Saturday, May 27, 2006
Odds and ends
My husband is a MORON. If you're a new reader and need proof, here it is: Because of the massive clearing out of old shirts that no longer fit that I posted about on 2-16-06, I generated a big pile of spare hangers, which, since we have nothing resembling empty storage space in my house, got put on top of a pile of boxes; I started getting new shirts, but instead of taking hangers from the pile to put them on I got rid of another old shirt for each new one. Eventually, I got to the point where I FINALLY had all the "bad" shirts cleared out, and went to get a hanger from the spares to put a new shirt on... and they were GONE. I tore the house apart looking for them, but couldn't find them. I confronted my husband to find out what he'd done with my hangers, but, as usual, he denied all knowledge of them, and that he could possibly have been involved in their disappearance; when I pointed out that there's no one in he house but US, and since *I* don't move things around at random and forget about them, and he DOES, that he HAD moved the hangers, he grudgingly admitted that MAYBE he had. An exhaustive search of the many towers of boxes that fill our rooms took place; no hangers. He told me that he vaguely remembered seeing them in a box, and thought maybe he'd taken them to storage; he checked... no hangers. We figured he must have hauled them up to the attic; he checked... no hangers. This isn't doll-clothes hangers we're talking about here, we're talking several dozen big, brightly colored plastic hangers... and we can find no trace of them.
The moronic part isn't that he's displayed even more ability than usual at losing things, or even at losing them so thoroughly that they're gone for ages, or forever... well, ok, that IS pretty moronic, but it happens literally every day and I've become somewhat inured to it. The truly moronic thing is that his brilliant idea of what to do with all the spare hangers in our home was to stick them in a BOX and then put them, not in a closet, but somewhere obscure, and FORGET what he did with them; what's next, all the linens not currently in use will vanish, or all the pens other than the one HE'S using, maybe? And let's not forget that they were MY hangers, and so he should never have TOUCHED them without asking me, much less HIDDEN all of them. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
He says that THIS weekend he's really really really gonna gonna gonna take the @#$%^&*! Christmas tree down; he said, "You know how you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day? I say you're not supposed to still have your tree up after Memorial Day." He thought he was quite clever; *I* thought about where I could hide his CORPSE if he piddles another weekend away without dragging the boxes out to pack the tree parts in.
A couple of days ago I added a new sidebar doodad; it says "Save the Internet," and if you're in the USA and don't want big corporations like AT&T deciding what you can do and see online, click on it, go to the "act now" section, and take a couple of minutes to at least use the 1st option to send messages to your representatives demanding that they back measures to preserve "net neutrality." This isn't like the waste-of-time petitions that you see so often online, that all officeholders rightly ignore because they're easy to fake, it sends actual emails to your specific representatives, and they ARE taking it seriously; one of my state's senators wrote me back the next business day, and the other the day after that, and, while of course they must be form letters sent out by underlings, they assured me that my senators DID get my message, are aware of the issue and view it as I do. Be sure and use your correct personal info, so that they can verify that you are in fact a registered voter in their state/district, and take a minute to add a line or 2 to the prefab letter to drive home the point that you consider this a serious issue, that many voters agree, and that NO voters want their online freedoms reduced.
Some day, when I get my muscle car, I'm going to put one of these on it;
http://www.shoplaser.com/PRODUCTS%20-%20Exhaust%20Tip%20Spinners%20-%20ShopLaser.com.htm
They're called Exhaust Tip Spinners, and they're just what they sound like, cool spinning things that go in your exhaust pipe; I want the "Flare" style... it'll go well with my big spinning chrome wheels, don't you think?
Here's one of the coolest cams ever; it's trained on an eagles' nest, complete with eaglets
http://www.infotecbusinesssystems.com/wildlife/default.asp
I've seen some amazing stuff on this site; the best one was with both adults in the nest with a carcass that one of them was tearing shreds off of to feed the babies. Give it a try-but beware, it's addictive.
