and it had some mistakes in it, so I started composing a reply (because I hate hate HATE inaccuracy), and that prompted me to do some fact-checking (because I hate hate HATE *HATE* inaccuracy in my own work).

Long story short, I probably spent four hours on this e-mail. Towards the end, I was probably having too much fun going off on unrelated tangents, but anyway. For a moment, I even considered making a post here about it. There are lots of things about the American flag that most Americans don't know.

But, I decided that most Americans don't care, either. So, I just sent the e-mail.

And...Yahoo had logged me out. I spent so much time writing the e-mail, that I was logged out. And the message was gone. The message that I paid FOUR HOURS OF MY LIFE FOR was gone.

You really can't begin to understand the effort it is taking me to keep this post family-friendly right now.

Now, if you are timed out on Gmail (for example), YOUR MESSAGE IS STILL THERE. You see:
Your connection to Gmail has expired. Please log in again.
in a pop-up window. Click OK and YOUR MESSAGE IS STILL THERE. If you've logged in as another user, you see:
Your Gmail account has been signed out.
This may have happened automatically because another user signed in from the same browser.

If you were composing a message, you can copy and paste the text of the message into another application, such as a text editor. When you're done, click Sign out to sign back in and finish composing your message.

This may be the end of Yahoo for me. I don't mean that I will stop using my Yahoo accounts (I will stop using my Yahoo accounts), but I mean, if YOU use a Yahoo account, I may not write to you anymore. If you want a Gmail account, I'll send you an invite.

This Phoenix is a Sad Phoenix. Crying 2


  1. Sad!

    Blogger did that to me a few times. Even now I still keep copies of e-mails and blogs posts in the clipboard while submitting, just in case.

  2. The really REALLY sad part, that I didn't mention, is that I, too, had copied the message to the clipboard before sending. But, then I decided not to post it to the blog, and browsed around in other windows.

    By the time I came back to the Yahoo window, I could hardly remember what I had sent, and it took a few moments to realize that the logged-out message had come up after I pressed send and switched windows. So, I didn't realize right away that my message had been lost.

    Here's the really REALLY sad part: I had JUST copied a new piece of text to the clipboard, maybe two minutes before. If I had seen that window first, I would have still had it intact.

    Do you remember the old clipboard manager that used to come with Windows? You had to install it separately, but it was REALLY handy. It kept track of what had been copied to the clipboard, so you didn't lose anything. You could even export it directly to files (handy to get around crippled software that didn't allow saving or printing, but did allow copying and pasting).

    It's no longer available for XP, but ClipX is (which I now have installed, a few minutes too late). I should make a post about handy tools.

  3. Also, Blogger's Recover Post feature (which has been updated since I complained about it), keeps every post you write (until you write a new one), so if the same thing had happened there, I would STILL have had it.