My latest rant

Thank you for spending $20 million in an extreme makeover for your e-mail service. 

I’m sure the revamp was done with the best of intentions but, as the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. 

The new and supposedly improved service is only a month old but I’m pretty sure it’s aged me 20 years. That’s $1 million for each extra batch of wrinkles. Impressive — even my husband hasn’t managed that.
It’s good that you automatically upgraded all customers to the new service so we don’t have to worry our pretty little heads about how we can hook ourselves up with all that lovely extra mailbox storage space available — up from 12MB to a much more user-friendly 100MB. I could have done with that when I was in hospital for a week and came home to an overflowing inbox and a message from Xtra saying I’d exceeded my limits and mail messages were now being bounced. 

I’m pretty sure anyone travelling will find that a huge bonus, too. 

The improved security is also appreciated. I like to feel safe and secure, so thanks for that. 

However, it’s the “better spam filtering” and new webmail interface that have caused me the most grief. 

I don’t like a computer deciding what is and isn’t spam. Feel free to tag my mail as potential spam in the subject line if you must but please don’t take it upon yourself to make the decision it’s spam, it’s bad and it’s not going to make it to my inbox. If I want you to decide that for me, I’ll tell you. 

The default setting for the new e-mail service should have been for potential spam to be tagged and sent on, not automatically sent to a separate folder so it doesn’t get downloaded to my inbox. 

I know I get a lot of spam, and I know I complain about it. However, I also know that at least half a dozen of my real e-mails get tagged as spam by you each week. 

I did try to change the spam filter setting but ended up being booted off the system and got a message saying: “There was a problem processing your last request. Please try again later.” 

Yesterday, I finally managed to hide on the webmail system long enough to change my filter options. 

Please don’t take it upon yourself to tinker with my settings again. 

Kindest regards, a stressed out customer

September 17 is the political version of the NZ Idol final. Without the singing, of course (thank goodness for small mercies).

As we all know, too much of anything is bad for us — as the South Korean man who up and died after playing Starcraft online for nearly 50 shows. The same goes for politicians.

Everything in moderation. And let’s face it, they’re all so damn boring we’re unlikely to want to have to spend too much of our time listening to them anyway.

David Lange was a politician who wasn’t boring. No matter whether you supported his policies or not, there’s no denying the man was incredibly clever, witty and respected.

Mr Lange, who died on Saturday night, was to New Zealand politics what Mohammed Ali was to boxing — a clever, colourful, flamboyant character who makes all who have followed in his footsteps look like bland imitations.

The wrong choice of apparel is the quickest way to make yourself look like a total knob or a dinosaur, or in the case of Motley Crue, both. 

There I was, innocently minding my own business, watching the Live 8 spectacular on Sunday when all of a sudden the band that time forgot appeared. 

Admittedly, back in the 1980s, I thought Motley Crue was okay. I even looked at the band members product-laden hair with a touch of admiration. 

Fast forward to 2005 and there they all were, on my TV screen, looking pretty much unchanged. The same clothes, the same hair-dos. Im not even sure they’d showered since 1985. 

Fashion can be a strange thing but perhaps Oscar Wilde summed it up best when he said: “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months” . 

Current fashion trends are more than a little confusing. First we have little girls being dressed in crop tops and tight mini skirts to look like pocket-sized trailer park trash. 

Then there are the grown women, many of them in their 40s and 50s, wearing little girl clothes — pink frills and fluff, polka dots, mittens and ribbons. I’m not sure which version I find the most disturbing. 

If you want to have a giggle at fashion transgression of bygone years, in the 1970s has a good range of clothing and fads to poke the borax at. Sister sites In the 80s and In the 90s cover the next two decades. 

Fiftiesweb has fashion fads for earlier eras, and also covers slang, music and pop culture. 

Looking at the changing fashions over the past few decades, the pattern for everything old being new again is pretty obvious but there are some trends that should stay in the past. Mullets and sideburns spring to mind. Oh, and 1980s hard rocking dudes need to move with the times. 

Perhaps Carson and the rest of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy boys need to pay a visit to Motley Crue.

It started off like any other Monday — opened one eye, crawled out of bed, staggered towards the kitchen to get up close and personal with a cup of tea, got attacked by the cat, prised open the other eye, found the morning newspaper and settled down to read it.

That was when it hit me. I spied the date. I was mere days away from being the mother of a 16-year-old (insert Jaws theme music here).

Yesterday was the big day, and now my wee lad isn’t such a wee lad any more. Happy birthday Nick and I must admit, I feel a tad old.

I know they say age is only important for dead fish and good wine but my moments of age-related paranoia aren’t helped when our own Southland Times Uptown Girl columnist Sarah Kilkelly talks about going to see the movie Jurassic Park when she was just a kid.

Oh, and Sarah, don’t click that link, there are scary dinosaurs galore.

The movie that was my generation’s biggie was, of course, Star Wars — although I’m sure that year of release must be a misprint, 1977 is nearly 30 years ago. That would make me … ah yes, old.

I was born in 1966, the same year the first episode of Star Trek screened in the United States, Billie Jean King won her first Wimbledon singles title and John Lennon famously proclaimed the Beatles to be more popular than Jesus.

John Lennon’s death was another defining moment for my generation. No kiddies, his death doesn’t sit alongside that of grunge rocker Kurt Cobain. Lennon grew up with a whole generation of fans and collected new ones from the next generation, he was as important as Elvis.

Without the spandex jumpsuits and cheesiness.

That’s another thing that doesn’t always age well — fashion. Although, right now retro is the latest thing so maybe there’s hope for me yet.

The 80s was one of the most unkind decades for fashion. I can’t help wondering if a few thousand years from now, scientists will be disturbed upon viewing photos of Michael Jackson’s glove, David Hasselhoff’s Speedos and Linda Evan’s three-storey tall shoulder pads in Dynasty.

Hell, I’m disturbed already by those images, and I had pink, spiked hair in the 1980s.