Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"We cannot accomodate with plan[sic] text"? It's the simple version. It's standard. What are they, a garage operation using webmail to handle customer service? Maybe I shouldn't trust them to reliably provide my dial tone after all. Sodding amateurs.

I'm not getting warm fuzzies here. I'm having serious second thoughts about having switched my dial tone to TalkAmerica. Unless I get clues that they know their asses from their elbows, I'm certainly not going to suggest that anybody else use them.

(They also gave me a "tell the customer what he wants to hear" answer instead of the truth (which was probably "we don't know") when I was first signing up, when I asked whether their "turbo Internet" access worked with Linux. Once the CD arrived and I saw that it had only Windows files on it, I called and asked, and they explained that no, there was no Linux version, but that Linux is "so much faster" than Windows that I should see the same speedup anyhow. (Okay, Linux is faster than Windows ... I'll buy that, especially since I'm not running an X server on most of my Linux machines -- and certainly not on the box with the modem attached. But 500% faster at serial I/O than a Windows box? Windows really can't keep a 56K modem busy?) Uh, riiight ... But if I'm already using Linux to connect to a different provider and the speedup I'll see is because I'm using Linux, won't I see the same speed that I already get with my old provider? Fortunately I wasn't expecting actual results from that "feature" but took the freebie as an experiment.)

They've earned a public mocking. Plaintext is easy, and they're a $%*#ing telecommunications company. They can write RFC-compliant email if they want a shred of cred with a techie. I don't like being lied to (even in a "say yes instead of 'I don't know'" manner), and I really don't like being told to "just get a different MUA" because somebody else can't be bothered to send plaintext. There are reasons I use the mail client I use.

(And yes, I'm aware the HTML could have been worse -- it could have been that abominable Microsoft cruft with a separate <DIV> tag for each line and gratuitous font-change commands that wind up not doing anything. Small favours and all that...)

(Don't worry if you don't catch the significance of the title of this entry. The people who do understand it will be amused enough for the rest of you. Almost by definition.)

I am easily amused. And approve of this example of puppy theology.

I am easily amused by my cat: I came home knowing Perrine would be hungry. I opened the door and she gave her "will you follow me to the kitchen?" gestures (specific to when I come in the front door), then alternated between standing in the doorway to watch me pull stuff out of the car and running up the stairs to get out of the way of LargerThanCatSized/HeavyLooking objects I was carrying (guitar case, amplifier ...). She wound up perched on the landing, and I noticed that her eyes were very wide, which usually indicates that she's feeling playful. So after I had brought stuff in and closed the door, I stuck my hand through the railing to invite her to play "swat".

She saw fingers wiggling through the railing and dashed halfway down the stair to play, reached my hand, reared back to swat at me, then sudenly realized (I swear, you could see it on her face) that waitaminute, there's supposed to be feeding going on! Shifted her body language and ran to the bottom of the stair to herd me toward the kitchen. I was extremely amused. And had been planning to feed her right away anyhow.

I don't know whether it's because I'm so much less a dog person than a cat person, or just that the dog in question only has one state, but I was less amused by the small, wiggly dog at my mother's house whom I have never seen in any state other than "Must play now must play will you play with me will you play if I jump up at you really you gotta play hey wrestle me or hit me or something or make a loud noise because all those are play too and I'll jump some more and maybe if I lick you enough you'll play with me but not by throwing a toy because I don't want to play with a toy I want to play with a person and I gotta gotta gotta play now now now oh look you're paying attention to me which means we must be playing can I climb up your leg like a kitten please please please?". (Does Ritalin work on dogs?) But there was a period of several seconds when she sat in front of me trying desperately to behave so that I would decide she was good and reward her by playing with her, but kept wiggling and squirming in place as she sat, with her tail going about 12 to 16 Hz against the carpet the whole time. I'll confess that I wasn't completely unamused for those several seconds. Thank goodness the other small dog is much more serene.

My day had its ups and downs. Let's see, first the car wouldn't start and it was the beginning of "no parking for street cleaning -- here's a $42 ticket" time. Then I got it started and bought some gas but lost a chunk of my morning that I'd been counting on doing other things in. Then I got to a gig half an hour later than I wanted to but fortunately in plenty of time to be ready to play on schedule. The room was small and "live" (lots of echo) so I didn't need the sound gear I'd brought (but that's okay; the opposite situation would have been A Problem, whereas this just meant I'd burned a few more calories loading the car than I really needed to). I didn't play anywhere near as well as I would have liked, but the audience and the person responsible for booking future gigs were thrilled, which matters rather a lot. Then I went to help my brother with his algebra, but had to wait around a while before he decided he didn't need help this week after all and by then I had run out of steam and had to lie on the couch for a while because I didn't feel up to driving, so I missed 3LF rehearsal as a result, and got frequent exposure to cigarrette smell (every time my brother went out to the garage for a coffin nail and came back in), but on the other hand, Mom bought pizza, which was a bit of a mood-lifter (I like pizza). So the day has really been a mixed bag. What was good was significantly good. What was bad was kind of ordinarily (for how my life has been lately) annoying. Several things that should have happened did not, but hey, there was music and there was an audience. And later, pizza. And my brother spent less time being Mr. Non Sequitur discussing politics than usual.

Now I'm either going to try to make words out of some more ideas that have been bouncing around my brain like drawings of gas molecules in a high school physics cartoon, or crawl into bed where my legs will be warm and the cutest cat in Baltimore (or maybe the second-cutest, 'cause misia has a cat in her league) will perch on top of me for the night.

On 2004-09-09, nancylebov predicted: "Unless there's a solid majority in the polls for one candidate that's reflected in the election results, half the country is going to think the election was stolen, except, perhaps, for a few mathematically inclined folks who think that really close elections are decided by noise."

[I think she was partly right, but it's fewer than half. Some people are thinking the election was stolen; many more are wondering whether it was stolen. Even so, I'm actually hearing less ranting about that than I expected, having agreed with nancylebov's prediction when she made it.]