I happen to know that if your credit card expires Rhapsody suspends your account and notifies you right away that your account is suspended and you can't use it until you pay up. This happened recently (my bank issued new debit cards and stopped clearing the old ones just shy of the expiration date) and that's what happened. I don't have an ongoing contract with them, so if they suspend service in response to non-payment it seems like there's a mutual stoppage there.
Netflix also did the same, except in their case I had their property in the form of DVDs, so provided I didn't send it back they could charge me for them, and they very subtly said as much. My gym froze my account and said I couldn't use it if I didn't fix things and then also said they'd terminate my account on a certain date if they hadn't heard back from me.
Having that happen was a nice little test of "What happens when you quit paying?" for all of those services. I'm actually kind of glad the bank stopped clearing the debit cards early otherwise I would have likely re-set the card data and missed this opportunity. I have a lot of subscription-type services and unless there's one I'm forgetting that is silently piling up fees to send to a collection agency, not a single service has proven itself unscrupulous in this one particular regard.
My favorite online forum auto-replace: a friend's name became "Thingy" Robinson. It was hilarious and yet bothersome at the same time. Censorship at its silliest.
I have been using Rhapsody for several years. A few Christmases ago I received a Rhapsody-To-Go compatible portable device and upgraded to that service. There've been a few glitches here and there, but I'm mostly very satisfied with the service. I am online at all times save when in a car, on a bicycle, at the gym, or outdoors, so even the $17.99 per month of the upgraded service saves me a goodly sum (and satisfies my need for entertainment during long car trips). I used to spend $50 on CDs each month, now I buy about three CDs a year, and those only if I know the artist personally or if they are not available on Rhapsody.
That said, for Rhapsody and pretty much any other service, I'd suspect the easiest way to cancel it is to change the credit card expiration date to one that's invalid and call it a day. I doubt I'll be unsubscribing anytime soon, but if I do that route should save me the 800 number hassle.
Tara@69 - Good golly, that's brilliant.
The True Confessions of Bromium Doyle
On the long, grueling journey from Arcturus to Boötes, where she will be raised into a proper lady by her maiden aunts, Bromium Doyle's safe passage is threatened by a vengeful captain and a mutinous crew. The plot thickens when Bromium is accused of murdering a crew member. Overcoming the odds, Bromium emerges unscathed from the tumult and finds herself commanding an entire fleet of interstellar cargo ships.
Is this "full of win" a misquote or some new phenomenon about which I have not yet heard? See, the parts of the tubes I frequent are full of people and things which are "made of win," and have been so for quite some time.
A lot of this conversation reminds me of The Name of the Wind.
I am entirely too young. Decidedly. I say this because when reading 5. Comment Registration Systems which require the use of True Names, I thought "Wait, you mean like Facebook? That's not a great invention. Not even close."
I'm a bit lazy (and getting into this conversation late) but *I believe* you can solve this with only clues #1, 3, 4, 5 & 9. I say this because I was too lazy to read all of the clues and I figured it out....
Please don't submit a story anywhere until you've read one or two issues of a magazine, or a few books they've published.
Yes, of course. That's one of the reasons why I haven't submitted or queried anything yet. I'm a slow reader (my reading is only marginally faster than my writing) so I'm taking some time to pin down what I want to do - and even trying to pin down what I want to pin down, to a certain extent since reading is so hard for me.
Don't get me wrong, I am literate, and I do read for fun, but it takes me a week to read a mid-length novel even if I'm trying pretty hard and I have friends who can do the same in an evening. Knowing this helps me out because I can look at the fifty books I read in a year and feel accomplished, even if I have friends who will have read four or five times as many in the same amount of time.
As you can well guess, I'm sort of a writing newb but I stumbled onto http://community.livejournal.com/market_finder/ which if legit, looks to be worth its weight in gold provided I or anyone else reading it actually managed to scrape together some Good Pieces.
Does anyone know about this (or perhaps any equivalent and decidedly legit links)? I haven't done any querying or submitting yet because I'm sort of trying to figure out what I want to do before I do it, but I really want to avoid being taken in by a scammer or having my work stolen.
By the way, I like the "spelling reference" you have put up. I hadn't noticed it before. I really dislike mispelling words, especially proper nouns.
"Congratulations!" to all those winners who might happen to read this (especially and including Patrick, who is the most likely one to read this but I realize there are quite possibly others).
Algernon Moments is a good way to describe that phenomenon. I've often had the same sort of thing with regard to science or technology; I understood Van Eck phreaking, for example, while reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I can only hope that when I get finished with what I'm working on people can similarly understand lock bumping and smart card eavesdropping.
Paula @ #37 - It's penitentiaries, I believe.
Bruce @ #44 - That is sad. I hope it's not true.
PJ Evans @ #46 - I read that Fitzgerald said he doesn't expect any more indictments to come out of it now, on the Salon link. It wasn't a direct quote though, so I hope it was just a very inaccurate paraphrase.
Since Novak testified in Libby's trial that one of his leak sources was Rove (who did not come forward like Armitage), what are the odds that we will see an indictment for Rove in the near future? Why haven't we seen one yet? Is there more "behind-the-scenes" stuff I'm missing? Is outing an undercover agent not enough to get you arrested?
I had already typed all this when I read Clifton #36. Maybe that is what Fitzgerald is up to.
I followed the link and got spooked because the picture of Kelley Eskridge on the Clarion West site looks quite like me. Fortunately Google is my friend and revealed it was just the shot's lighting producing that effect. Kelleys are rare enough and platinum blond ones are rarer still; I can rest easy knowing I'm not about to lose my Universally Unique Status.
The "Will I have something as good (or at least favorably reviewed) as Solitaire published in 19 years?" question is still rattling about in my head though.
According to Wikipedia (which I realize is only as in the know as whoever writes in it), it is Coos County, pronounced /ˈko.ɑs/ with two syllables.
Jen Roth: Wow, you're in CU too? Awesome. It being a college town, I'm not too surprised. A lot of people roll through from time to time - Neal Stephenson for instance lived here for a while when he was a kid. And of course there Roger Ebert.
Nancy C: Thanks for the info on the pod casts. I might consider subscribing and listing to it while I run occasionally. (During the day and very carefully, for any would-be lecturers on safety issues for female runners.)
Thanks very much! I have bookmarked all of the suggestions and I read through today's material on the sites Gar Lipow suggested. Unfortunately I can't listen to Rachel Maddow on the air here (Champaign, IL is about 100 miles from anywhere she's broadcast) but I'll check out the streaming option.
I'm definitely going to check out the World Socialist Web Site because of the world-news focus. A good indicator of how badly I needed a clue-stick is the fact that prior to glancing at that site just now, I didn't even know that Sri Lanka was in the news. Stuff goes on all over all the time, and unless someone tells me, I just don't learn about it....
If I were to pin it down really specifically, around 10:30 EST/9:30 CST each morning would be ideal. (That's about when my brain gets fuzzed at work and I need to take a 15 minute breather.) So I take that time and try to keep abreast of what's going on outside of small-town Illinois. My afternoon breather tends to focus on local news.
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| 2008 | 4 |
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