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Irrational nostalgia
Jan. 30th, 2014 08:24 pmI just realized. Today's the last day Gmail Notifier (that little envelope marker in your menu bar you can download to tell you when you have new mail) will work. As of tomorrow (according to the email Google sent out a couple weeks ago), it's no longer going to be supported.
I'm honestly a little sad about this. I realize it's irrational - the advent of smartphones and in-browser email notifiers has more or less rendered it obsolete. But for more than a decade now, it's been one of the first things I install on any new computer. And because I've always kept my Gmail address for personal correspondence, I have a Pavlovian association with it - whenever I hear the chime and see the little red envelope icon light up, I get a warm fuzzy feeling, because it means someone wants to talk to me.
I think it also makes me feel a little old. I'm of the very last tail-end of the generation who can remember when home Internet was new, before computers were something you saw in nearly every household. (My father was a hobbyist, so we always had PCs growing up, back when PC wasn't a brand but an acronym - "personal computer". Mostly Commodores - I remember a Commodore 64, a 128, an Amiga 1000 and 2000, before we moved on to Windows.) So if computers are "new", and I've outlived the quite-generous lifespan of an app that I use every day...that must mean I'm getting up there. (Thirty years old - getting old and creaky! Hah.)
Ah well. Tomorrow I'll uninstall it, and that will be that.
But I think tonight I'll send myself an email, just to see it light up one last time.
I'm honestly a little sad about this. I realize it's irrational - the advent of smartphones and in-browser email notifiers has more or less rendered it obsolete. But for more than a decade now, it's been one of the first things I install on any new computer. And because I've always kept my Gmail address for personal correspondence, I have a Pavlovian association with it - whenever I hear the chime and see the little red envelope icon light up, I get a warm fuzzy feeling, because it means someone wants to talk to me.
I think it also makes me feel a little old. I'm of the very last tail-end of the generation who can remember when home Internet was new, before computers were something you saw in nearly every household. (My father was a hobbyist, so we always had PCs growing up, back when PC wasn't a brand but an acronym - "personal computer". Mostly Commodores - I remember a Commodore 64, a 128, an Amiga 1000 and 2000, before we moved on to Windows.) So if computers are "new", and I've outlived the quite-generous lifespan of an app that I use every day...that must mean I'm getting up there. (Thirty years old - getting old and creaky! Hah.)
Ah well. Tomorrow I'll uninstall it, and that will be that.
But I think tonight I'll send myself an email, just to see it light up one last time.
