It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

I've puttered around with PHP programming a bit. Until this month, I had not used it for any significant projects. Although PHP may be better suited for web applications than, say, perl, it is a terribly messy, inelegant programming language. You know, the kind where after you code for a few hours you feel dirty and have to wash your hands.

I just phoned SBC and asked them to terminate my phone service. Come Monday, I will be without wired phone service. Between cable Internet and cellular phone, it just wasn't being used for much. It was costing me about $35/month for this underused service. I can throw a small part of that at an upgraded cellular plan and pocket the rest.

You could say that SBC spam cost them a customer. The final straw that prompted the cancelation was their $5 late charges. My bill paying cycle is out of sync with their bill sending cycle, so I almost always got hit with the late charge. This irritated me greatly.

Some time back, I used their electronic billing and it worked great. I'd be notified when my bill was ready, and jump over to my bill paying service to schedule a payment. Then, however, they started spamming my email with the most ridiculous crap, like promotions for the San Antonio Spurs. I phoned corporate offices in Dallas, but they failed to stop the spam. I ultimately got it to stop by canceling the on-line billing service and having them purge my email address from their databases.

So I'm thinking that maybe if they hadn't misused my address for spamming, I probably still would be a customer. I would have still had the ebill service, I wouldn't have gotten slapped with the late charges and I wouldn't have gotten pissed off at them. (The business office person worked hard to keep my business, including offering to rebate a couple months' late charges.)

You know, at one time giving up your land line was a terribly heroic thing. I suspect you all are very blase about it all. I know I am.

Google Keywords: domain registrar, Dotster, spam, stupid gits.

Although not the cheapest, I've been satisfied with Dotster as a domain registrar. Then, they decided to spam the tech contact of a recent registration with unwanted email saying, "You have the .ORG domain, now buy the .COM domain." Stupid gits. First, nowhere did I ask them to spam me with advertisements. Second, if I wanted the bloody domain in the first place, I would have registered it.

Thanks to an unexpected weather event, the three hour drive from Houston to Austin took over eight. Floodwaters blocked I-10, forcing rush-hour traffic to divert through neighborhoods winding along one-lane roads. Later that night, an incident with a tractor trailer north of the city forced the road closed while they towed it clear.

We missed the brunt of the rains and all of the tornados. The hardest rains stopped soon after we hit the city. The radio kept saying we were in a brief lull before the rains returned--possibly harder than ever. I was afraid we'd be trapped in a low-laying area when it did. If the waters started rising, there would have been no choice but to abandon the car. Fortunately, that never happened.