A Head Full of Ideas that were Driving Me Insane....

Dear Firefox,

I love ya, babe. You serve up  -bed browsing and keep me safe from Bill and Ballmer's not-so-excellent internet adventures, but face it. You're an enabler.

You store my passwords without me even having to think about them. They just appear in their ***** and ●●●●●-obscured fields and leave me to those higher Plato-type levels of thinking.

Except when I awaken to a post-midnight 3.0.something update which magically erased the entire freakin' collection of them.

You think I KNOW my amiestreet dot com name, much less my password? Hast thou a clue how many different court sites I'm signed into, each with a slight variant on the username, password or both?

Thank heavens for my November crash, because I was able to restore my entire default profile from THAT, including most of my last ten years of Mozilla passwords, to get on with my life this morning.

Love ya but it's not always easy,
Me.

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Dear Mr. Nokia I Am Writing This To You....

If that really is your real name, you hitherto mostly anonymous inventor of the mobile phone.

We've come so far, you and I, since my first boat-anchor of a Rochester Tel Mobile unit in the mid 90s. Nowadays, you sing, you dance, you even browse when I hit the wrong key in the car. And bless you, for including a mute button in your magic bag of tricks.

Just one problem with that.

You insist on emitting a dying-battery tone when the battery is, well, dying. While I understand this from an engineering standpoint, you might want to consider integrating this programming with another simple feature on the phone:

The clucking CLOCK!

At least once a week, I'm awakened by your loud, piercing "bee-DOOP!" sound at 1 a.m., 5 a.m., or whatever a.m.  And am joined in this happy news by the animals, who take ANY nocturnal activity as the signal that they're soon to be fed.  Even if they're completely mistaken. 

The 3 a.m. calls really can wait. Trust me on this.

Press My End Button,
Ray:P

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To the Medical Profession:

Middle-of-the-night wakeup calls from my cell phone aren't the only distractions in life. Mid-day voice mails from youse guys can be just as bad.

Like the one which came, sometime late yesterday, from Eleanor's OB-GYN, asking her to call in concerning her test results from last week.

Needless to say, we did not assume this call was intended to congratulate her on a perfect 100 percent score. No, calls from doctors of this kind can only bring one kind of news, and it's the kind of trouble that starts with T that rhymes with B that stands for BAAAAAAD.

It didn't help that I'd just begun reading The Middle Place, a beautifully written but emotionally taxing tale of an author facing cancer in her own life and a recurrence of it in her father's, so I was even more disposed to expect the worst than I usually am. I worried, I slept badly, I couldn't wait for the damn office to open this morning.

You can imagine how the actual patient felt.

Turns out, it's probably Not Mucha Anything. Federal regulations prohibit specific disclosure of the test results which will be discussed next week, but I think I can say that "Endometrial Cells" would be a good name for a band.

Also, that I'm incredibly relieved, and still praying, but with greater optimism.

We weren't through with the bugs, though.

I got an email this afternoon from another of the Good People around these parts, thanatos_kalos, needing some voice assistance with a spoof video she's doing for a class project for her Masters'.  I'd passed on this previously mainly because my high-teknikul setup here lacked one vital thing: a microphone.

I rooted through drawers. I went to the neighbor's home to see if they might have a mike. No ruck.  But then I had a brilliant idear: phone it in.

I'd never done a phone post, but I knew, from some of you who have, that they come out on the other end in perfectly lovely .mp3 files.

( LJ Phone Home )