I've seen some fantastic movies lately that I'd inexplicably never heard of before:
"Stage Beauty"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMovieSpecialOffers.action?movieID=137579
"The true story of two performers whose careers were changed forever by a shift in gender roles on the British stage comes to the screen in this adaptation of the play 'Compleat Female Stage Beauty' by Jeffrey Hatcher. In London, in the latter half of the 17th century, Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is a noted star of the legitimate theater with an unusual specialty -- at a time when it was considered unseemly for women to work as thespians, Kynaston specialized in female roles, and was described by one writer as the most beautiful woman on the London stage."
I don't want to tell you any more, because it'll spoil your enjoyment if you know too much in advance; just take my word for it that the plot and acting are wonderful, Crudup is beautiful as both a man and a "woman," and there are some highly unusual sex scenes.
"Triumph of the Will"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMovieSpecialOffers.action?movieID=120066
"'Triumph of the Will' ('Triumph des Willens') is a filmed record of the 1934 Nazi Party Convention, in Nuremberg. No, it is more than just a record... Possibly the most powerful propaganda film ever made, 'Triumph of the Will' is also, in retrospect, one of the most horrifying."
Horrifying; that's it in a nutshell. I'd never seen Hitler speak for more than a few moments at a time, and to see him make entire speeches (subtitled), to watch how he projected himself to his audience, to hear the sorts of lines he used to push people's buttons... he was evil and insane, but a brilliant demagogue as well. And the SCOPE of the Nazi events is mindboggling; one had 200K people, and another looked to be closer to 500K... bigger than any rock festival you ever saw, and all to hear Hitler talk about... well, watch it and then you'll know.
There are many lengthy stretches of film in this documentary that are endless footage of parades and such that's fairly boring; it's worth having to fast-forward through them to watch Hitler in action. If you have any interest in history and/or psychology, you'll want to see this one.
"In My Country"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMovieSpecialOffers.action?movieID=148461
"The many emotional scars left by South Africa's history of institutionalized racism come under the microscope in this drama. As South Africa comes to terms with the legacy of apartheid, their government has created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which the perpetrators of racial violence and injustice must come face to face with their victims if they are to be forgiven for their crimes."
Yes, FORGIVEN; in accordance with traditional African ideals, anyone who'll fully admit to his crimes and ask for forgiveness from those he's sinned against can receive absolution rather than punishment... very different from Western concepts of how to deal with criminal behavior. I'm sure that ample dramatic license is taken in the movie, but at least in a broad sense the events portrayed DID really happen, and the story of how it was handled, and of the abuses that made it necessary, is compelling.
The more I pursue movies outside of the mainstream, the more I realize just how uninspired, and uninspirING, the vast majority of well-known movies are; the best recommendation I can give someone seeking to watch top-quality stuff is to get Blockbuster online and work their way through the documentaries and the search results for "Sundance"... yikes, I'll be watching art films next, lol... actually, I DID get a Warhol movie that I think was supposed to be arty... anyways, there's a goldmine of stuff that they don't "waste" space on in your local DVD rental places that'll blow your mind-try some and see.
The moronic part isn't that he's displayed even more ability than usual at losing things, or even at losing them so thoroughly that they're gone for ages, or forever... well, ok, that IS pretty moronic, but it happens literally every day and I've become somewhat inured to it. The truly moronic thing is that his brilliant idea of what to do with all the spare hangers in our home was to stick them in a BOX and then put them, not in a closet, but somewhere obscure, and FORGET what he did with them; what's next, all the linens not currently in use will vanish, or all the pens other than the one HE'S using, maybe? And let's not forget that they were MY hangers, and so he should never have TOUCHED them without asking me, much less HIDDEN all of them. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
He says that THIS weekend he's really really really gonna gonna gonna take the @#$%^&*! Christmas tree down; he said, "You know how you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day? I say you're not supposed to still have your tree up after Memorial Day." He thought he was quite clever; *I* thought about where I could hide his CORPSE if he piddles another weekend away without dragging the boxes out to pack the tree parts in.
