Nathaniel Borenstein. “The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”

[Quotes of the Day]

Wow. The weather has certainly shifted suddenly. It went from being quite cool to suddenly quite warm and hot. It’s 6am and already 67 degrees (19 C). My apartment warmed up pretty quickly already. I’m sure it will cool back off again, but this weather already feels quite wonderful :). I’m going to wear shorts today!

o I’d joined up with audible.com a while back, over a year and a half ago. And I’d used them for quite a while. But then I got OS X and they don’t support it at all, so I decided to cancel my account there. Here’s the email I just got back (that has my request to cancel).

Hello Gregory,

Thanks for your message about canceling your AudibleListener membership. I have cancelled your plan, but if you’d take just a moment to communicate with me, I would really appreciate it. Audible is a young company that has become completely dedicated to making its customers happy. We usually do make tens of thousands of people happy every day and we retain most of our members, so we really feel the loss of even one customer.

If you would take a moment to tell me why you want to cancel, I would really appreciate it. Did you have any technical issues or pricing issues?

Please feel free to email me directly at with your comments and give me a time when it would be convenient to call you back.

Customer Service Email Info:

Username: (censored)

First Name: Gregory

Last Name: Blake

Email: (censored)

Phone Number: (censored)

Problem Category: Account Information

Memo:

Please cancel my account.

I am on a mac running OS X and currently there is no support for this platform and it doesn’t make sense for me to keep paying for something I can’t use.

Thank you

gregory blake

I just love form letters, especially ones that don’t make sense. I’m not sure how they can misunderstand my technical issues. Their product doesn’t work with my OS. And I like how they ask me to email them, but then don’t provide their email address. Come on folks. At least if you are going to send out form letters be complete about it.

I’m tempted to just reply to the letter saying, “sure, call me. I’ll tell you the same thing I did in my original request. It doesn’t work on my computer so I don’t want it anymore.”

A big thanks goes out to my online friend Lyn for uploading episodes of Earth Girl Arjuna.  It’s going slowly, but they are coming along about one a day.  Thank you!

And in the theme of spring, here’s a site to check out that I think says it all.

Christophe Bruno wondered ‘how can I lose money with my art?’ In the end he “decided to launch a happening on the web, consisting in a poetry advertisement campaign on Google AdWords .” The result of this experiment can be found at The Google AdWords Happening. With all the neat things happening on the technilogical side of Google, it’s cool to see something using it in an inventive way.

Arthur Miller. “Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.”

[Quotes of the Day]

Lately I have been including links to Amazon when refering to books and movies I have bought/read/watched. Is it considered bad form to have those links earn me $$ if someone decides to buy the book?

Amazon has its Associates Program. Which lets you have links to amazon products on your site. If someone clicks through to the product, then decides to buy it, you get a small cut of sale. While I don’t think I’d go out of my way to list things just on the hope of someone buying something, I do post links to books quite often.

So the question is, is this considered a good or bad thing? Or does it not matter at all?

Well, the latest version of nethack has been released for OSX. It’s pretty good, but I wish someone would get a version built for command line. I don’t see why they only relased a graphical version.

My friend Lyn pointed me at the Toastyfrog Thumbnail Theatre. It includes a great retelling of Evangelion. Thanks Lyn! I needed this!