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.