Saturday, January 28, 2006

Sticking Around

As anybody with eyes can see (anybody who still visits here, that is) January third has come and gone, and "Coming to Terms" has not. Gone, that is. And it is not likely to go anytime soon, either.

A couple of months of water have passed under the bridge since the Great AOL Ad Invasion. (I’ll probably come up with all sorts of "water" analogies, if the Pacific Northwest weather keeps going along as it has been…) Time for things to calm down, dust to clear, heads to cool. And I have to admit—the main thing that incensed me about the ad thing was the time it took for any given journal page to load, with all the moving gew-gaws and animated doohickeys in the ads. But since I’ve joined the twenty-first century and connected to DSL, that problem no longer exists. I don’t have to wait three hours for a page to load. AND I haven’t seen a flying scooter since before Christmas. Mr. Boss’s Boss’s Boss’s attitude still pisses me off, but this is one of those times when I can’t see cutting off my nose to spite my face. I LIKE AOL Journals. They are easy. I don’t have to be an HTML whiz to have a decent-looking, comfortable place here. When I load pictures, they look nice, and not all warbly and smudgy like the ones on my Blogspot journal. I can change the colors easily, any time I want. And, let’s face it—a lot of people whose friendship I value still live in the AOL-J community. AND…I’m one of the real old-timers, now. Practically a relic. That has to have some cosmic importance, no?

In addition—and maybe I’ve fallen for some of AOL’s ad hype here—I want the security that AOL offers me. I’m a little vague about how secure a DSL connection is, and I have, in the past, been lax about keeping up my personal virus protection on my computers. I just didn’t feel comfortable surfing around on the internet without the stuff that I at least think AOL has looking out for my welfare. So yesterday, I actually downloaded AOL 9.0 onto the new desktop we bought a couple weeks ago. Am I a sap? I don’t know…maybe. But I sure get a kick out of being able to "Instant Message" the hubs when he is online on the downstairs computer, and I am online upstairs. J

So, Coming to Terms is going to remain. The actual casualty of the AOL tsunami is going to be "Brainsurfing"—my private journal. I just can’t maintain three blogs, and I intend to keep "Better Terms," over at Blogspot. "Better Terms" is going to be what "Brainsurfing" started out being—the place to cache my serious, heart-felt writing. "Coming to Terms…" can serve as my connection to the community, where I can put things like memes and "tag" thingies and silly quiz results—the stuff that made blogging in the AOL community fun. And, of course, I will double-post all the "good" writing on both journals.

So, there you have it. My solution to the "AOL vs Not" war. Hey…whatever works, right?

5 comments:

  1. I'm so very glad!!!!!

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  2. I have also played around with blogger. Mainly as a place to stash pictures so I could use them in my AOL Blog. But, the pictures don't upload consistantly and I really don't like having to wait for blogger to get around to posting to see if it actually worked or not. AOHell has some problems, but they all have some problems. I guess all highways have potholes even the virtual ones. LOL

    Jackie

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  3. Right on.....I have grown immune to the ads too. They were a shock at first, but that's life. Working for a big corporation, I understand their thinking, it's all about the money. I am comfortable over here also. I still miss terribly how it was, but it was inevitable that people would feel the need to expand and grown in a direction AOL-J land did not provide.  Yet, I notice so many still involved with the "community" while maintaining a non-AOl-J land journal.

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  4. I'm going to be doing a little in both place...but primarily here.  I have too many other things going on to learn to perfect blogspot right now.  I'm still annoyed by the crappy attitude we got out of the powers that be, but I've learned to live with the ads.  Even if I were blogging elsewhere, I'd be here to read so many of my favs.

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  5. Im staying too. I do have a blogspot but it is a moirror.

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