A friend of mine that I know only through the magic of electrons commented today on the fact that I change e-mail addresses more often than anyone she knows. I thought that was kind of a harsh thing for a girl named Halibut to say, but we’ve known each other for a few years so I can let her slide.

Like any good woman, she has a point. I got my first e-mail account back iin ’96 before I knew that AOL wasn’t cool. After a couple of months I got tired of the ads, and harrassment of my peers and moved on to Netcom with its cumbersome .ix.com extension. They got absorbed by somebody and the modem to user ratio went into the toilet, so I went with a local provider. My buddy owned it so the price was right and like all good things it came to a rapid ending. From there I hopped onto Memphisonline.com which was a national provider that named itself after each city it hosted servers in. That was pretty good for a time, but then they went to an e-mail only help desk which is pretty much usless. I broke my contract with those guys and moved on to BellSouth and entered the world of DSL. Now that address stuck for a couple of years. I did have the HotMail and Yahoo account, but kept losing them due to neglect. I had acouple of accounts that were tied to different newsgroups or websites. There was, of course, the work address even though I never gave that one out. Then the Army wanted me at Fort Bragg for a year so I got a .bragg.mil account and another account that won’t change even after the Army kicks me out.

BellSouth didn’t have service in North Carolina so I used one of those free AOL CDs just to get my new laptop on line. An hour later I had dumped the Yellow running man and had hooked up with Earthlink. That account got be through my days at Bragg and back to Memphis. I stayed with the DSL version of EarthLink untill Uncle Sam called again.

Earthlink didn’t have DSL in Northern Virginia at the time so I made the move to cable. Cox Cable gave me several mailboxes with the account but none have been activated. I used my .army.mil account for a couple of months then went to Yahoo which sucks except for the price. Now I’m using Gmail. A far better than than I’ve used before.

Like I said, despite being named for a fish, she’s a pretty sharp lady.