Earthlink Drives Me Crazy!

I've used Earthlink for seven long and sometimes tumultuous years. Day one of their offer to my area of DSL service I called them up and got hooked up....before that I used their dial-up service. I've never been late on even one monthly payment. They debit my credit card. I don't mess with them, why in the heck do they mess with me?

Not me personally, 'me' as in MY homepage. I've lost count of the number of "new and improved" home page changes that have been foisted upon me. They tend to make these great changes on Sundays without a by your leave.

Today's change was the last straw.

My favorites box is gone. In its place is a new and improved edition and that means I'd have to start all over again filling in my choices. Phooey.

Next up is my stock market info....the carefully constructed list of what I like to keep an eye on. That's gone too. It shows the Dow at its closed Friday. AGAIN I'd have to fill in the missing info. Phooey.

They took away MY weather choices. I only got 5 choices to begin with and Houston led the list. I also like to keep tabs weather-wise on Las Vegas and Maui. The other two I change depending on where I'm going or have been. Do you sense a theme here? Yep, gone! I'd be back to square one just trying to get MY homepage like I like it. Phooey.

So short of telling them where to put my entire account (and the constant flow of incoming real mail on the other options out and about in this big old competitive world are verrrrry tempting) I'm just changing what I use for a home page when my Firefox browser loads. I'm going with my Bloglines and quick access to the feeds I follow.

All because some whiz kid has to keep "improving" things that don't need improving IMHO. Over the years there have been very few improvements anyway.....most of it is irritating sh*t that I block or move to the bottom of the columns which put it on the 2nd page. That would be the page I never look at!

The more I'm with Earthlink the more it's getting to be another AOL.

Phooey.

Stayin' Busy and Out of Trouble!

Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote anything. Time flies when you're over the hill!

Let me catch you up with all my adventures!

First I bought a new computer and it's taking LOTS of my time and energy. It's a Dell XPS 710 that I call "Overkill" because it's far more computer than *I* need, but when has that ever stopped me? My roots are based in Commodore and consequently you can't insult me with too much RAM or harddrive space. This one has THREE harddrives internally and TWO externals! One of the externals is just until I'm sure I got everything off of it that I want and the other one is what I've been using as a backup drive for over a year now.

One of the internal harddrives is going to hold photos and graphic files and the other is for music. More about that later... I'm running Windows XP Media Edition and have only had one problem so far. I wanted to label some disks last night with the Roxio that I bought with this monster box and it crashed the program. That really irritates me because I had the older version that worked perfectly on my older computer. Now I'll be forced to play Dell Hell trying to figure out who can help me squash the bugs. It's always been my experience that 'A' will send you to 'B' and 'B' will say it's 'A's' fault and I ended up feeling like a ping pong ball.

I also bought a turntable that easily fits into the "Overkill" description. It's the AT-PL120 made by Audio-Technica and it drove me crazy trying to get it all tweaked, then like a bolt of lightening it all of the sudden found the correct combo it liked and the rest is all history now. I've got a least 50 LP records that have been well taken care of and I've always wanted to rip them into MP3's and be able to play them on my computer whenever I want. Of course it'll be great to put them on my iPod too.

I ended up using the great program that came with my SoundBlaster card called Creative Smart Recorder. After I've ripped the side I run it though Audicity to cut the individual tracks out of the larger file. Then I use MP3 Tag Tools to plug in all the info on the song so that iTunes won't show them as 'unknowns'. LOTS of work and very painstakingly slow, but it gives me a project and I'm lost without a project.

The purest among us would most likely turn up their noses at the quality of my rips, but I'm tickled pink and amazed with how good they sound. The Creative Smart Recorder even takes the hisses and pops out for me. The only problem so far was that my Mario Lanza record is horribly warped and it's just not going to work for me to get any good tracks off of it. I have a CD of his and that will have to suffice.

My tastes is music gravitate to music from the 40's probably because *I'M* also from the 40's! But I have, believe it for not, some rap to go along with the country and rock and rock 'n roll. I have some jazz which I don't normally care for, but like all music there are certain tracks that I like in small doses when the genre as a whole leaves me cold. I don't haunt the Blues section at the music store and yet I loved Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong and others like Etta James and Billie Holiday. I have a bunch of music videos too and love Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats and pretty much anything by Toby Keith. I bought his newest CD Big Dog Daddy and just love Get My Drink On.

