DISCLAIMER: All opinions expressed here are strictly my own and have also been known to change over time. I am a work-in-progress. I am not always right. I do not consider myself an expert at anything or necessarily uniquely qualified to provide advice (if given) that may be helpful to you. But advice, when given, is intended only for a positive purpose. All readers are encouraged to always inform themselves in greater detail and make up their own minds with regards to anything I might write. To get a better idea of who I am, my experience, and where I'm coming from, see my "about me" blog entry.

I'm losing my battle with MySpace mail. It's sad.

I want to be able to reply to each and every message that comes in, but unfortunately, that's becoming almost impossible due to the nature of the MySpace mail system. The system makes it very easy to get buried with messages and complicates it further by not allowing an easy way to sort or save messages based on certain criteria (name, subject, date).

Yes, this blog entry is about MySpace mail. If you're already bored, please feel free to pull out now. You won't miss anything terribly spectacular by not reading further and you might just be saving yourself 3 minutes of your life that you'll never get back. Unless you're a slow reader, in which case, you might be saving 10 minutes or more! (Don't say I didn't warn you!) :)

Right now I have exactly 565 MySpace messages (57 pages) sitting in my "Inbox" since only mid-December 06. I'm sure that's not any sort of MySpace record, as I bet many of you have far more messages in your inbox than I do.

Well, my "situation" (that's what we're calling it downtown, a "situation" -- though I live in Santa Monica) was actually much worse a week ago before I started deleting dozens and dozens of messages that I'd already replied to.

Now, that's not something I like doing because I very much prefer to have a record of what's been said in a conversation (I'll admit it, I'm an anal email collector - I wish there was a support group for that!). But my inbox "situation" was getting impossible. And did you realize that messages that are sorted to your "sent" folder in MySpace are automatically deleted after a time? Yup. So unless the person copied everything I'd said in a previous message into their new one, I'd have to try to figure out what they were replying to based on the content of their message (sometimes that's easier than others). Regular email rules definitely do not apply to MySpace. Thats fine. I just wish there was a better way.

So now in my effort to bring my email "situation" under control, I've deleted complete conversations with people that I will likely forget. And if you wonder if it's the people or the conversations I'm referring to...sadly, it's potentially both.

Sorry "Buffy from Milwaukee", be confident that I still love you, even if I don't remember you. And "Tad from Agoura Hills", nothing but the best to you...unless that was hate mail you sent me (obviously I don't remember). In which case, dude, what's up with that? You must chill! :)

I have a lot of contact with people who I've never actually met in real life. What? What? What!? You mean I don't actually know all the people I have listed in my friends list? Shockingly, no. Not yet anyway! It's not that I'm a "friend whore" (lovely name) and it's certainly not a popularity contest. If you know me, (and based on my friends list, you probably don't - yet), I'm actually a big believer that "popular" doesn't always equal "good". So I'm really not trying to say anything by having a lot of friends.

I'm here for networking, y'all. After all, it's pretty hard to secure work when people don't know you exist. So I'm building a network...(Can you hear me now?). Not just for my own purposes, but also with the intention of "giving back" (like here and here) whenever I can. 

Good karma is a beautiful thing. And through my "friends" I've had some wonderful opportunities (did you know I got invited to shoot an after party at the Golden Globes? Couldn't go, but how cool is that?) and I've had the privilege of meeting and working with some very cool and very interesting people (Evan, Paul, Jay Jay, Christel...).

So anyway, because this is "cyber-space", I often have to mentally attach names & conversations to the images they use to represent themselves on MySpace. But, of course, many people change their main images often. That dude who was Kermit the Frog is now a tap dancing Fozzie Bear. And that "Terminator" dude is now a picture of Big Bird giving me the finger.

Seriously, how am I supposed to make sense of that? It's like going to a Halloween party and expecting to recognize all your friends who are wearing masks and constantly switching them with others when you're not looking. Crazy!

Plus, "will you shoot me for free?" is probably the most common topic of email I get... and the individual senders all sort of roll into one amorphious blob of a person after a while. (Answer to this question: See the "Q: RE: Free Photo Shoots? Everyone wants one. How can you get one?" entry midway down my profile.

But I digress (as I often do). :)

So while my 57 pages of emails (58 by the time I finish writing this) is way down from what it was, I'm sure there are some messages I still haven't replied to (maybe on page 42, who knows?), but finding them requires a whole search team of Saint Bernards with those cool barrels of hooch around their necks. Or more importantly, it would take me minutes of time that I'm sure I'd much rather be doing something else!

Yes, I'm kinda selfish that way. But isn't the computer age supposed to be making life easier for us? Things like searching and sorting through emails should not take minutes and minutes of time in this day and age. I mean, I've got a Pentium, baby.

Not to mention, where is all this time we've been "saving" by using computers going? Even when I do save 20 minutes of time here and there, it's not like I end up with a surplus at the end of the year... 4 days of "nothingness" saved up. Ah, that would be nice.

Anyway, I know the same task of searching any combination of emails from the past 6 weeks in any other email "program" would take less than a minute.

So I'm losing my battle with MySpace mail.

So if you wrote to me and I didn't reply, I apologize. It's not necessarily that I didn't want to (though sometimes I don't). And it's not necessarily because I have bad manners (though sometimes I do).

And if you re-write to me and I don't immediately "recognize" you because you changed your avatar to some animated bouncy dude strapped to a jungle gym with bungee cords, then I'm an idiot, but it doesn't mean I don't value your time. :)

And for those who are open to perhaps writing to me outside of the MySpace mail system (it's a whole new world "out there")... If you know my first name (and I kinda think you do), and if you know my website domain (pretty easy to figure out, Charlie), then you already have my email address. And if you're wondering if that's zerodean.com or zerotopia.com, it works with both because I'm cool like that (brain the size of a planet, actually).

And if you write to me at that address and I still don't reply... Then I'm an ass and I really am ignoring you. :P

Zero Dean

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