Today I decided to give you some more money, by upgrading a second seldom-used account to pro. Of course, you’ve just done that thing where “old skool” users have to switch to using a Yahoo! account for Flickr, which means I needed to go dust off the old Yahoo! account that logically matches that Flickr account.

I must have had, in the course of my life, 10 Yahoo! accounts. If I was thrilled about that, all but one wouldn’t be long-deactivated. But I’ve had to reactivate before, forgot to log in for 90 days, it wasn’t a huge deal.

It has now become a huge deal. This old Yahoo! account I want to use apparently cannot be reactivated unless I have purchased something via Yahoo! using a credit card and that account. If I had done so, I could reactivate my account by giving Yahoo! that credit card number. In other words, I am useless to Yahoo! unless they have somehow made money off me in the past. No matter all the personal information I provided when I set up the account, like my birthday and an alternate email address and the name of my damn dog or place of birth or first car or whatever the hell it was.

There’s no point in me predicting the imminent business failure of Yahoo! and Flickr because, obviously, other people’s money seems to be getting to them just fine, but I’d love to know who’s doing User Experience at Flickr and whether he or she goes to work in the morning doing a little dance or with a slight stomachache.

As a user, it hurts my feelings when someone doesn’t want my money, it hurts my feelings when someone with whom I’ve had a really long relationship (hint: my primary Yahoo! account is first initial underscore last name with no numbers at the end) starts trying to scam me, and it hurts my feelings when I’m treated like crap because I haven’t (or appear to have not, as is the case when I’ve had a million other accounts) spent any money. It’s like making me buy something so I can use the bathroom, even though I’ve previously purchased many a greasy treat.

Man, I had Ideas. I had Plans. All I wanted was a Flickr Pro account in my brand using a Yahoo! account that I might possibly remember to log in to every 90 days instead of having to go register Yahoo! ID flickrsux123456789123456789. And somebody somewhere (hello? UE person?) has just decided to overlook how appalling “oh well, just get another ID” looks to a user.
From the Flickr FAQ:

If I lose access to my Yahoo! account or my account is deactivated, will I be able to sign in to my Flickr account?

If you use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr, you need to have access to that Yahoo! ID in order to get in to Flickr. If you lose access to that account, we can help you get back in to Flickr. In the case of persistent problems with your Yahoo! ID, you may be able to switch your account to be associated with a different Yahoo! ID

In other words, if you didn’t pony up some shopping under your Yahoo! ID, or you did but you aren’t willing to use your credit card number as a password, fuck you. Get another ID. Get a new one every 90 goddamn days, or just go to hell. Someone else will give us money - speaking of, if the Yahoo! ID deactivates and you have a pro account and get sick of all this, do they give you your remaining money back? Or will they only do that if you did a little shopping with your completely unrememberable Yahoo! ID?

It just sucks. It’s not illegal, it’s probably the result of merging with a behemoth company whose UE engineers are, I don’t know, dead or made of cement or something*, but it’s sad to see what had been a pretty cool user-focused company hit this kind of snag.

If anyone has any insight, my email address is lyn.never at, you know, gmail.

Sigh,

Me

*PS I get it.  I’m a one-woman IT department and I get what a monstrous snarl it is when two systems merge.  Sometimes I have to tell my users to suck up an inconvenience.  The thing is, I’m not Yahoo!, that’s my problem.  A more reasonable user merge IS possible, and if anyone has the resources, it’s Yahoo!  But they’re busy requesting credit card numbers in lieu of security, which probably should have been a line that someone, somewhere drew.

But this morning as I was getting ready for work, I saw she had something in her mouth and made her drop it in case it was one of her less appropriate selections like my underwear or a dead bird. What she had, though, was a month-old packet of Fear Factor Mystery Candy, which we had at our Halloween party and a couple must have gotten dropped on the ground. It was hardly a mystery, by the way: several of us opened packets to find the same unidentifiable brown-black gummyblob that was gross-flavored only in the sense that it was not any recognizable flavor.