I've also been lucky enough to see some outstanding Astros baseball games. I was there when Craig Biggio got his 3000th hit. It was magical. It was the finest baseball game I've ever been to and that's saying plenty because I've been going to ball games my whole life. I was there the next night too when there was yet another walk off homerun to win the game. That game was shaping up as the single most boring one I'd ever seen clear up until the cowhide hit the Crawford boxes.

So that pretty much explain my absence. The rub is not only am I not posting I'm doing very little responding and visiting. I got a tad burned out because one of the ones I read is going through some D-I-V-O-R-C-E pain and it's distressing to read at the best of times and so far this has just been horribly one sided and she could use either a boot to the butt or a couch to lie upon and some chill pills. She's surely not thinking of the welfare of the kid they both produced no matter how much she's convinced herself that she has. I always feel for the kids. Grown ups are supposed to be grown up, but kids don't get to BE kids much anymore especially when their security gets a boot to the head.

Oh well, it's times like those that make me hum Maurice Chevalier's song from Gigi...I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore!

ADDITIONAL - Norton's AV is the Devil in Disguise

Hmmm...on second thought I took the AVG Free off my computer and am currently evaluating BitDefender AntiVirus Version 10. It annoyed me no end that I couldn't turn off the system scan at 2 a.m. with the AVG version. Probably there is a way to do that, but darn if I could find it and I said 'phooey on youie'. So far so good on BitDefender and it's highly regarded among those in the know. This copy is just for eval so I'll have to pay if I keep it (and, as usual for most of these try-it-before you buy it deals, it nags the living sh*t out of me constantly to do the right thing!).

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God help me if I EVER install another Norton utility! You'd think I'd of known from my former Commodore daze that Norton is a resource hog of the 1st ilk! I've been using Norton's AntiVirus 2005 on my desktop and version 2004 on my laptop. I'd upgraded from either 2003 or 2002. It seemed to be doing a decent job of checking my email coming and going and every time it did a system scan nothing untoward showed up.... what more could you ask from a program?

Well my desktop system got s-l-o-w-e-r and s--l--o--w--e--r. I thought I just had too much crap on the harddrive. I've got pictures and MP3's and nasty bits of orphaned files and Lord only knows what else clogging up the innards. I'd recently installed KHOU's recommended Weather Bug too and THEN heard that was an evil POS (piece of software!)...it is reportedly chocked full of spywareish, tattletale intrusions.

The last straw was when a pal was over and I wanted to show him something cool that I'd gotten in email and it took FOREVER for Window's Explorer to get anywhere on my harddrive. It was agonizingly embarrassing and he was popping off to my daughter the whole time wise cracking about how her mom was supposed to be semi computer literate and what was the deal with the slow down. Grrrrr...

So today I said ENUFF and uninstalled the Weather Bug and Norton! I'm not sure if I got all the nasty bits associated with both, but I'm 97% sure I got most of it and the speed picked up immediately. I went out and got AVG Anti-Virus Free and installed that puppy. The whole time MickeySoft's Security Center warnings were doing all but bitch slapping me to get my attention. The only thing it didn't do is bleat! It goes nuts from time to time any way because I don't use a firewall and, as I understand, since I run my own little network via Linksys, I don't need no stinkin' firewall. I set up whatever it is you have to set up so that some yoyo can't sit in front of my house and watch porn movies on my dollar and that's all the protection I need.

I'm very happy with AVG and it didn't insult me a bit that it's FREE. I'm also using their Anti-Spyware, but didn't notice the FREE one until after I'd PAID for the not free one, but that's okay. I'd rather give alms to GRISOFT than Norton any day!

Oh and for my weather watching I got a copy of WeatherPulse Version 2.05 that "does not display ads and is free. An excellent weather monitoring tool that sits on your desktop like Weatherbug". It's telling me right now that it's 47 outside my house. It was a gorgeous day today with sunshine and clear blue skies. I'd gotten so accustomed to the gray funk with drizzles that I'd forgotten what sunshine looked like! I thought I'd been transported to Washington state!

Anyway that's the way today went. You win a few and you lose a lot when you run crap software and what really galls me is that it's so insidious it creeps up on you and steals your resources and before you realize what has happened you are cussing the CPU and whacking your head on the keyboard while waiting for something to load. It WAS Commodore all over again!

Maybe for my next post I'll tell you how yesterday I decided to get rid of HTML in my email, both sending and receiving because it's just getting too tricky to use with all the evil bastards and their virus and worm infections. Check this out in the interim. (Thanks to TechBlog for the link).