Modern Technology

Don't you hate it when something that's supposed to make your life easier makes it harder and harder until you just want to bang your head against the wall with frustration?

I was trying to add pictures to my profile yesterday. I have an account with one of the free photo hosting services; I thought, "No problems!" Well, I was wrong. Every photo link I used I got some kind of error message, from "incoherent code" to "this link does not exist." (Does not exist?!?!? I was just THERE!)

About the time I was about to tear out my remaining hair, I noticed another option right there on my "edit profile" page. "Learn more about free photo hosting!!" it bugled. "Okay," I though, "Let's learn more. Learning can't hurt anything..."

WRONG!

You'd think I'd have learned by now that "Want to learn more?" is 'netspeak for, "You are about to be taken to some strange download site with no idea if you can ever get back to where you want to be. This site will tell you all the great ways their program will make your internet experience more fun, but will not actually tell you how it works or what it even does. The only way to figure that out is to download the thing and run a few trials. By the way, downloading this 'free' software may commit you to a year's membership in some weird cell phone ringtone site at the low price of $29.95 per month which will be charged directly to your phone bill, sucker."

Okay, I thought, I'm woman enough to understand these things and figure out a program after I install it. I read the fine print. I can always uninstall. And it would be cool to just beam my pictures to my blog. So I downloaded the thing. Actually, I downloaded it twice because for some reason Netscape won't let me sign onto Blogger, so I have to use Explorer, but then when I picked "Download," both Netscape and Explorer downloaded the program. More competition between companies, I guess, but not my concern.

So I install the software. NOW we're getting somewhere. This looks cool. All you have to do is make a task called blogbot your buddy, send it your photos and then you can open your blog and send the photos directly there. I like the sound of this. I go through the steps and some to a sign-in screen. I sign into my Blog.

"I'm sorry, you have entered an invalid password or you are not allowed access to this Blog!" the computer tells me in that annoying Star Trek Computer voice it has in my head.

I click the help link. Actually, these should probably be called, "Help--You Wish," but never mind. It tells me to clear my cookies and try again. I do so, no change. THEN it tells me to enable my cookies. Hey, I just cleared them! No matter, I still can't sign on through Blogbot. As a last resort, I reset my password. Now I can log into my Blog but I still can't send it pictures.

I reflect on the irony of the page title: Blogger--Out of Beta and Running Great!

I may try to send pictures through Imagshack later, but it's been running so slowly today that I think it's having a nervous breakdown. Until then, no real pics. I'll be busy banging my head against the wall.