This isn't about RIFE, so much as about why the Internet and things like RIFE are good.

So, I'm a 24 year old software developer from Florida, USA. I'm currently in law school and working for a company in China as their Chief Architect. I have a fiance, who teaches English for the Peace Corps in Bangladesh.

One day, my fiance decided to send me a letter and a few pictures of her from Bangladesh. This letter travelled for 5 long months before arriving on the East coast of Florida (I live on the West coast). The letter was remailed from a previous address only to get lost in the 180 mile journey (3 hour car ride) from the East coast to the West coast. So, it crosses god knows how many date lines, borders, and security checks to arrive in the USA, only 180 miles from me, to get lost by my local post office.

You see, this is the post office who 5 days AFTER I returned home from China, decided that I had moved and closed my mailbox, because there was excessive mail in it (mind you there was NOTHING in my mailbox since I'd checked it two days before they shut it down). This is also the post office that left me a letter informing me that I needed to pickup a package at the post office and that it could not be redelivered. I get up an hour early (before a full day of law classes) to get my package, arrive at the post office when it opens, wait in line, and I'm told they don't have a package for me, it must be on the mail truck for redelivery. They continue to ask if I can come back tomorrow to get it. Luckily, I learned in law school it's a bad idea to beat people.

So, back to email. In those 5 months, I've sent literally hundereds of emails to my fiance, made hundreds of phone calls, and sent hundreds of SMS messages. The best part? almost ALL of them have been recieved without issue. Now, I think that traditional mail is a very romantic concept. Having something hand written by someone you love is a great thing. However, the ability for goober ass American post people (not all of them, I know some personally and they're great hard working people) to lose a letter that I've waited 5 months for and FINALLY thought I'd have in my hands from my loved one, seems to just enforce why we should all use email and just either fix the damn US post system or abandon it all together and go pure digital / private carriers.

In conclusion, we all need to support wonderful projects like RIFE, because they don't lose our mail, as a matter of fact I discovered they make versions of everything we edit (you can't access them yet, but Bevin is on the case).

Cheers,
Tyler

P.S. I'll let you know if I get my mail
P.P.S. I'll try to make my next post more RIFE centric.