Paul’s alice.homelinux.net weblog

You handled every voltage up and down, as I looked on. You protected my computers when Holly vacuumed and tripped the circuit breaker. You shutdown my systems safely before you exhausted yourself keeping them running. You did so for many a day, without complaint, attention, or more than 2U of rackspace.

Now I hear your cries that your battery has passed on. UPS, we hardly knew thee before you ran your battery off into the sunset, one last time.

I now commend the UPS battery’s remains to the earth. Filings to filings, rust to rust.

…Yet another reason I’m not fond of the giant yellow ball in the blue room.

Please, if you can, support me this year!

Also, I need to get this off my chest.

Open statement to Y-ME: You are losing potential donations due to your poor website design and policies.

More than one person has “given up” on donating to Y-ME because they’ve been confused about where to go to make the donation, can’t download and use the form, or other issues. I can’t be the only one with these problems. I’m not an expert on site design, but I know that the following are contributing to my feeling that merely using your site is like a crime against the Internet:

• It’s extremely challenging to navigate.  Isn’t there an easier way to get to my page, or my team’s page?
• The site times out about as quickly as Ticketmaster.
• The downloadable form for donations doesn’t have an extension (It’s a PDF, but I guessed that.)

And worst of all:

• sends UIDs and passwords via E-mail in clear text.

With that said, I’m looking forward to a nice 5K.  Last year, I finished with a decent time, but I felt like I was going to barf at the end.

Today Abby came over to work on Holly’s and her Prayer Partner project to construct a portion of the communion banner.  It did come out pretty nice:

… but you’ll notice there’s actual wheat glued at the bottom.  Holly bought a bunch of wheat for those, and now our kitchen looks like the guy from Led Zeppelin IV walked through there.

I suppose as long as it makes the kids happy…

A couple weeks ago while browsing the iTunes Store, I found a bunch of albums for $5.99 each, and added a couple to my cart (where I store stuff I’m thinking about buying). A recent re-visit to my cart shows all the added albums now at $9.99, prompting a “what the frick!?” on my part. This price shifting seems not only a dumb business practice, but also unfair:

• The albums weren’t marked “sale”, “while supplies last”, “act now”, or otherwise implying the pricing’s time-scope is limited.
• Amazon.com routinely changes prices on items in my cart or wish list, but tells me about it in the header when I revisit (and usually the prices are less, unless the items were on sale, which I knew about when I added them.)

While I’m certain Apple has no reason to care, this seems a less-than-prudent business practice. Since I bought only the $0.99 songs I wanted from the albums in the cart, they still “won” in a sense, but I guess I didn’t buy the albums they enticed me with. But what’s next? Changing prices as you’re pumping gas?

Phone rings. It’s Heidi, sounding serious.

[paraphrased]

“A certain little dog chewed up Jeff, and someone’s really upset about it. I found one on eBay. Can you order it for me?”

“Sure.”

“It would really improve my quality of life.” <screams in the background>

“I think that if your quality of life hinges on a piece of plastic, your life’s taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

“Just order.”

Guess who we found at White Fence Farm!  That’s right, your old pal the Fun Chicken.  You know, from Shakey’s.  Mom and Dad will no doubt recall your serious-as-crutches clucking immediately after a quarter was placed in the tray and pushed in.  Perhaps some arrangement to have you re-united will ensue, if you so wish.

This first snapshot’s not mine**.

A nice closeup I did get of the Fun Chicken.

**Word to the wise: MS Photo Editor *will* trash your file if you attempt to cancel after rotating a pic, causing you to lash out at loved ones.

Last night Holly and I went to a 70’s party for the United Way.  Bad clothes, bad music…  It was most excellent.