There are a LOT of cheap people on Craigslist. Call them whatever you want; bargain hunters, cheapos, cheapskates, frugal, or any other euphimisms  but the bottom line is that they oh-so-many are cheap. I’d say that the fact that craigslist is free has a lot to do with that. It attracts people who like free things (which is just about everyone in capitalist America). I’m amazed at how so many people try to bargain for things on Craigslist, even when they are already dirt cheap and lower priced than would be found elsewhere anyways!

Microsoft has a broken system in one of their small business offerings. It’s been broken for months. Rather than say so on their website, they continue to waste people’s time. I waited and waited but the system is STILL broken. AAARGH!!

It has to be. What else could bring me out of temporary blogging retirement but the high level of frustration I feel towards several failed attempts at buying about $400 worth of services from Microsoft. I am TRYING TO GIVE THEM MONEY and after several attempts on different days, I continually get screwed on the very last page of the checkout process.

You f*&$ing IDIOTS! My beloved dead grandmother could run the company better than the current Microsoft primates can. And she barely spoke English!

I usually go to bat for Microsoft but this time I am REALLY POed at them.

After seeing the demise of my friend’s pre-blog-days blog, I decided to chronicle my own life and started my own blog. I don’t want to mention the web address but suffice it to say that it had become quite popular. I took it down for privacy reasons. I don’t intend to go into details at this particular juncture but suffice it to say that blogging can be simultaneously fun and stressful. Still, I rest satisfied that I was one of the second bloggers out there. By “second bloggers” I mean second wave of bloggers in the early days. I just made that classification up. Hmmmm… perhaps on entry on the phases of blog writing in history is in order. A possible topic for the future.

Back in the 1990s, a friend of mine was one of the first bloggers. Back then bloggers weren’t called bloggers but that’s what he was doing! He would chronicle our adventures as nightclubbers and other interesting occurences.

At the time, blogging software technology was not easily available so he used a free website account (like angelfire or geocities) and just continually published one loooong page of stories. Many were funny, some were exciting, a lot were more detailed than needed. All were great!

In the early 2000s, blogging was just starting to get somewhere and I went back to see my buddy’s words of wisdom. It turns out the free service had deleted his work. Everything was lost!

The lesson here: You get what you pay for in web country!