A couple of days ago I added a new sidebar doodad; it says "Save the Internet," and if you're in the USA and don't want big corporations like AT&T deciding what you can do and see online, click on it, go to the "act now" section, and take a couple of minutes to at least use the 1st option to send messages to your representatives demanding that they back measures to preserve "net neutrality." This isn't like the waste-of-time petitions that you see so often online, that all officeholders rightly ignore because they're easy to fake, it sends actual emails to your specific representatives, and they ARE taking it seriously; one of my state's senators wrote me back the next business day, and the other the day after that, and, while of course they must be form letters sent out by underlings, they assured me that my senators DID get my message, are aware of the issue and view it as I do. Be sure and use your correct personal info, so that they can verify that you are in fact a registered voter in their state/district, and take a minute to add a line or 2 to the prefab letter to drive home the point that you consider this a serious issue, that many voters agree, and that NO voters want their online freedoms reduced.
Some day, when I get my muscle car, I'm going to put one of these on it;
http://www.shoplaser.com/PRODUCTS%20-%20Exhaust%20Tip%20Spinners%20-%20ShopLaser.com.htm
They're called Exhaust Tip Spinners, and they're just what they sound like, cool spinning things that go in your exhaust pipe; I want the "Flare" style... it'll go well with my big spinning chrome wheels, don't you think?
Here's one of the coolest cams ever; it's trained on an eagles' nest, complete with eaglets
http://www.infotecbusinesssystems.com/wildlife/default.asp
I've seen some amazing stuff on this site; the best one was with both adults in the nest with a carcass that one of them was tearing shreds off of to feed the babies. Give it a try-but beware, it's addictive.
I've seen some fantastic movies lately that I'd inexplicably never heard of before:
"Stage Beauty"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMovieSpecialOffers.action?movieID=137579
"The true story of two performers whose careers were changed forever by a shift in gender roles on the British stage comes to the screen in this adaptation of the play 'Compleat Female Stage Beauty' by Jeffrey Hatcher. In London, in the latter half of the 17th century, Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is a noted star of the legitimate theater with an unusual specialty -- at a time when it was considered unseemly for women to work as thespians, Kynaston specialized in female roles, and was described by one writer as the most beautiful woman on the London stage."
I don't want to tell you any more, because it'll spoil your enjoyment if you know too much in advance; just take my word for it that the plot and acting are wonderful, Crudup is beautiful as both a man and a "woman," and there are some highly unusual sex scenes.
"Triumph of the Will"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMovieSpecialOffers.action?movieID=120066
"'Triumph of the Will' ('Triumph des Willens') is a filmed record of the 1934 Nazi Party Convention, in Nuremberg. No, it is more than just a record... Possibly the most powerful propaganda film ever made, 'Triumph of the Will' is also, in retrospect, one of the most horrifying."
Horrifying; that's it in a nutshell. I'd never seen Hitler speak for more than a few moments at a time, and to see him make entire speeches (subtitled), to watch how he projected himself to his audience, to hear the sorts of lines he used to push people's buttons... he was evil and insane, but a brilliant demagogue as well. And the SCOPE of the Nazi events is mindboggling; one had 200K people, and another looked to be closer to 500K... bigger than any rock festival you ever saw, and all to hear Hitler talk about... well, watch it and then you'll know.
There are many lengthy stretches of film in this documentary that are endless footage of parades and such that's fairly boring; it's worth having to fast-forward through them to watch Hitler in action. If you have any interest in history and/or psychology, you'll want to see this one.
"In My Country"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMovieSpecialOffers.action?movieID=148461
"The many emotional scars left by South Africa's history of institutionalized racism come under the microscope in this drama. As South Africa comes to terms with the legacy of apartheid, their government has created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which the perpetrators of racial violence and injustice must come face to face with their victims if they are to be forgiven for their crimes."