Anyway, Sophie has now been carrying around this packet of candy off and on for 14 hours. She won’t eat it, which must be a testament to its grossness since she eats dead birds and cat shit with relish (not literal relish, but she totally would if she had some), but she is so damn proud of her little prize. She lost it for a while in the yellow and black leaves on the patio, but I saw her find it and take it for a victory lap around the house just a little while ago. Gir and Roxy have taken it from her a couple of times just to push her around, neither of them actually wants it, but their occasional interest just increases its value for Sophie.

My mom asked what kinds of toys the dogs wanted for Christmas, and if Sophie liked the big heavy indestructible toys the other dogs play with, and I said no, she has such a little mouth, all she really wants are things she can carry around that the big dogs won’t destroy (note: Sophie has now put her candy in the middle of the floor and is dancing around it, occasionally throwing it across the room, I guess to make it dance back). I guess I’ll just tell her to find us several more bags of Mystery Candy for the poor kid to play with.

I was airing up a leaky tire at a convenience store - a brand new, shiny, brightly lit QT right off the highway - and as I walked in to the store to get a soda, a man in a clerical collar (burgundy shirt, though, not black) got out of a nondescript late-model sedan and threw away an empty 24oz can of beer.  He looked around as he went back to the car, and our eyes met, and he looked away.  When he opened the door and the interior light came on, I noticed the woman in the passenger seat with her head in her hands.

I love the internet.

Jason is clearly busting his ass over there, but it’s not free to do this sort of thing and circumstances are such that he really needs to pull in some more subscribers if there’s going to be any more issues.  In the US, it’s a mere $20 for a one-year subscription, which is going to get you some great stories and art and essays and one more place where I could actually submit stories assuming I ever finish and polish something that I would let see the light of day.  I’m working on a story for their Hallowe’en contest and would like to see them stay afloat long enough to see who wins (and to have another one next year).  So, maybe you’d like to try it out, or you know somebody for whom it would make a nice gift, that would be awesome.  And if you wanted to pass the word on, that would be equally awesome.

On the other hand, we were fine. These are the problems of the blessed. I got around to setting up BeyondTV on one of our desktop computers, and I need to do some tweaking but it’s really nice. I got some reading done. B was gone to a conference one week and I planned our vacation while he was gone (I’m the detail person on things like that). One evening it rained, bucketing down for about 45 minutes, and we stood on the porch with beers and toasted it and watched the whole thing until it was just drizzling. Then we went to our friends’ house about 8 miles away, and they were bone dry and got no rain all night. That’s the kind of summer it’s been.

In other news, we have not stolen the neighbor’s dog, exactly. She has a spot in the fence that she can get through to go back and forth, and she goes over there several times a day to see if anybody gives a shit about her yet, and then she comes back when nobody does. There’s been stuff afoot over there in the past several weeks (or, an escalation of stuff, because there’s always been some shadiness going on), and the people who took care of her don’t appear to be living there anymore, only visiting briefly every weekend, and the person who is sleeping there is the one I’ve seen threaten the dog with a board because she was scratching to come inside. You would have to be an idiot to not know where the dog is; he is no longer even bothering with the charade of putting out a bed and dumping a bag of dog food on the patio. I hate to close the hole in the fence, because I don’t want to officially take a dog away from little kids, but I am pretty sure that had already happened and that it would be safer to block off her path back. I will reassess if I see the children come home, but honestly I think I’m just pre-empting the part where he moves out in the middle of the night and abandons her in the yard either with or without the gate to the street open.

And we like her. She’s calming down and learning not to jump on us, and to sit, and to not steal containers of barbecue off the kitchen counter, I hope. She’s a beagle whippet (lurcher is the word I wanted, though she is just the right size for a whippet), and I find her greyhoundiness very charming. We are relatively sure the children called her Scrappy, and we’ve been trying to call her Scrappy-Sophie to transition her to a less horrible name. She’s getting along really well in the pack, with the dogs and with us, and I wouldn’t hate it if we kept her for good. I do really hate the situation and it makes me kind of tense, so I’m trying to stay on the side of not doing anything technically unethical, but I will say I sleep a lot better at night, even with her sleeping on my knees, than I did when we were giving her food and a blanket and shutting her outside.

