Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I just created a New York Public Library e-card, mostly to see if I could, because of a discussion on Discord of getting an NYPL card if you don't live in the city. This makes five library cards: Boston and Minuteman, plus King County and Seattle from when I lived in Washington. I'm using King County the most, because they have a very good ebook collection.

The NYPL e-card is available to anyone who lives in the United States and checks a box for "visiting New York City." I have a library card number, a username (of my choosing) and password, and a printout with all this information. They promised a confirming email, and I very much doubt that they're going to check that I live at this address in Belmont, rather than in New Haven, Seattle, or Toronto.

NYPL uses an ebook format/reader I hadn't heard of, and will need to download to my phone.

ETA: The virtual card expires in 14 days if I don't go to a branch in person to validate it. Which I suppose fits in with me saying I was "visiting NYC." If I remember correctly from yesterday, the visitor card is only three months anyhow.

Good: the Palm will still charge on its cradle; this buys me time, at least.

Not as good: It's not entirely clear how much I need to do to run Palm Desktop 4.1.4 on Windows 7; what I'm finding online says "compatibility mode," and then Windows 7 offers to test for compatibility. And now I'm worrying about losing data, because the only place I'm sure I have it current is on the handheld. (My first attempts yesterday to get files from the backup I wrote using the Windows XP backup utility achieved nothing.) In the meantime, I have copies the "backup" folder in the Palm folder to "my documents" so I have it in two places. I suspect I shall be spending some time copying a few people's contact information by hand before I chance sync'ing. And I don't want to spend the next few days doing nothing but work, fret about systems stuff, and sleep.

Eudora seems to be working; it's configured to both download mail and leave it on the server, and since Panix is now giving us 500 MB of storage, I'm going to do that for a bit, since this is beta software. Really beta, not Google "we'll call it that for a year and then declare it out of beta without any recent changes."

They really have created an ftp server that is accessible via Internet Explorer, sits there forever spinning its wheels in Firefox, and from a command-line interface will give me a directory listing, and otherwise is capable of error messages or telling me that transfer type has been set to binary. When the command given is 'mget g*', the message that file transfer type has been set to 8-bit binary is an error.

It has to take work to produce behavior that pointlessly baroque and annoying.

After rysmiel mentioned gmail and chatting earlier today, I started wondering whether Google talk was willing to work with Gaim. Technically, it's not, the protocol isn't supported: but that mostly means that the last time they upgraded the program, they renamed it, so I now have a cheerful IM window with a client called Pidgin.

The oddity is that rather than either list all my buddies on different hosts and such together, or list them all separately (as Gaim did), it's showing me one list for people on the LJ Jabber server, and one for people on AOL's IM client and those on Gmail. My mother not being logged on right now, I don't know how it handles Yahoo Messenger. (I log into that because Mom does--it's the program my brother set her up on, and no hassle for me to talk to through the same client I'm using anyway. (Mom, you don't need to change anything about your software because of what I've changed.))

For a freelance project, I've needed accounts on two new systems today. On neither did I get to choose my own username. For one, I entered my email address, and it generated a username, which I'm guessing is sequential and possibly sorts users into categories: the letter p followed by a string of digits. It emailed me that and a thoroughly random-looking password; I can change the password but not the username.

For the other, the person running the project set up a username, supposedly my first initial and last name. Except she mis-typed my name, though she got it right in the user info. I've asked her to change it, either to the correct spelling of my name, or to "vicki" or "vr", so I don't have to remember what will feel like a typo to both my conscious mind and my fingers.

(I will also be getting to deal with a new Wiki markup language, which seems to be an interesting combination of old-fashioned email _emphasis_ *markup* and an overfondness for CamelCaps; not everyone uses the MediaWiki software I've learned on Wikipedia.)

The New York Public Library has computerized book (and music, and video) checkout and return.

I hadn't realized until I looked at the slip on the CD I borrowed a few days ago what a useful thing they're doing. It doesn't just tell me that this item is due on thus-and-such date. It lists everything I currently have out with the due dates. This is particularly useful because I'd forgotten that I have a book due on the 29th. Returning it on time will be trivial, now that I've been reminded.

(The system also knows that I owe them 50¢, and the next time I go there, with any luck there will be a functioning cash register and we can clear this up. But the book in question is not listed as still checked out, so that's okay.)

This afternoon, AIM offered me an "automatic update". I accepted, ignored it for a few hours, and then discovered I could no longer log in. I reset my password. No luck. I discovered that the help links are a mess of "coming soon," irrelevant FAQs, and nonexistent live help.

Next stop, Trillian. Which won't load my buddy list, and whose help pages are cheerfully willing to show me how to display a hidden list, which isn't my problem.

AOL's Web site says that the new version of AIM Triton doesn't overwrite the old. Well, not entirely, but I had to set Windows Explorer to hunt down the previous version. I am now logged in, and will celebrate by starting dinner.

Email works better when you remember to press the "send" button. (Neither of these messages languished for very long--I put Eudora back at the top and there they were--but it's disconcerting.)

I'm buying some holiday cards from joedecker and wanted to use Paypal to pay for them.

I tried to log on to my Paypal account, and it insisted on sending me to the "I forgot my password" page no matter how many times I entered my existing password. So I went through that rigamarole, and was asked to reset my password. It wouldn't accept the previous password because it recognized it as my old password, after refusing to recognize it when I tried to use it to log in.

The right hand knoweth not what the right hand is doing.