Yes, FORGIVEN; in accordance with traditional African ideals, anyone who'll fully admit to his crimes and ask for forgiveness from those he's sinned against can receive absolution rather than punishment... very different from Western concepts of how to deal with criminal behavior. I'm sure that ample dramatic license is taken in the movie, but at least in a broad sense the events portrayed DID really happen, and the story of how it was handled, and of the abuses that made it necessary, is compelling.
The more I pursue movies outside of the mainstream, the more I realize just how uninspired, and uninspirING, the vast majority of well-known movies are; the best recommendation I can give someone seeking to watch top-quality stuff is to get Blockbuster online and work their way through the documentaries and the search results for "Sundance"... yikes, I'll be watching art films next, lol... actually, I DID get a Warhol movie that I think was supposed to be arty... anyways, there's a goldmine of stuff that they don't "waste" space on in your local DVD rental places that'll blow your mind-try some and see.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Free online services prove that you get what you pay for
Before I get to the rant, there's some exciting news; those of you who use BlogMad
might have seen that my blog buddy, Little Orange Fox, whose terrific blog is here
http://outlawrepublican.blogspot.com/
was running a contest for the prestigious Fox Award; although we haven't known each other very long, she nominated ME as one of the contestants, which was pretty darned nice of her. She had a poll for her readers to vote for the winner... and posting on everyone's blog, and having my banner everywhere, paid off, because that, along with the help of my blog buddies who're also on BlogMad, allowed me to emerge victorious; check out the cute trophy in my sidebar that this honor entitles me to!! Thanks to everyone who voted for me, and to those who took the time to pay me a visit during the contest even if they picked one of the other fine blogs to give their vote to.
Speaking of which; you can find links to my competitors' blogs here
http://outlawrepublican.blogspot.com/2006/05/fox-award-time.html
and it'd be well worth your time to check them all out; every one of them would have been an excellent choice as the winner.
Ok, here's the rant:
I don't expect free online services to be perfect, even when they're owned by huge corporations and/or include optional paid services, as most of them do; there's minimal impetus to fine-tune stuff for non-paying users, and the vast majority of these services are run by volunteers who have jobs and lives that are a higher priority than hashing out the minute details of how to optimize what they're giving away. But STILL:
I could go on and on about the stupidities of eBay (yeah, I know, but it's free for buyers), which are exponentially grimmer since they make massive $ from their sites and their nonsense impacts their ability to get that $ from people; I'll just mention the latest one I've noticed, which is how inconsistently the searches work... you know, the searches that lead to most of the business being done and fees being paid? Let's say that sellers have items of the specific type you want in both the auction listings and in eBay stores; ideally, your search would show you stuff in BOTH of these categories, right? Sometimes it does. Sometimes the store results appear at the bottom of the 1st page so that you SEE that you have choices in the stores. Sometimes the store results appear on the LAST page of the search... even if it's 20 pages long and you're highly unlikely to ever reach the last page to see them. Occasionally, the store results are kinda tacked onto the end of the regular search, with nothing to indicate that you've left the auction zone except the "buy it nows." And a scary % of the time you don't get ANY store results with your search even though checking the stores reveals that there ARE appropriate items there. Can anyone explain to me why a multi-BILLION dollar corporation can't get a simple search to work correctly?
Yahoo is trying to reduce the amount of spam being sent from its email accounts, which is overall an admirable idea; sadly, their implementation leaves much to be desired. The latest twist is that every so often you have to enter an anti-spam code to get an email to send, which is flawed in 2 pitifully obvious ways:
1) What they SHOULD be doing is launching the anti-spam thing ONLY if the inbox detects questionable emailing activity, NOT aggravating the people who send a few emails a day with the struggle to decipher the code.
2) If you get the code wrong, which is VERY easy to do, not only does the email not get sent, it isn't even SAVED, thus guaranteeing that innocent people will be losing emails on a regular basis.
