melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote2011-06-29 08:06 pm

you just keep on trying till you run out of cake

I am currently in the middle of an EPIC BATTLE with Yahoo! support.

...okay, not epic so much as I sent an e-mail, they sent an e-mail saying they'd be back to me in 24 hours or less, they sent an e-mail saying my question had been ESCALATED, they sent an e-mail saying 'sorry we haven't answered you yet, we're overloaded, if you still need an answer, please ask again,' I sent an e-mail saying "THIS IS NOT A DIFFICULT QUESTION YES OR NO PLEASE."

My question is: will the new version of Yahoo mail they are forcing everybody to switch to work at all on any browser other than Firefox, IE, and Chrome? It is necessary to ask them this because none of their 'help' material about the change acknowledges that there are browsers other than those three, because I can't test for myself because once I switch I can never go back, and because the last time they came out with an ALL NEW YAHOO MAIL! they put in one of those stupid, stupid, stupid browser checks that blocks you if you aren't on a whitelisted browser, even if your browser would otherwise work fine. Which is why I'm still using Classic.

I suspect the reason they're overloaded is that if even 1/10 of the Yahoo! users who aren't on a Big Three browser have e-mailed to ask, they have probably gotten tens of thousands of e-mails just with that question.

(This is almost as exciting as my ongoing battle to get my bank to let me do online banking, now that they are charging fees to everyone who doesn't do online banking. Yes, bank, I would be fine using the internets if you would let me use the internets!)

Exciting life, I know.

In other computer news, a few days ago I opened up my laptop again, hoping that dusting out the fan would solve the 'constantly running hot' problem. It didn't, sadly, but while I was at it, I finally got my DVD drive working again, and utterly destroyed the civilization that lives in my keyboard, and even managed to reassemble the thing properly! It's always disconcerting though 'cause after I open it up, it sounds different, and I have to let it settle again. I also set up my new terabyte external drive - nobody needs a terabyte external drive, but she was on 55% off sale, and I needed a new external drive one way or another. I have named her Pomona, after the Roman deity / 19th century allegorical figure of abundance and plenty. Because nobody needs a terabyte drive.

and I am possibly working on a picspam/intro post for 'Civic Allegories', aka 'Hot Women With Swords in Togas' fandom

I also figured out how to force my graphics card to play all video in grayscale, and I am loving it. Everything looks classy in grayscale. Trashy Australian game shows look classy in grayscale. I may never switch it back. (I went googling all over in an attempt to find out how to turn my monitor grayscale, by the way, and I got crabbier and crabbier that every time somebody resquested this on a message board or whatever, 90% of the responses were 'why would you want to set your monitor to grayscale? Color is so much better in every way! Here's how to make the color even better' Yes, because God forbid I want to be able to control how I consume my media, or look at a video in any way other than the way it was originally packaged. ...and apparently actually so, because it looks like, in most Windows computers at least, there is no way to set your monitor to grayscale unless you're an expert at fiddling with drivers. How hard would it be to just give consumers contrast/brightness/saturation sliders, huh? There don't even seem to be any external applications that will do this. Bah. And let's just ignore the people who say 'I need this because color gives me migraines'.

***

In other news, today I read [personal profile] sassbandit & [personal profile] were_duck's epic Draculoids Will Never Hurt You, and it left me itching under my skin too much to just sit inside and mess around with kink_bingo, job stuff, and sewing, which had been my plan, so instead I picked wild blackberries, went and watched the dragonflies over the stream, pulled out the camping supplies and checked them over some more, cooked fresh local squash for dinner, and lay in my hammock read old anthropology essays from a book I found while shelving, and played with writing original fic from that story which will probably never see the light of day.

It wasn't necessarily a more productive day than staying in and doing art or sewing would have been, but I think it made me happier. \o/ for summer days where the temperature never hits 90°.
siegeofangels: The angel from Guido Reni's "The Angel Appearing To St. Jerome" (Default)

[personal profile] siegeofangels 2011-06-30 01:30 am (UTC)(link)
I am mostly going to attempt to keep using the old Yahoo system until it makes me switch, and then I am going to see if telling Opera to identify as IE lets me in. Identifying as IE worked for my online banking, so I'm hoping it fools Yahoo too. (I am likewise still using Classic.)

You're using Opera too, yeah? It's Settings -> Quick Preferences -> Edit Site Preferences -> Network -> switch "Browser Identification" to "Identify as IE" [or whatever], if you haven't tried it.
elf: Computer chip with location dot (You Are Here)

[personal profile] elf 2011-06-30 02:13 am (UTC)(link)
I suspect it'll work on Safari, because the iPhone/iPad crowd is not small. But Opera and other browsers... no idea.
siegeofangels: The angel from Guido Reni's "The Angel Appearing To St. Jerome" (Default)

[personal profile] siegeofangels 2011-06-30 09:50 am (UTC)(link)
Hah, I thought you probably knew, but hey, just in case! It sucks that Yahoo is being so difficult, though. I wish you the best of luck with your quest for a straight answer. At this point I'd forgotten that there are actual Yahoo people behind the giant indifferent entity that is Yahoo. (I have perhaps been listening to too many Radiolab bits about robots.)
dancesontrains: A white girl with red snorkels in a bathtub (Avoiding reality)

[personal profile] dancesontrains 2011-06-30 10:21 am (UTC)(link)
But I was told asexuals had all the cake privilege! :o

I have no advice to give re. Yahoo mail and Opera, but that sounds like an excellent day out.
dejla: (Default)

[personal profile] dejla 2011-06-30 01:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Is it too nerdy to say that I bought a 2TB drive just because it was on sale and super-super cheap? (Now if I can just remember where I PUT THE DAMN THING...)
lastscorpion: (Default)

[personal profile] lastscorpion 2011-06-30 05:47 pm (UTC)(link)
When I read their FAQ about this mail change, it said you could go back to Yahoo Mail Classic instead. And when I read their FAQ about Yahoo Mail Classic, it said that's what you want to use if you have a slow connection, which I do. So I switched back to that, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will continue to kind of work.

Not exactly answering the question you asked, sorry.