Perspective

(Just one more post on the reactions to the banner ads placed on AOL journals.  Tomorrow, we shall return to irregularly scheduled journalling.)

Item:  Please, don't call it "rape."  That's an insult to rape victims.  Can we have a teensy bit of perspective here?  It's a banner ad, for cryin' out loud. 

Item:  Don't confuse malice with incompetence.  Which is to say, yes, the banner ads were most definitely intentional and we can and should get riled up about them.  But all of the other errors that came along with this install -- like the inability to add or save entries -- that's just incompetence.  I totally accept the Joe's explanations for those things.  Why?  Because I've been with AOL for over ten years and they've never rolled out a new version of anything that wasn't crawling with errors.  I got AOL disks dating back to 3 1/2-inch floppies of version 3.something.  I'm running 9.0 now.  That's years of new installs.  And by around 6.0, I started realizing you should never download the new version from AOL when they first offer it.  Why?  'Cause it has errors so plentiful and obvious, you wonder if they had monkeys beta-testing it.  (And I'm talkin' stupid monkeys.  Not the kind that understand sign language; the ones that fling their poo at you.)  ANYWAY, I've learned to wait a few months until they've gotten most of the bugs out.  Because AOL always seems to release stuff that doesn't work all that well on an unsuspecting public.  It's just their way.

This sounds rather more like an indictment of AOL than a defense of it -- but my point is this:  Yes, the banner ads on journals are a new low in AOL's attempt to make advertising bucks off the same people it gets subscription bucks from.  But bugs in a "new and improved" version of anything from AOL?  That's just the standard incompetence you should come to expect from being a longtime AOL user.  Take a deep breath, know that that will be fixed in time, and focus on the real battlefront.