Victim Of The Modern Age

"The doctors told me it was Pneumonia, but I knew what it was. A victim of the modern age, poor, poor girl." -Mr. Alexander, "A Clockwork Orange"

As I continue trying to define, organize, and consolidate my Web presence I find threads lying about that have reached a disconcerting number.

I cancelled my Facebook account without any problem, but when I tried to cancel my MySpace account, I did not receive the confirmation email and couldn't complete the delete. Upon investigation, I discovered that my Yahoo! email account had stopped forwarding to my Gmail account... and I had over 500 messages sitting there!

I fiddled with the settings for a while, but eventually it looked like Yahoo!Mail had changed and I wouldn't be able to do the forwarding unless I upgraded to their pay service. Well, I wasn't going to do that, so I started clearing out the junk and manually forwarding the important stuff to my Gmail. Along the way I unsubscribed from at least five different newsletters; not that I don't like them, but I sure hadn't missed them...

I HAD missed those Amazon.com order updates... But had I bothered to check why I wasn't getting payment and shipping confirmations? No, because there was already too much to do. The packages arrived and I thought no more of it. But now that I saw what was going on, I had to go to Amazon and update my information. So I had to open my password database where I keep my 20+ different internet accounts and their passwords organized. Safe from hacking? Sure, but let's be real. Nobody's ever stolen a password from me. I FORGET them. And Usernames. And which email account I used to set it up. Etc etc etc.

While I'm at all of this, I go cancel my LiveJournal account, because now I use Blogger. I forgot I even had a LiveJournal. Another thread left untended in the checkered fabric of my cyberquilt. It's embarrassing to have all of one's false starts on public record.

Then after trying to figure out why a Google thingy tied somehow to my Google Account didn't have my profile photo on it (I was able to fix it but don't ask me how I did it, or why it was necessary) I went to check Gmail... and there were all my Yahoo! emails, just like the old days, forwarded as slick as you please.

Why? I don't know. It didn't work when it should and now it's working when it shouldn't.

THEN after typing this and saving it, half the paragraphs came out as gray text on a white background, nearly illegible. Why? I don't know. I spent a minute trying to figure it out, then I just copied the whole thing to a text editor and copied it back. So that was fixed, but then the spaces between the paragraphs were bigger than with previous posts. I had to go into the HTML to fix it. If I wanted to do that I'd code these pages all myself and publish them on my website.

Welcome to the modern age, poor, poor girl.