Come on, isn't there a single programmer or executive at Yahoo who's capable of grasping that you're supposed to be targeting actual spammers, not making the lives of honest folks more difficult?
Pingoat has been a reliable pinging service, but now they're trying to get clever and refuse to ping spam or porn blogs; again, this is admirable, but they don't have their software sorted out yet, and they're not having a human being verify that blogs are indeed problematic BEFORE they're blacklisted until they DO get their system squared away... with the predictable results. I got an error message a couple of days ago telling me that my blog, which doesn't have so much as a dirty word or a Google ad, had been blacklisted as spam or "objectionable" (aka porn); I clicked the contact link and reported it, and to their credit they responded fairly quickly to tell me that I'd been "whitelisted," but there was no apology, no explanation... not very professional. It later occurred to me to check out their forum, and there was a LONG list of people who'd gotten the blacklisted message that same day, so clearly they REALLY don't have all their ducks in a row; there are other pinging services to choose from, so hopefully they'll wise up and improve their customer service and their judgment about the trustworthiness of their algorithms so that this doesn't keep happening.
NeoWorx is a cool service, but they REALLY blew it over the past few weeks; your blog avatar gets positioned on their member page based on how many other avatars you've clicked, which affects how many hits you get from the listing, and my position started to drop inexplicably last month. At 1st, I thought I must be spending enough time on BlogMad to significantly reduce my # of daily clicks and impact my standing... then, I'd dropped so much that I contemplated asking about it, but it seemed crazy to think my account had been singled out... then, I started doing what I never like to do, just clicking on an avatar every 60 seconds rather than reading and posting on the blogs, and I STILL dropped a couple more notches... and then I FINALLY wrote to the admin... and GUESS WHAT?!! I got a reply that didn't make sense, which is a sure sign of someone fumbling to cover up for a major screwup:
"I had to disable that function for short while to check potential abuse from other users. It's back on now. Let me know how it goes."
SHORT WHILE?!! grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
I wrote back asking why MY account tally function, and ONLY mine, had been disabled to check for abuse by OTHER users, and got no reply; I assume that he was monkeying around with all the top blogs on the list at some point, possibly to check for abuse as he said, and accidentally failed to restart my tally along with the others... for which I deserved an explanation and a frigging apology, since this has cost me a HUGE # of hits, and continues to do so because he hasn't put me back at the position I should be at on the list based on my # of clicks (which is still being tracked in my account). He might eventually make good on this, but for now I'm very un-thrilled; just because I'm not paying him, is it too much to expect him to admit his mistake and fix it sooner rather than later?
Last but far from least: Ripway. I store my favicon and Flash files there, and, although like all sites, paid as well as free, they have occasional down time, they'd done fine by me... note the use of the past tense, and I do mean TENSE. A few days ago, I noticed that my pizza clock wasn't showing, but didn't think much about it; when I eventually realized that it was STILL not showing, I went to Ripway's site to see what the announcements were... I thought maybe they were switching servers again. I entered my login info, and this is what I got:
"This account has expired or has been marked for removal.
Please contact us if you wish to reactivate."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!! Nothing has ever been said anywhere on that site about accounts "expiring," and there's nothing whatsoever that should cause my account to be "marked for removal"; I'm not using up my daily allotment of bandwidth by a long shot, I'm not storing porn or copyrighted files, my account isn't empty or unused, so what's their excuse for this? And IF I wish to reactivate the account that I was using right up until the moment they pulled the plug; don't you love it? I sent them an email, and, to my relief, my account returned the next day; however, I've gotten no return email, and thus no explanation or apology for their inexplicable actions.
To add insult to injury, although my pizza clock came back, my favicon didn't; they'd changed how they named the URL's for files stored with them a while back, and turning my account off and on somehow erased the older version of the URL for the favicon file, so that it no longer worked. I copied the new URL into my template, and... it loaded, but the default favicon overrode it when the page finished loading. This had also happened when I'd originally installed it (see my post of 5-3-05), and I'd never been able to fix it; it had just started working suddenly, and had worked perfectly ever since. My husband, who'd had no more idea than I had as to what was going on last time, has apparently learned a little since then, because this time he told me that it was because of how the operating system store favicons, and that eventually the correct one would override the default one; fortunately, he was right... all seems ok now. I appreciate that they store my files for free, but isn't this a little more effort and aggravation than I should have had to go through as a result of not being a paying account?
