disgruntled

Even a or so day back, I had this notion about myself that I was, if not exceptionally talented, good enough to feel at home in and around the world wide web. At this moment, however, I realise, in a rather disgruntled manner, that I am far from it.

first of all, I decided to create an account, and an e-mail id in my father's domain "yantrajaal" ... I managed to do that and then decided to start using it. So as a "teshting" measure I sent a mail from my current e-mail id, the one at gmail ... and was quite successful in recieving it at the other end.

So far so good.

Now, to actually get going, I decided to change my kontactr message alert to this new id, and tried to log in to my kontactr account. Then I realised that I had completely forgotten my kontactr account password.

"No probs", I thought to myself ... I've reset several passwords before ... so I clicked on the reset password option. Immediately I recieved an e-mail, to the same effect. Well and Good.

Now, I managed to log in to my kontactr account and changed my e-mail id to the new one, and logged out.

Now to see, whether this change worked successfully, I decided to contact myself ... er ... you get what I mean right? So left a "teshting and checking 1 2 3" message in my own form, and used my old id (gmail) to leave a message in my new one. Successfully answered the captcha (the funny lettering that ensures whether ypu are a human or an inhuman), and clicked on Send.

Well and good? Not really ... nothing happened ... no notification that your message has been sent, or despatched ... or "crossing the Atlantic" or "stuck at customs"... or "held up due to anthrax scare" ... or for that matter ... not anything remotely related to this fateful transaction of a ghost meassage. I kept staring at my laptop screen, hoping that ... perhaps Airtel Broadband had cracked up ... but no ... it was well alive and kicking ... visted a couple of other sites and confirmed that.

I tried again, and again, but in vain. Finally, a thought hit me ... what if that's how kontactr works ... they must have sent the messages already ... so I, with refound vigour and gutso bravely opened my new mail box ... and the spirits that had risen so fast, sank down twice as faster. Was it a problem with my dad's domain then, where I had created my id? (It wasn't, as I found later ... it was after all a customised avataar of Gmail itself)

So thinking that it was, I logged in to kontactr again and again changed my e-mail id to my old gmail version, and did everything from step 1 to step .... er ... lost count ... i mean the last step ...to no avail. I just could NOT contact myself. What can be sadder?

Now I was feeling pretty scared ... what if no one could contact me now? What if I lost contact with the wide and wonderful world and its wonderful inhabitants owing to a bug in a message service? So I closed my kontactr account and tried to open another.

Seven Sixty Six Suffering Samurais!!! they said ...you know what they said ...sniff ... they said that my e-mail id ... sniff ... was already in use .... boo hoo hoo ... sniff sniff ... mummy!!!

Thought to myself, well then if the whole kontactr team was conspiring against me, I didn't have any other option other than shut the damn thing down and forget that anything called kontactr ever existed on planet earth, hopped onto dear old google search, and typed in "personal contact form not kontactr" ... putting the "not kontactr" in quotes ... read in googling tips somewhere that when you do that, google treats it as a phrase, and not two individual words.

Thanks to dear ol' Google, I found another service called "contactify" ... weird name, but serves my purpose ... (but the other one, the one that got extinct a few hours back was better :( ) I've tested it to see that it does indeed deliver messages to my new id.

You can check it in action by clicking on the "contact me" button on top of the page.

So the first part of my tragedy ended, only to give birth to the second part.

I dunno whether you have read a previous post of mine, but I had stated that I did not have an account in any social networking platform ... viz Facebook or Orkut or Twitter or MySpace or LinkedIn ...The only networks I join are blogging networks like Indiblogger and Blogged, and the kewl stuff like StumbleUpon, digg and the sort. So today I decided to start in the mainstream ones. I chose Twitter, because it was cuter and sounded sweeter than any other ... hey poetry!!! Successfully created an account and looked around the place ... and for the first time in my life, I felt ... totally lost. Lost-er than what I had felt when I had sat for my IITJEE examination, earlier this year. I realised that you are supposed to follow others and others are supposed to follow you. I glanced through the choices the guys there threw at me ... found that digg was the only thing that sounded familiar and decided to follow digg. Suddenly remembered that indiblogger was also on twitter too and i quickly started to follow the same ... at least something less unknown than everything else that greeted my eye.

(If you, in the faintest probability, are sad enough to be wanting to follow me on twitter click here.)

Plus, my old fears were confirmed when I opened MS word after a lon long time and saw that MS office still considered my name to be a spelling error ... what more they even give suggestions like "Subhuman" and "Subhead" as alternatives to "Subhayan" ...!!! Would you believe that!

Lastly, but not leastly, I have even become unable to comment on select blogs ... Shankar's and Debi's ... to be precise, I know not why, but I find no place to enter the word verification ... i guess, it's the age that is catching up on me :D ...

till then, signing off on a still disgruntled note :(