Not communicative at present

Lately I seem to have little to say.....

Comcast: the right hand doesn't agree with the left hand

I don't mean to complain. But I will.

After losing a few channels in the Comcast lineup which have gone "digital" we thought we'd check out what the digital package entailed. I registered online, to mange the account. Then I searched for what packages you can sign up for. Then I couldn't figure out if the $29.99 price for digital starter was in addition to our current 60 dollar bill. so i entered a "chat" - and I had to wait nearly an hour to get into it -- I think maybe I was connecting to India or somewhere very remote from Comcast. Who knows. After extensive questioning as to whether it would cost MORE than our current bill - and requestioning to make sure (I really grilled her) I concluded that as I was told, it would just cost us $29.99 for six months and $52 dollars plus change thereafter.

Then I tired to sign up and with a few clicks I was in another chat. But that person told me I wasn't eligible for the 29.99 basic digital starter, because I was already a customer....

Comcast. We are bidding our time. But you will be disconnected from this house....

I have both transcripts.

A poem in reaction to the day

Waiting,

oddly detached, I am still.
The way a large vacant room
might hold its breath in silence

during a long season
when the door is locked
and sheets cover the furniture.
Dissolution is on my lips,

or the expanse after dissolution

the expanse when the wind is blowing hard
and all the particulate has scattered

and there is no longer weather to speak of
during this polar night. No stars reveal themselves.
The void overshadows but sleep does not come.

-- a poem by Mar (Mistryel) Walker

Safari & Opera browser bugs on Blogger post forms

Well, I have another problem I'd like to addresss.

Safari 3 still cannot be used to cut and paste into blogger. On my system at least, it habitually pastes the block below the entry form which is not very helpful. Does anyone else have this problem?

So I downloaded another browser Opera - which I like quite a lot. But it has yet a different bug on blogger. It seems to allow you to paste into a blogger form. and you save your post. But when you look again - it's not there. Weird. Even if you refresh the page.

Anyway I gave up and downloaded a fresh copy of FireFox which seems to work fine on blogger. Thank you Mozilla.

Week long saga of Apple's unfinished, buggy MobileMe upgrade

In the interests of this blog not turning into a litany of complaint about Apple's transition from dotMac to MobileMe - I have put the saga into this single post.

7/20/08

Things seem to be working much better today. Where is there a large board so I can knock on wood?? HaHa. More later Actually, rather than have all these whinning posts I am going to consolidate the saga.

==============

7/19/2008

I was finally able to get some info back from my iDisk. maybe the one million iPhone newbies were having dinner and not hogging all the bandwidth....

==============

July 18

APPLE ARE YOU THERE? STILL HAVING TROUBLE ACCESSING MY IDISK

Yes I already installed all the requisite MOBILEME updates for my operating system. Fat lotta good that did.

Apple's status says one percent of users cannot access web mobileme mail but all other services are working . WHAT A LOAD THAT IS. I still can not mount the iDisk. It still has not returned a file list, after 40 minutes. I give up. One again I tried to access it through MobileMe using safari. It let me up load two files, but when I tried to create a folder - it does so without asking me for the folder's name. Then it hangs - and WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO RENAME THE UNTITLED FOLDER. After that everything is frozen, even after emptying the browser cache, and nothing more can be done to the iDisk. This makes my web work impossible to do. Now I check again. The file list from the desktop iDisk still has not mounted.

If this is "working" I would hate to see not working. of course this is Days after MobileMe's launch. BACK!

While it is a complex thing they have tried to do - it is a truism that one does not FIX something which is not broken. DotMac was NOT broken. The company bit off more than it could chew with ONE MILLION new iphone users, and the roll out of the IDIOTICALLY NAMED MOBILEME - (a name only a teenager could love.)

Apple CAN YOU HEAR US? PLEASE FIX THIS.

======================================

July 16 or 17?

MobileMe, ie APPLE, engenders a snafu for folks with domains still in sites folder.

With all the mysterious machinations of the MobileMe transistion. For a while I thought all was well but now that I have republished some of my iWed sties, some of my domains are not working. OutoftheMist, and several other domains I had now return errors from MobileME DOTMAC APPLE - I am thankful BentPin still works. However that is in the "web" folder - and is published with iWeb. The sites that are problematic are strait HTML and reside in the homepage "sites" folder, though they were not made with homepage. In its paternalistic wisdon APPLE has programed the new MobileMe, so that Domain names can apparently only be associated with an iWeb page not with the old HOMEPAGE folders where I had several living - not generated with iWebs 50 ton codes.

I am frustrated with Apple. I was going to get an iPhone next year. Maybe I will get a Google phone instead.

=======================================

This morning's NY Times reports passage of survellance bill

The New York Times claims the bill (refered to in my last post) "broadly expands"
wiretap powers. The Supreme Court just gives us back habeous corpus, and the congress gives away the right to privacy.(AGAIN...) Thanks a heap.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/washington/10fisa.html?hp

NOW I see on Yahoo - this column denouncing the law!!!
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/38229/Senate-Passes-Eye-of-Sauron-Act

BBC reports Senate passes Eye of Sauron Law

I noticed an amazing revision on the BBC news channel today.

The first headline on this story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7498753.stm was

SENATE PASSES "EYE OF SAURON LAW"

To complete the display there was a picture of the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies. The article referred to that founding fathers quote that says he who would compromise freedom for security deserves neither.

However, - immediately somebody did some editing. Seconds after beginning this post I returned to the article and found it well - radically changed. It also now notes that Barack Obama voted in favor of the bill....

It seems some honest BBC reporter simply called a spade a spade - then one of two things happened 1) the reporter changed his mind or 2) an editor changed his article. One or both of them were soft-pedaling what the senate did (and the house before them) because they didn't want to damage Obama? GEEEZ. Rethinking their instincts because a someone BIG held a contrary opinion... Isn't that just what the US media did when George and Dick were talking up the threat of WMD in Iraq?????

Sorry dear OBAMA - but this wretched law excuses past sins in wiretapping by the government in cahoots with ATT, Sprint/Nextel etc. It also expands and continues the president's spying powers. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? WHAT's THE MATTER WITH YOU FOLKS in CONGRESS? (Dear Lawmakers - Has Karl ROVE been sending you all love notes noting your past sins? He probably knows all YOUR secrets from the first period of warrantless wiretap. OBAMA is probably the first one George will use the new law against! After all according to right wingers there is no greater threat to national security than a Harvard Liberal ie an educated man with an open mind who cares about the little guy!!) HAHA!

In any event, for the foreseeable future - mums the word. Don't type it, don't say it.
BUT WHEN THEY GET THE REMOTE MIND SAMPLING SOFTWARE IT'S ALL OVER!!!
Imagine George ordering your endless, anonymous incarceration (or secret excommunication by Blackwater mercenaries ) all for what you dream at night......