Like I said, I don't expect perfection... but are professionalism, courtesy and common sense too much to ask, even of a free service?
might have seen that my blog buddy, Little Orange Fox, whose terrific blog is here
http://outlawrepublican.blogspot.com/
was running a contest for the prestigious Fox Award; although we haven't known each other very long, she nominated ME as one of the contestants, which was pretty darned nice of her. She had a poll for her readers to vote for the winner... and posting on everyone's blog, and having my banner everywhere, paid off, because that, along with the help of my blog buddies who're also on BlogMad, allowed me to emerge victorious; check out the cute trophy in my sidebar that this honor entitles me to!! Thanks to everyone who voted for me, and to those who took the time to pay me a visit during the contest even if they picked one of the other fine blogs to give their vote to.
Speaking of which; you can find links to my competitors' blogs here
http://outlawrepublican.blogspot.com/2006/05/fox-award-time.html
and it'd be well worth your time to check them all out; every one of them would have been an excellent choice as the winner.
Ok, here's the rant:
I don't expect free online services to be perfect, even when they're owned by huge corporations and/or include optional paid services, as most of them do; there's minimal impetus to fine-tune stuff for non-paying users, and the vast majority of these services are run by volunteers who have jobs and lives that are a higher priority than hashing out the minute details of how to optimize what they're giving away. But STILL:
I could go on and on about the stupidities of eBay (yeah, I know, but it's free for buyers), which are exponentially grimmer since they make massive $ from their sites and their nonsense impacts their ability to get that $ from people; I'll just mention the latest one I've noticed, which is how inconsistently the searches work... you know, the searches that lead to most of the business being done and fees being paid? Let's say that sellers have items of the specific type you want in both the auction listings and in eBay stores; ideally, your search would show you stuff in BOTH of these categories, right? Sometimes it does. Sometimes the store results appear at the bottom of the 1st page so that you SEE that you have choices in the stores. Sometimes the store results appear on the LAST page of the search... even if it's 20 pages long and you're highly unlikely to ever reach the last page to see them. Occasionally, the store results are kinda tacked onto the end of the regular search, with nothing to indicate that you've left the auction zone except the "buy it nows." And a scary % of the time you don't get ANY store results with your search even though checking the stores reveals that there ARE appropriate items there. Can anyone explain to me why a multi-BILLION dollar corporation can't get a simple search to work correctly?
Yahoo is trying to reduce the amount of spam being sent from its email accounts, which is overall an admirable idea; sadly, their implementation leaves much to be desired. The latest twist is that every so often you have to enter an anti-spam code to get an email to send, which is flawed in 2 pitifully obvious ways:
1) What they SHOULD be doing is launching the anti-spam thing ONLY if the inbox detects questionable emailing activity, NOT aggravating the people who send a few emails a day with the struggle to decipher the code.
2) If you get the code wrong, which is VERY easy to do, not only does the email not get sent, it isn't even SAVED, thus guaranteeing that innocent people will be losing emails on a regular basis.
Come on, isn't there a single programmer or executive at Yahoo who's capable of grasping that you're supposed to be targeting actual spammers, not making the lives of honest folks more difficult?
