I started at my opera in September of 2001. It was the best Internet blogging experience ever. My Opera is officially closing on March 1st, 2014. I’m now transitioning to WordPress. WordPress was very ready for the My Opera closure with blog importing tools and instructions. I have archived my old blog here at WP.
I just made my last post at My Opera after a nice 12-year run. I hope for some fun and friendship here at WordPress.
 | Kim G on gay travel long time ago |
 | slackwrdave on gay travel long time ago |
| slackwrdave on gay travel long time ago |
| Kim G on gay travel long time ago |
| Kim G on gay travel long time ago |
"If you are not willing to be a fool, you can't become a master." ~ Jordan Peterson
Analysing capitalism from unexpected angles
Understanding Life with Art
Analyzing the American empire and its failure to live up to its high-minded rhetoric
m/m original fiction and fanfic for adults only
Just another WordPress.com site.
peering into the underworld
News from the people’s perspective
Film reviews by André Crous
Journey with us as we share all that God is doing in High Point and around the world
The Triad's Socialist Magazine
Astronomy
This WordPress.com site is the cat’s pajamas
Addressing each of my life choices one at a time
reflections on the religious and spiritual journey
peering into the underworld
On a Journey to Find Themselves
Landscape and abstract paintings
A blog about a gay Floridian's thoughts and feelings
Musings from Boston, Mexico City, and Beyond!
These are amusing short stories about events like "Walking the dog" or "Manufacturing Jewellery"
The public blog of Andrew Turner (a.k.a Luther Spectre)
Batman, Random Things & Geek Stuff
Fashion, Life, and Starbucks
It's Funny to Me ...
meandering thoughts, ideas and opinions
Depressing Music, Dark Literature and Positive Thoughts
Mostly photos, with an occasional garrulous ramble
and be ready for...
3D Graphics and other hobbies
art, poetry, life
peering into the underworld
Fuenteovejuna did it 
Bloody hell, and I thought I was an old-timer there. What was the place like when the world was filled with rampaging green ones and zeros? 😉
I’d already started to move before they started making exporting possible so had a couple of hundred posts already here and formatted for this place. Having chopped out two thirds of my page I was able to export recently and now am going through combining the well formatted posts back into their comment streams. Bloody nightmare, but at least I’m no longer losing those lovely comments.
Oh, just checked your post over there. I think they’re shutting Opera Mail too. I may be wrong but it’s worth checking into.
I think Opera had just taken the Nixie tubes off of the server panel that year. lol.
Way way back, maybe late 90’s, I remember opera.com had to do with opera the performing art form. Opera Software was operasoftware.com, I think.
I can’t remember signing up in 2001 now nor how I knew about it. I seem to remember there wasn’t much to do at my opera then, mainly just the forums. I’ve never posted much in forums anywhere, including at my opera. They are usually rude and warlike. At least on a blog there is some control. If Americans start dropping in, it doesn’t matter if the topic was software, somehow it will change to talk about guns or the latest gem of corporate “wisdom”. I can’t take that, so I never hang around when that happens.
For the first few years I didn’t post anything to the up and coming blog section. I had never been a blogger anyway. Once I got going on myopera, I realized that it was different there, and it turned out to be more rewarding than I ever expected. It was truly international. “First-world” countries did not dominate, and I liked that. It was a net group or community like few others. There were so many odd things about the entire concept. A company that made an unusual web browser for people who were somewhat unusual was developing a worldwide blogging site. In some ways it didn’t make sense in that the effort and expenditure did not seem to have a measurable link to benefiting the company. Opera ASA was odd like that, and it was appealing. I often felt compelled to evangelize for the company’s products, in part because they were excellent and I liked them, but a big part was that they freely gave out memberships on such a great blogging platform. Now I feel that we’ve all been given the pink slip (discharged). My response has not been rational in that I’ve removed Opera from every device I have and will probably never reinstall.
As far as Opera Mail, I’m hoping that operamail.com is not going to go down like myopera.com. operamail.com has always been a bit “off to the side” from Opera whereas myopera.com was integrated. I remember the announcement a long time ago about free e-mail accounts that were going to be available at operamail.com. I happened to be off from work that day and bagged my first corporate-domain e-mail address with my simple first name. That would never happen at hotmail or yahoo. That was back when an easy first name in an e-mail address was unusual due to individuals almost never owning a domain.