The last time the bedroom was empty was when my housemate moved out five years ago. It had been kind of tense around here for several months before that, and I was marginally aware that the room was going to need a lot of work, and I was just ready to be alone a bit before dealing with it. I just closed the door and probably didn’t go in for a week.

Once I felt fortified in my independence, I surveyed the damage. There had been a lot of guy and a whole lot of dog living in there, and it was pretty bad. This was late winter, so I closed the vent, opened the window, opened the sliding glass door, closed the bedroom door, and didn’t go back in for a couple of weeks. I went in and vacuumed every day for a couple of days, putting down the most toxic flea-killer I could safely use indoors (there weren’t any fleas, and we’d been using Frontline, but I worried about eggs) and then left it for another week.

And then I started. I washed the walls, which took me three days for 5-6 hours a day. It took me three trips to the hardware store to find something strong enough - tools and chemicals - to get the blackout paint off the sliding glass door and windows, except I ran out and one window still needs the paint removed. I patched holes in the drywall. Then I taped off the baseboards, primed one wall to cover some homemade artwork, and painted half the room, the worst half that hadn’t washed clean very well.

Then I rented a Rug Doctor and cleaned the carpet 7-8 times.

I left work undone. I did try getting the toilet to work properly in a couple of fits over the years before deciding it was a vent issue that I haven’t bothered to have looked at. I didn’t repaint the bathroom until last year. The ceiling in that bathroom, the laundry room, and the garage were clearly not primed before they were popcorned, and the popcorn’s been coming off for years - not my problem except cleaning up the fallen crap. When I repainted the bathroom I re-caulked. The door and part of the frame need to be replaced, but it hasn’t been a big deal. The room was just so much better that I was happy to call it done for the time being.
Once the paint had dried, I moved my bedroom out of the room we’re back in now.

And so now, I guess, we’re going to sort of do it over again. We’ll stay in the front bedroom until September, which will give me time to clean the carpet (which I did again a couple of years ago by cleaning half of it, letting it dry, moving the bed over, cleaning the other half), paint the half I didn’t paint before, get the rest of the paint off the windows. Then we’ll move the office into the master bedroom and clean and paint the office. Then, when it cools off, we’ll move back into the master bedroom and clean and paint the front bedroom, which has needed painting since before I moved in here.

Then if we’re really smart, we’ll immediately move before anything else needs to be cleaned or painted.

I use the RSS fed for my contacts, and part of the problem there is that because it’s a shared account, there are people in there I don’t know and half the time I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking at and am not personally invested (or in many cases even know how) in finding out.  (This is why the basic functionality of Flickr is so brilliant, it’s just probably that we should have gotten three accounts instead of one.)  B had just finally gotten all his SXSW pictures in (which are exempted from dismay on the grounds that they were always meant to go up, it just takes us a while to get anything done), and we now have a bunch of contacts that neither one of us know.   I assure you that those people are probably wicked irritated about all the random stuff of ours that just showed up in their feeds/Your Contacts’ Latest Photos, and they think we are stupid, boring people.  Because that’s what I think when other people do it.

Not that it’s my place to dictate what other people do with their Flickr accounts; I am hardly an arbiter of cool or even sorta-okay.  But one of the beauties of digital photography is that you can take 20 photos to get one really great one - post the great one publicly and put the rest somewhere else.

Also, I use Flickr as a way to keep up with people I never talk to, and I know other people do that with ours as well.  Since Flickr makes it either difficult or impossible - I haven’t figured out which yet - to insert things where they belong chronologically, we’re having those boring stupid lives now.  And whatever with tagging being the wave of the future and all, and woo hoo for the searching, but if I don’t know you went hang-gliding before you uploaded all 34 pictures of your broken fence plank AND that you tagged those photos “hanggliding” or whatever, it does me no good.

I think the moral of this story is that I’m probably far too concerned with my public Internet face, and now I can make other people paranoid that I’m judging them for their Flickr photos.

Today’s entry in the Things (I think) My Dogs Ate: the remote control to the window unit in our bedroom. I didn’t have time to search the yard before I left.
I’ve been having some thoughts about geek (or Geek) culture. I might talk about that some time.