Pingoat has been a reliable pinging service, but now they're trying to get clever and refuse to ping spam or porn blogs; again, this is admirable, but they don't have their software sorted out yet, and they're not having a human being verify that blogs are indeed problematic BEFORE they're blacklisted until they DO get their system squared away... with the predictable results. I got an error message a couple of days ago telling me that my blog, which doesn't have so much as a dirty word or a Google ad, had been blacklisted as spam or "objectionable" (aka porn); I clicked the contact link and reported it, and to their credit they responded fairly quickly to tell me that I'd been "whitelisted," but there was no apology, no explanation... not very professional. It later occurred to me to check out their forum, and there was a LONG list of people who'd gotten the blacklisted message that same day, so clearly they REALLY don't have all their ducks in a row; there are other pinging services to choose from, so hopefully they'll wise up and improve their customer service and their judgment about the trustworthiness of their algorithms so that this doesn't keep happening.
NeoWorx is a cool service, but they REALLY blew it over the past few weeks; your blog avatar gets positioned on their member page based on how many other avatars you've clicked, which affects how many hits you get from the listing, and my position started to drop inexplicably last month. At 1st, I thought I must be spending enough time on BlogMad to significantly reduce my # of daily clicks and impact my standing... then, I'd dropped so much that I contemplated asking about it, but it seemed crazy to think my account had been singled out... then, I started doing what I never like to do, just clicking on an avatar every 60 seconds rather than reading and posting on the blogs, and I STILL dropped a couple more notches... and then I FINALLY wrote to the admin... and GUESS WHAT?!! I got a reply that didn't make sense, which is a sure sign of someone fumbling to cover up for a major screwup:
"I had to disable that function for short while to check potential abuse from other users. It's back on now. Let me know how it goes."
SHORT WHILE?!! grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
I wrote back asking why MY account tally function, and ONLY mine, had been disabled to check for abuse by OTHER users, and got no reply; I assume that he was monkeying around with all the top blogs on the list at some point, possibly to check for abuse as he said, and accidentally failed to restart my tally along with the others... for which I deserved an explanation and a frigging apology, since this has cost me a HUGE # of hits, and continues to do so because he hasn't put me back at the position I should be at on the list based on my # of clicks (which is still being tracked in my account). He might eventually make good on this, but for now I'm very un-thrilled; just because I'm not paying him, is it too much to expect him to admit his mistake and fix it sooner rather than later?
Last but far from least: Ripway. I store my favicon and Flash files there, and, although like all sites, paid as well as free, they have occasional down time, they'd done fine by me... note the use of the past tense, and I do mean TENSE. A few days ago, I noticed that my pizza clock wasn't showing, but didn't think much about it; when I eventually realized that it was STILL not showing, I went to Ripway's site to see what the announcements were... I thought maybe they were switching servers again. I entered my login info, and this is what I got:
"This account has expired or has been marked for removal.
Please contact us if you wish to reactivate."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!! Nothing has ever been said anywhere on that site about accounts "expiring," and there's nothing whatsoever that should cause my account to be "marked for removal"; I'm not using up my daily allotment of bandwidth by a long shot, I'm not storing porn or copyrighted files, my account isn't empty or unused, so what's their excuse for this? And IF I wish to reactivate the account that I was using right up until the moment they pulled the plug; don't you love it? I sent them an email, and, to my relief, my account returned the next day; however, I've gotten no return email, and thus no explanation or apology for their inexplicable actions.
To add insult to injury, although my pizza clock came back, my favicon didn't; they'd changed how they named the URL's for files stored with them a while back, and turning my account off and on somehow erased the older version of the URL for the favicon file, so that it no longer worked. I copied the new URL into my template, and... it loaded, but the default favicon overrode it when the page finished loading. This had also happened when I'd originally installed it (see my post of 5-3-05), and I'd never been able to fix it; it had just started working suddenly, and had worked perfectly ever since. My husband, who'd had no more idea than I had as to what was going on last time, has apparently learned a little since then, because this time he told me that it was because of how the operating system store favicons, and that eventually the correct one would override the default one; fortunately, he was right... all seems ok now. I appreciate that they store my files for free, but isn't this a little more effort and aggravation than I should have had to go through as a result of not being a paying account?
Like I said, I don't expect perfection... but are professionalism, courtesy and common sense too much to ask, even of a free service?