In spite of always loving the e-mail address I got that day, operamail.com has always flat out sucked and still does. It has had several providers running it over the years, the current one being fastmail.fm. Fastmail.fm *can* provide a quality e-mail service, but the free accounts are always worthless. I just upgraded to a paid account this month even though for what is offered, it is a terrible value. They offered a 5-year special. I wanted to get on as a paid subscriber so that if opermail.com really does go down, I’ll have a legitimate reason to fight and whine my ass off.
OMG, I have run on at the mouth again. It’s just unloading about the myopera closure and a trip down memory lane. Mr. Furie, it’s really good to see you. We didn’t interact much on myopera, but I stopped by sometimes in lurk mode, and I always had an awareness of what you were doing there. Now we are refugees and must bond! hehe.
I believe I followed you early on there after seeing you on a few of the other pages I was following. As with so many others I never got alerted to your posts and assumed you were a commenter more than a poster. They may have been quirky and friendly, but the features never were much up to scratch on the site at least. The watchlist problem was one of the big ones for me, and there were so many I lost contact with after thinking they’d disappeared only to find out I just wasn’t being alerted. It was one of many problems with that place that drove me away about a year ago.
And yet, I made some good friends there. People I count as actual friends not simply online acquaintances. I put up with so many of the problems to stay with those friends and the problems got worse and worse. I still remember the update that made it impossible for Opera Mini users to use anything but the title box of blog posts. Forum entries, comments and even the report bug forms wouldn’t work. I made a massively titled, yet short on content post about that and got PC users to report the problem. Eventually I left for this place and tried to keep up with my friends on the OC, which was always a battle with slow loading and bugs.
As for removing Opera, I did that when I realised that the mobile browser team wasn’t even building so that MyOpera could work with the browsers. I’ve been a Chromie for a while now and it pretty much suits all my needs. Oh, that reminds me. Hi Mr NSA agent assigned to me. Did you enjoy the five hundred and seventy-three photos of my genitals that I sent to non-existent e-mail addresses? How closely did you have to study each photo to be sure there were no secret plans in there? But yeah, it suits me better.
I know what you mean about the watchlist. Similarly, I was supposed to get an e-mail every time certain events happened yet never got a single one from myopera, ever.
The Guru Meditation always pisses me off as does the long log-in delay. A few years ago, whenever the server would fall over you’d get a pic of a goofy-looking man with an awful mustache. That always majorly got on my nerves. Now everything is awash in spam.
After *years* of using the Opera browser, I now do Chromium and Firefox. I always liked Firefox due to the Netscape legacy, and Netscape (used to be called Nutscrape informally) was the first major graphical browser I ever used. I think Opera has abandoned Linux users without ever saying so. That made me sad.
Like you experienced, some good friends were made on myopera that became real friends. One of my closest friendships is with an Iranian. When I’m reading between the lines in the news and spot stuff that is even worse than usual, I have called or texted him saying, “the USA is rattling the sabre towards Iran real hard again and I’m worried.” He tells me not to worry and gets me to calm down. It’s freakin’ amazing. HE’S in the target country and gets to calm ME down. Touches my heart actually. It’s like we grew up together online.
I don’t have any connection to the NSA that I initiated, so I have not been privy to the genital pics. Rats! lol.
Oh, that was to our watcher. *smile, wave and prepare to wake up in an alleyway with a vague feeling of having been violated until you answered all the questions you had to*
I always loved your job description at MyOpera. When I first saw that I thought, “Wow, my employers have gone international.” 🙂
That moment of silliness on my part got me Member of the Week one time because Espen Øverdahl liked it. I’ve never changed it due to that happening. There’s a weird story behind it dating back to the mid-1980’s when I put a silly classified advert in a gay newspaper and ended up getting about a 1000 pieces of mail because of it. There were comments made at the post office, lol. That was pre-Internet when such things were handled by newspaper and post.
I like the newspaper advert anecdote. That’s worth a blog post of its own, I reckon. 🙂