I wonder why the New Improved websites of the internet always make me yearn for their predecessors.
The online mail server added a minor feature, a “preview pane”, and it came with many many annoying features, like displaying that preview pane on my news page, so now my news is filled with spam from DallasDebby about maximizing my pleasure.
The improved gas credit card site added dozens of ways to see last years usage in pie charts (all of which show that I buy only one grade of gas at one station), and simultaneously make it impossible to see when my next payment is due without wending through several pages of self-serving ads.
The latest is BookTV. The old version had one major fault, which I think could be solved by a few lines of code: all the times and days are listed in Eastern Standard Time, which is a pain to decrypt to set my recorder. If I calculated the time right I would sometimes miss the am/pm change or the day change.
But the new version makes it a real labor to discover what’s on when. (Of course this would be simple if they supplied the TV guide sites with the same information as every other channel. Instead they only tell them "Book TV Non-fiction books and authors, time Saturday am thru Monday). The website says something like “2009 Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest - Beryl Satter”. You then have to click on it to see what is being discussed. That is, you have to open 57 (fifty seven) additional pages to find out what’s on. And you’d better not close that first page, because although the 57 new pages show all the past and future start times of those discussions, they neglect to tell the length of the segment. A rather glaring omission.
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.