It’s that time of the year again. Everything is changing, and maybe for the better.

The days are getting shorter. When I left for work on my bicycle yesterday morning, it was still dark outside, and a little nippy. There’s nothing quite like riding a bicycle down a deserted country road at night, a cool breeze at your back, and having the sun come up as you ride.

And with the cooler weather, we can open our windows at night instead of running the air conditioner. It’s also nice to have a pleasant cool breeze flowing through the house, and hear the frogs, crickets, owls, coyotes, and other wildlife at night. Out here, we certainly don’t hear sounds of traffic, or loud car radios, though on a really clear night we might hear the rumble and whistle of a train from a few miles away.

This is also sunflower season in Kansas. The wild sunflowers, when their smaller-than-most-people-think flowers, grow everywhere. Some ditches turn into a sea of person-height yellow. Sunflowers are on the sides of bridges, around people’s mailboxes — just about anywhere that isn’t mowed or farmed. Then you also pass the sunflower fields, with their larger flowers, even more sea-like.

The beans are getting tall in the fields this time of year, and it won’t be long before the milo starts to turn its deep, dark reddish brown.

But, you know, we’re Kansans. We can’t really let ourselves enjoy it all that much. Just today, I heard a conversation — apparently the Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a brutally frigid winter this year. Gotta keep our sense of pessimism about weather alive now…

Last month, I wrote that I was looking for mailing list hosting. It looks like some of the lists I host will move to Alioth, and some to Google Groups.

Google Groups has a nice newbie-friendly interface with the ability to read a group as a forum or as a mailing list. Also, they don’t have criteria about the subject matter of a group, so the Linux user’s group list I host could be there but not at Alioth.

So I set up a Google Group for the LUG. I grabbed the subscriber list from Ecartis, and went to “Directly Add” the members. This was roughly August 12.

After doing so, I got a message saying that Google needs to review these requests to make sure they’re legit, and will get back to me in 1-2 days. OK, that’s reasonable.

Problem is, nobody appears to be reviewing them. This is three weeks later and no action.

So I decided I would ask someone at Google about it. The only way they give to do that is to post in the Google Groups Help Forum. So I did. Guess what? They ignore that, too.

Let me say: relying on this sort of service for something important really makes me think twice. It makes me nervous about using Google Voice (what if my Google Voice number goes down?) It certainly makes me think twice about ever relying on Gmail or the other Apps for anything important.

My own mail server may not have the features that theirs does, but if it breaks, I don’t have to worry about whether anybody even cares to fix it.