Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Not dead yet, though apparently I sound a little scary on the phone. (Breathing uncomfortably poorly in general, yes, but it's worse when I try to talk. Which is, of course, frustrating when I'd like some conversation.) uh, doing worse since I started writing this (which was last night, when I was trying to decide whether I was being a wimp or properly cautious by not going out). Major coughing problem, and can't even get albuterol into my lungs except by squirting it inside a plastic bag so I can rebreathe what I just coughed away from me (which in turn meant having to take care not to rebreathe my own exhalations so much that the CO₂ concentration triggered the take-deeper-breaths reflex, which makes the coughing snowball painfully. Unfun. Lips not turning blue yet, so postponing calling 911, but will beg local friends to bring cough suppressant (no decongestant!) and lemon juice (and either more whisky or Chloraseptic -- the former is a bit more effective but the latter has the advantage of not making me feel <strike>stupid</strike> ah, drunk ... uh, okay, one kind of comes along with the other, doesn't it?). Thinking I should've tried to make a quick drug-store run last night when I was feeling sortakinda capable. Damn. This symptom-rollercoaster vexeð me greatly. I keep thinking I'm almost better.

A browser feature I'd find useful: the ability to attach a "sticky" window title to a window in which all the tabs relate to a particular task or recreation (as opposed to the normal behaviour, where the window title changes to the page title of the currently selected tab). This'd make it easier to keep straight which windows are which when I've got a bunch stacked so I mostly just see title bars of all but the frontmost, or when I'm control-tabbing or command-apostropheing through a set of windows quickly. Oh my, I just verbed 'apostrophe' and I don't even feel guilty about it. This feeling is either depravity or liberation.

The New york Times really doesn't want me to read its content or the ads that come along with the content, does it? I mean, first there's the stupid registration requirement even for (some of) the articles and columns they give away for free, which would be a minor annoyance if it meant logging in each time I reboot, change browsers, or change computers; but the "remember me on this computer" tickybox doesn't even work, in at least three different browsers on the Mac, two browsers on WinXP, and two browsers on Linux (I don't remember whether I tried it in iCab on the Mac, or in Konqueror on Linux. The number may be higher. I haven't gotten around to trying with Lynx or Links yet, either.) So every time somebody links to a NYT editorial and I click "open in background tab" because it looks interesting, when I get around to that tab I see the "we really don't want your eyeballs" login screen again. So 90% of the time I just say "fuck it, my friends must've been wrong about what a must-read this was," and close the window. Occasionally I bother to open another tab to visit BugMeNot¹ or hit Google to find somebody who infringed NYT's copyright conveniently-for-me, depending on my mood, but mostly I just take that login screen as a "we wrote this for our health, not to have other people read it" label and assume somebody will eventually excerpt or summarize any important points hidden beyond. And that means that I'm not going to see the ads on that page, which means they don't get the fraction of a cent they're counting on from my seeing those ads displayed (of course, if they're pay-per-click ads, then my eyeballs would be a waste to them anyhow ...). Because they're telling me to take my eyeballs elsewhere.

Also, since a major part of the reason for using "open in background tab" is so that the page will have already finished loading by the time I get around to looking at it, even if I do decide the item is worth the bother of logging in for, they've wasted my time and prevented me from using my tools to organize my reading experience the way I prefer (the same goes for Salon's watch-this-ad-first thingies). And since friends linking to the NYT seems to happen in bursts, I sometimes wind up with four or five copies of the login screen in different tabs all at once.

Hey, Times: make your stuff convenient for me to read the way I like to surf, and you get those ad pennies and probably even get more inbound links. Make it inconvenient or just plain annoying, and I'll either get your stuff from somebody who stole it or simply do without. Simple, no?

[1] I've created my own registrations a bunch of times, and they don't work any better -- or stay valid any longer -- than identities glommed from BugMeNot. So playing the game the way the NYT wants me to play it doesn't work either. I don't know why this doesn't work, but given that my problems with nytimes.com span several versions of a bunch of different browsers on multiple operating systems, I figure I'm not alone.

Eyelids drooping -- unsurprising since I only slept an hour last night before a coughing fit woke me (yesterday it was two hours of sleep then waking up choking) -- so I'll add the rest of what I was going to write to the folder of unfinished entries to get back to. Maybe I can sleep now, but I'm not holding my breath ... uh, so to speak.