Tiresome Week, New E-Mail Addresses, Earthlink, and General Woogyness (~-^)
Bleah...it has been a truly horrible week for me. I'm ready for a change, and I mean a BIG change for the better! I think I've had quite enough crap in my life, already!!! I'm still behind on answering emails, so I'm asking, once again, for your forgiveness, if I've not yet replied to an email you have sent to me. I promise I will get to them, soon.
This leads me to my next point, which is that I'm trying to move away from my AOL email address. I'll be replacing all the email links on the site, as I'm able to. The email links at the top and bottom of the pages now go to a central Contact page, which lists all my Kyoki Press email addresses in one easy-to-find place. I think this one little change will be an enormous help to me, in keeping my messages up to date, as I can now keep business, personal, and fan mail separate and easy to get to.
Over the weekend, I tried out a new account with Earthlink, hoping to find something better to use for an ISP than AOL. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with Earthlink. I found the bare-bones interface confusing and often maddening, as I hunted for things that were not readily apparent, due to the weird naming conventions they use. For example, WHO would think to look for the normal connect button in a folder called "Register and Utilities?!?" The access numbers were also difficult to get, as an 800 number had to be dialed to pull up every area code in existence, which took a full 30 MINUTES. During the first 30 minutes, my connection was lost, very near the end. I had to start all over. When I finally got an access number, I found that if I needed to change to another one, I had to go through the entire 30 minute process, again! The only way around that would have been to have written down each and every number I might possibly be able to use, and then dialing them manually. I don't have time for that nonsense.
Next, the best connection I could get was 19.2K!!! Even AslowHell can connect me out here at 26.4K, which is still intolerable, considering I have a 56K modem. I know a lot of this is the phone line, but I fail to see how overburdened AOL can connect me faster than Earthlink can. In any case, 19.2K is unacceptable. I'd never be able to do all my work on such a slow connection!
But perhaps the worst thing about it was that the Earthlink program deleted ALL my AOL cookies, and somehow managed to wipe out the preference file for it, as though it was designed to go in and meticulously destroy every other internet program on the system. It automatically set up a new user in my Netscape program, without even asking me. I seriously began to wonder if this program had been designed by Microsoft.
Extremely disappointed, I cancelled my account with them, and have come back to AOL. I continue to hope that DSL will become available in my area, sometime in the next century, or that I can find SOME kind of decent replacement for this overblown AOL program. I guess, though, that I'm just out of luck, until I can move into a real town and stop having to live in the outback boonies. This has, though, spurred me into another bit of lyrical silliness. Imagine this, to the tune of "Home on the Range":
Oh, give me a home, where they've got telephones,
Where the cables and DSL lay!
Where seldom is seen, that ol' disconnect screen,
And the lines are not busy all day!
Sigh...someday, somewhere, somehow...I am going to have a normal life, again!!!
(^-^)
Kaichi
