Well everything was going great until Saturday, April 3, 1999. We'd almost
finished our second web site which features our on-line art gallery, our
scanner and printer were working fine, then I noticed the pop up advertising
was back on our web site, which wasn't supposed to be there because Gerald's
Tripod Premium Membership was supposed to have been automatically renewed
March 30th, 1999. I figured it was a computer glitch of some kind. Then
I went into our filemanager where we keep our web site and found it read
that we only had 11 MB of space where we are supposed to have 22 with premium
membership! Still another computer glitch I wondered? These things have
been known to happen.
The next day the window was still there. So early Easter morning Gerald
told me to write Tripod and ask what was going on, then go into our web site
files and delete all the books we had published on there, and if we needed
to, take off more so we'd be below the 11 megabytes reqired. Then later that
day we received an official notice stating that his premium membership had
expired. We wrote Tripod another letter asking what was going on, and they
responded April 7, 1999 saying our credit card had expired, that we had to
fill out new information. Gerald had me write another letter to the company
saying that this was not so, and their staff was totally encompetent.
In the middle of all this, we had been having trouble every night with the
resident hackers shutting down Gerald's chat room, sometimes in the morning
too. So we moved it to another location.
Like we're so fond of saying we must be doing something right because so
much stuff is going wrong! We're keeping our fingers crossed everything
will be o.k. but now Gerald is having trouble at work again. The same people
who caused him problems a while back are starting in with the same type of
things again. Also Gerald fell and hurt his leg there, so he hasn't been
able to sleep very well. The usual battle with spring hay fever is going
on because the trees are budding. And our computer never did get back to
normal after I reinstalled Windows 95Plus and IE 4.0 after we mysteriously
lost Word Pad one Sunday night!
It never rains it pours. Well the good news is this is our 13th anniversary
issue! May we have many, many more to come! And may there be much more
GOOD news to report!
Thank you all for reading VOICES and we hope you'll stay with us for a long,
long time!
We've lost a great entertainer with the death of Al Hirt. His music always
lifted our spirits, as I'm sure it will continue to lift the spirits of the
Souls where he now is. I remember with sadness the incident some years ago,
where someone hit him with a brick because he was performing with black musicians.
We can dream that such incidents will never happen again. But with the
ignorance of man it is unlikely that dream will come true. Play on, trumpet
man, play on!