The Sun Will Come Out... Today

It is a lovely day here in Colorado. I'm looking forward to the weekend and things are going better for me professionally and personally. Those two things are not unrelated. Nothing improves a person's sense of well being like a sufficiency of money in his metaphorical pocket. Not that I am not still looking for a new job, a better job, with the same urgency that I once put into finding a boyfriend. For once I have a comfortable living going there will be some great improvements to my life.

My gran is still weak though. Never a silvery white cloud without a shadow after all. Nothing that can be done about that though. Her problems come down to the fact that she is ninety-one years old. She is weak and she frequently needs my help. That's part of why I am out at my parents house today and was here over the weekend as well. A second unfortunacy (as Glinda would say) is that my father has managed to rupture a disc in his back. Most unfortunate. The doctors say his prognosis is good, but for now he is in a lot of pain. But I have just completed payroll for the month and now I am working away on other tasks while I wait for my parents' eventual return from consulting with the doctor about when and where my father will have the surgery to fix his problem so he can start healing.

Pandora, A Well Named Website

This might be subtitled "When Supposedly Good Websites Want You To Something (Moderately) Dumb". A number of people have told me when I complain of my inability to hear music I might like to own that I try pandora.com. They have this great system for users to find music they like based on what they already like. They might, but I'll probably never know because before I can use their system they want me to "allow third party Flash content to store data on your computer" in the global settings for macromedia flash. In the global settings. Think about this for a moment. In other words they want every advertiser on their site and indeed on the internet to be able to set cookies and just about anything else on my computer in such a way that I won't be able to easily see or purge them should I so choose. Let me think about this a moment, NO.

I don't trust flash to not have some hole in it that would allow a clever advertiser to put spyware, adware, or other junk on my computer. And Pandora goes one better by suggesting that instead of limited what a site can store to just 100k that I should make it unlimited. Oh, great. This sounds like something I really want to do given how huge and cruffy just the regular browser files get without regular purging. So, no, I can live without your service since you apparently want to enable anyone on the internet to bend me over without even the courtesy of a reach around.

This is not the worst advice/design I've seen on a website. I seem to remember one that apparently innocently wanted me to install the old gator adware. But that was so far back in the mists of the internet that I cannot remember who they were.