Rayne Today

I've been asking myself for nearly two years now: are these people idiots? Yeah, the Bush Administration and the Defense Department - are they fully screwed in?

Nope, not asking any more. The appointment of a proven partisan to a non-partisan position - a position which, to be effective, MUST be non-partisan - is totally whacked. It's not at all in the public interest to have the Defense Department's Inspector General's Office lead by a partisan.

I hope real Republicans, real conservatives, are paying attention here; the same kinds of doesn't-quite-look-right stuff made toast of Enron and WorldCom and Global Crossings, took a bunch of this economy with it.

If it looks iffy, it probably is and it shouldn't be done as a business practice. That's what I've been taught, repeatedly, by corporate controllers and auditors alike. L. Jean Lewis has no business working in a capacity for this administration in a position of oversight of this nature.

This particular move stinks to high heaven.

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See this photo?

Exactly.  The Java script for uploading pictures to AOL Journals is broken.

My REAL blog [at http://blogs.salon.com/0001549] is at 1% of free space; I thought I'd try and host a pic from here, with a tiny little link from there.

Wrong.

This AOL Journal space is proving to be far more hassle than it's worth...again and again...

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This is creepy; I tried to use a general tutorial yesterday so that I could acquire and use the appropriate term of art in a post regarding the AOL Journals.

The tutorials required some sort of update which took forever.  The tutorials stank to high heaven -- they actually take control of your PC, refuse to allow any other activity on the machine except for taking the tutorial.  I couldn't kill the operation even with CTL-ALT-DEL going to Windows Task Manager and trying to find and terminate the operation.

Nope, I actually had to hard boot the system.

Later in the afternoon, AOL sends me a lovely message, offering me AOL Member Support and all that. 

Hmm.  Wonder what spawned that message, the upgrade to and interrupt of the tutorial, or the bitching I've done about the cheesy AOL Journals?

Creepy.  Feel like Big Brother is watching me.

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Okay, okay, I screwed up and didn't shout out for some of my peeps; they should have been included in the previous list (although there's still no room for them on the "Favorite Sites" list to the right).

Andrew Bayer is Dreaming of China http://blogs.salon.com/0001033
Perils of Caffeine in the Evening http://blogs.salon.com/0001970
Julie/Julia Project http://blogs.salon.com/0001399
Blog Baby http://blogs.salon.com/0002237

And last but not least, Phil at Just Playing -- who's blog URL I have misplaced. (I promise I will track it down and repost it!)

Okay, anybody else I missed in the Salon blogosphere? Speak up now.

Agh, I just thought of another: Jennifer at Synaesthesia, another URL I can't pull up. God, I'm a sack of useless blog crap when I can't blogroll my blogfriends.

UPDATE -- and I missed Rose of Charon, too.  Damn, I'm useless!

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Well, the system locked up again and wouldn't let me add the last five blogs to my blog roll. Here they are:

The Agora (Salon) http://blogs salon.com/0001147
Paulapalooza's recommended reading (Salon) http://blogs salon.com/0001520
FIONA (Salon) http://blogs salon.com/0001705
Le Prêtre Noir (Salon) http://blogs salon.com/0001823
Virtual Occoquan (VO) http://www.voccoquan.com

The limit of 25 URL's for a blogroll of external (non-AOL Journals) sites doesn't let me add the following Salon blogs to my Favorite Sites list:

Daihatsu Graceland http://blogs.salon.com/0002612
Patriotically Incorrect http://blogs.salon.com/0002379
Patteran Pages http://blogs.salon.com/0002065
Why Your Wife Won't Have Sex With You http://blogs.salon.com/0002153

And there's no room at all to add my non-Salon favorites to this site. I'm going to post them in this blog in the near future. What the heck, they deserve the eyeballs and the potential increase in ranking.

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I've tried to enter my blog roll over to the side here; the full blogroll of Salon blogs alone takes up the entire allowable capacity of 25 blog URL's.

For some reason AOL won't save my list.  I've tried several times; the system just hangs.  Can this be another example of the "walled garden" that AOL is trying to sustain in its environ by refusing to permit links to the outside world?

I'll try one more time right now, will have to cut-and-paste each blog name and URL into a total of 50 fields.  If you don't see it shortly after 2pm EDT, then it didn't take.  Again.

In some ways this Journal is becoming a clone after all -- a genetically-damaged doppelganger afflicted with schadenfreude.

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(ED: Reposted from yesterday afternoon)

Grrr...AOL Journals will simply not work for me. Here's why:

1) Inability to cut and paste from word processing or other editing software;

2) No spell checking or grammar checking features in lieu of using one's word processing software;

3) Although service is generally good, it is not 100% uptime on dialup; this means a Journal post could be lost if service hung or connection was lost before a post was saved (no auto-save feature);

4) Invisibility of HTML tags embedded by AOL which cut into entry size -- I have no way to count them and monitor them before posting (and my typical posts are often over 2,500 characters).

A shame that I have to call this new toy DOA already. I'll pick around with it for a bit, but I think I'm going to have to stay in my existing blog.

Feel free to leave me a comment if there's a work around on the cut-and-paste that might help. Thanks!

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I've disabled comments here for the mean time; if you have anything you want to tell me or share with readers, please try emailing me at rayne_today-at-yahoo.com (which will get answered MUCH faster than email to this Journal screenname) or drop me a comment over at my original blog, Rayne Today at Salon blogs.  Thanks!!

UPDATE: I've re-enabled the comments.  Sure, I'm being wishy-washy about this -- I'm may take them down again, who knows?  I thought better of it, wondering whether it would be a better experiment to leave them to see what I get here in Journals.

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I'm logged into AOL from another screenname, with a login to IM under the screenname of my AOL Journal. I'm going to enter a test post -- then try to add the other post I couldn't cut-n-paste earlier. Frustrating, really, was hoping for something a little cleaner and simpler to this.

UPDATE -- Weird, sending an IM gets you a confirmation like this:

"AOLJournals: OK, I added this entry to your journal "Rayne Today". You can always edit this entry to add a subject, description of music you're listening to, or mood. To add to this entry, just send me another message now."

When I click on the Edit link, I don't get any editing buttons.

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