so it has now been a week and a half since mirapoint^WcMail was rolled out. how has it been received? well, let’s see:

The Good
 — Steve Gabel, Associate Provost, said “…I could go on but the new email service is from my perspective the best ever.”
 — A student from my days back in the PSD, who stopped me in the Pub last .. Tuesday? and complimented me(us) on how well it went.
 — At least two people who have said, offhand, to me, “I didn’t notice anything; my mail just worked like normal.” this is possibly the highest praise from a non-webmail nsit mail user that I could ask for, as that’s exactly what it was supposed to do.
 — The Maroon wrote two actually pretty decent articles about cMail, including one plea to consider writing support with one’s feedback instead of simply bitching to one’s friends. Preach it!
 — Blogger Phoebe Maltz appears to like the fact that “[cMail] doesn’t look quite so much like andrewsullivan.com.”
 — postmaster@uic.edu wrote us a note and said they’d all been saying about us, “‘Wow. That’s moderately brave of them.'” I choose to interpret that in terms of “what would have been really brave would just have been to shoot anyone who complains that webmail is slow,” and thus it’s a commendation.

The Bad
 — Jonathan Cowperthwait’s cMail rant post in . Not necessarily his initial post — though that was certainly worth savoring at a time after we’d just worked our asses off for roughly 120 hours, with less than a normal night’s sleep therein, to make that general demographic quit telling us that webmail is slow — but the responses.
 — Various and sundry students insist on telling us things like “well, okay, but just so long as you know that the students are not happy with this!!!” Listen, I’m willing to accept that you speak for yourself, a group of your friends, maybe even an entire RSO, but I’m pretty sure that you don’t speak for all students. Especially the ones that wrote us to say that they kinda actually like cMail.
 — I am still not not-fatigued, which I blame on the stress and aggregate sleep-deprivation of the past month-to-six-weeks. which is getting really old, for the record, as I wish to have energy and initiative once more.

The Ugly
 — The gentleman who wrote to web services that “These [proposed new] design schemes are all ugly. All of it looks as if it was designed by a giant bureaucratic monster that eats children and spits them back out in bland colors and ugly typefaces.” Come on. That was just spiteful; you’re obviously not even trying to be constructive with that. If you don’t like email, fine, but don’t take it out on the web designers who are stuck working within the official approved university graphic identity blah de blah blah blah.
 — The Maroon‘s column in which it was ranted on, once more, about how NSIT had the gall to have a holiday party while email was down, during finals week, December 2002. Guys, none of the actual email systems people went to the party, because they were working on your email. And if the telecom customer service agents and the network engineers and the purchasing folks and the people who run the campus computer stores and everyone else but the five people who answered to root@uchicago.edu wanted to enjoy the holiday party, they were allowed to do so.

…

something i find amusing — blogger Brian Hinkle remarked in his “Mirapoint Woes” post that “an nsit technician” — that would be me, ladies and gentlemen — “blogged extensively” on mirapoint. i was actually trying to be circumspect. perhaps even downright tightfisted with the gossip, was i! i mean, apart from my hate, which was not actually a blog post, and my sleep-deprived remarks about the migration weekend itself, i diligently refrained from bitching about much of anything mira-related at all, other than process or scheduling, on the blog. not that there weren’t things to bitch about. i was just trying to be nice, and prevent blog-drama (which was, it turns out, completely in vain, as the hates post resulted in at least one mirapoint-internal panty-bunching, a fact i find astounding considering the ratio of google hits on “mirapoint sucks” to, say, “exchange sucks,” and the relative lameness of that particular rant. i mean, if they were going to angst at me for not being all paper-hearts and puppies about the product, i totally should have made it worth angsting about. but i digress).

and also, i was withholding the gossip so that my on-campus friends outside of nsit would lure me to the pub and feed me beer in order to make me talk.