835 Aaaaagh!

Saturday, August 05, 2005

I'm having trouble writing August, on checks, on notes, here, everywhere. It's like I refuse to admit it's August already. I'm not ready!

I'm fussing with Animusic.com. Our local PBS station plays their videos during the "fill time" between shows, and they fascinate me (not the ones with the robots. I don't like them). I like the ones with the Rube Goldberg instrument heaps that play themselves. So I went to their website and I bought the 2-DVD set. What arrived is two CDs - just the soundtrack from the DVDs - which, by the way, are $11.59 cheaper than the DVDs I paid for. I'm so very disappointed. But I like the music anyway (it's sort of jazzy easy listening electronic new age - I can't describe it - go to their website and check it out), so I decided to keep the CDs to play in the car.

They play in the house CD player. They play (audio-only) on the DVD player. They won't play in the car. They just get kicked back out again without even an error code.

Altogether I'm very disappointed.

So I have sent them a note today asking if they would please send me the DVDs, and since I overpaid for the CDs they sent me by accident, I expect to pay only the difference in price (also minus a $2 discount they offer on second orders). And, oh, by the way, why won't they play in the car?

I'm annoyed that I probably won't get a response until I'm about to head out the door for a week and a half.

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Speaking of heading out the door, I have a unreasonable reaction. I'll be home alone all day and night, for days on end, and get no phone calls, and it doesn't bother me at all. I mostly don't especially like the telephone anyway, and most people know that. I turn my cell phone on only for outgoing calls or expected incoming. There are only a few people I'm comfortable chatting on the phone with.

And yet, if I'm out all day, or for an evening, or even just for a few minutes, the first thing I do when I get home is check for messages on the house phone. And for some reason, I am always terribly disappointed, to the point of feeling sorry for myself, sometimes almost to the point of tears, when there are no messages on the phone. That big fat red "0" mocks me. Like I was away, and nobody missed me, nobody loves me, nobody wanted me. I know this is unreasonable, but it's there. Every time. I hate it.

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I managed no post here yesterday. Firefox, BiznessOline (my ISP), Netscape, AOL, and Bloglines *ALL* updated themselves either late Thursday or early yesterday. All at once. So all day yesterday I was having problems. Firefox and Netscape both kept program-checking, the connection was so especially slow that things kept timing out, and it kept bouncing, and every time I tried to go to a post on Bloglines, instead of loading the post, it DOWNLOADED the entire blog or web page. Gack! AOL would get slower and slower until it locked the entire system, and I had to push the button and cold-start. Which on this antiquated overloaded piece of #$%& takes upwards of 20 minutes.

I use Bloglines to read blogs and some news flashes. I can read the nice simple content of a post or report right there on Bloglines without all the formatting I have to wait for if I go to the website itself. For me, it's a lot faster. If for some reason I need to go to the actual post, I click on the title, and go there. That downloading crap was a shock. So much so I had to try it several times to believe it. I noticed on my SiteMeter counter (at the bottom of this page) that I got only 4 hits yesterday (I usually get only maybe 15 or so, many of which are accidents, which as far as I'm concerned is about all I want, maybe even more than I deserve), so I suspect others were having similar problems.

Bloglines seems to have straightened itself out. Firefox, Netscape, and BiznessOnline have bounced only once each so far today, about average. AOL is behaving. Cross fingers. Firefox has started doing its "tab" thing all by itself, which I don't like because I'm not used to it, but I guess I could learn to tolerate it.

I do wish "they" wouldn't all change at once.

Oh - AOL has sent out a notice that AOL is now free! But their notice didn't say whether or not they will continue to hit my credit card every month. This could get interesting. I keep AOL just for email - I find it easier to use than any other I've seen. I'm a little worried though - what you see when you have the paid-for AOL code on your system is nothing like what you see when you handle email through the AOL website. If they're going to switch us all to that mode, I may have no reason to continue using AOL at all.