ornamental

ILLNESS

Saturday, January 29, 2005

1996?

I am really starting to hate the fact that some businesses can't get their act together to do e-commerce. Not that anyone reading this would get pissed off at that statement, but just in case someone does, please note that I am NOT talking about Brick and Mortar stores that have no desire to get into ecommerce. That's one thing altogether and I respect their choice. I'm talking about those that *HAVE* a web presence, a website, etc., but they don't have any way to buy those products online without a lot of hoop-jumping on the part of the buyer. This is not 1996. There are ways. Even a techie moron like me can manage to put together a PayPal shopping cart without the aid of any 3rd party shopping cart script-that's-over-my-head setup.

Wanted to buy some widgets from somewidgetstore.com. Had to have a tax-exempt number (even though I'm not in the widget store's state, but ok, maybe they do things differently out there), so they wanted me to fax them my sales permit and I had to fill out a resale certificate, and of course, fax it to them. Now I understand that they need this information for their records to make sure a legitimate person is buying their widget and not just some widget hobbiest who isn't going to resell said-widgets. But obviously I didn't have a fax and I don't have a scanner (I used to have one, Stan used to have one, they're both got busted...the only digital hardware we've owned that actually broke before it could outdate itself. I'm not buying anymore scanners. They're crap) so I had to shoot the forms with my digital camera. OK, that's fine, I can understand the need to do that.

BUT...after that, I simply can't then go to their site and buy stuff, add it to my shopping cart, and pay for it with PayPal or some other shopping cart system. No, I have to fill out their form and fax it to them. They don't even have a downloadable form to fill out--of course not...I'm supposed to print out the form, fill it out, and fax it to them....why should I need a downloadable version? And I know, I could've just done that and instead of faxing, I would just shoot the image and send it to them as a jpeg. But...the form asks for my CC#! Like Hell I'm gonna email them a jpeg with my CC# on it!

So I save the html page as a jpeg file, drop it into Illustrator, (yeah, I know, I'm being sort of a layout DTP geek about this myself) and add the pertinent information (my name, addy, items I'm ordering, minus my CC number) all in a neat little form without any messy handwriting. It would then be so convenient if I could then save that out as a jpeg and send it to them, but NOOO....they need my SIGNATURE and I can't exactly sign it in Illustrator (well, I could, but I don't know if they'd accept it). So I print that out, take a digital picture of it, now I'll have to load it from my camera into I-Photo.

Would't it be so much easier if they could just do it all online? Like other sites do? Well, most other sites.

This is really nuts.

Posted by Ann on 01/29/05@10:29 AM CST ..::Link::..Whisper or Scream?

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Wildcat Dreams

I had a good dream the other night. Stan and I were looking at a house to buy. It was the highest house at the top of a very steep hill. It was brick, like a warm medium beige color, 2-story, and I don't know what the style was, but it was 20s/30s era with a steeply pitched roof. The interior on the first floor was vast. Unfortunately, it had been a rental for a while and the rooms were rather unevenly decorated, and the modernization of it was circa 1960, rather detailing with not much of its original history preserved, but it was HUGE! There were two rooms that could either be a living room or bedroom. All the rooms were rather connected on the first floor. The kitchen was small, as was another little room that Stan said I could use as my computer room, but the other rooms made up for it. One room had a lot of windows with a door that opened up to the back, and I think Stan wanted that as his cactus room. We didn't even get to see the upstairs, but we said we'd take it.

I didn't have good dreams last night. The first part of it was really weird, and I can't remember the order very well. I dreamt Stan was mad at me. I think I told him I hated him, but I was kidding. I think he took it seriously. I remember trying to call him on the phone, but he wouldn't answer (what number was I calling? and whose phone was I using)? It was sort of convoluted, I was at my parents' house, and CSU was in the picture. I had my old Monza, and I was driving to the CSU campus. I had to pick up some people. One of them was some man who was maybe 20 years older than me, although he didn't look that old. I have no idea who he was, except the next mission was to pick up someone who looked like Stan's youngest half brother, and I told him that his father was in the back seat, although he didn't look like him. Then I had to go into a building to pick up some more people, and I actually drove the car into the building. I remember being very confused by the layout, elevators, etc. I remember leaving with people I used to work with about 17 years ago, Blair and someone I think named Rick. We're walking out of the building and instead of being in the Monza, we're on some streets...snowcovered and alley-like. There's a woman standing in the alley and she says, "watch out, there's a wildcat." I look and there's a small wildcat, too small to be a mountain lion...more like a bobcat. It starts running toward me and the other people I'm with. I freeze, yet leap into the air, real high, and as I'm about to fall, I wake up. The entire surface of my skin is tingling, and although I don't feel my heart beating fast, I feel scared to death. I now know where the expression "jumped right out of your skin" came from, as I literally feel I did that in my dream, leaped right into another state of consciousness. I then fall back to sleep (with major difficulty, between the freaky dream, Stan's snoring, and my overall feeling of having injested too much caffeine the day before) and dream that I had cut my hair and unintentionally given myself a mullett (dyed marroon). I was with some women and recounting my dream with the wildcat with them, also having a hard time speaking. I had toast attached to my mouth and I had a hard time forming words. I know that sounds real strange...it was.

I wonder if the wildcat has anything to do with the anticipation of Tiger (Mac's next OS...OS 10.4?) I am finding the necessity to get a new ibook in the near future. Mine is over 5 years old, running only 9.2.2. It wouldn't be so bad, except I've been doing a lot of listing on ebay lately, and I'm finding that the system can't deal with the heavy ebay pages, nor can it deal with a lot of webpages it's encountering. Also, the monitor area is cracking. And it's heavier than new models are. As much as I dislike the non-ergonomic tracking pad of Stan's ibook, I am forced to upgrade. It's just taking too much time with my old Tangerine. As soon as Tiger comes out, I'll get a new one.

Posted by Ann on 01/26/05@10:27 AM CST ..::Link::..Whisper or Scream?
By Ann @ 10:29 AM CST:01:29:05 ..::Link::..Whisper or Scream?

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