Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Georgetown Saloon - great spot, great open mic!

Played tonight (Tues Sept 16, 2008) at the Georgetown Saloon open mic. That’s run by Marc Hubberman.

WHAT A GREAT OPEN MIC… so many great acts. I played three of my own songs, Stranded and Ready to Fall, It’s love that makes you free, and Wishing Stone.

What a great Audience they are too!!!My friend Robin went with me, and I tried a Saranac India Pale Ale for the first time. Not bad at all!!!Thanks Marc Hubberman and Georgetown Saloon for a great time!!!

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Sept 11, Can't help but remember

I was sitting safely in my Northville apartment, making toast. I had just been hired for a new job and was feeling quite positive about the course of life.

Then the phone rang. It was dear old mom. ”Turn on your television set, right now,” she said. ”A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” I turned the set on, then spent the rest of the day in stunned silence as events unfolded, as a plane hit the second tower, and later as both towers crumbled to dust on live TV.

It seems incredible now, all these years later, that in response we attacked the wrong country and have now spent $550 billion plus on that spurious activity. It won’t bring back our dead. More deaths and more debt won’t make the path right.

Friday, August 8, 2008

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.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

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

Monday, July 21, 2008

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.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

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.

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