But wait, hold it, never mind, cancel the panic parade: it was not, in fact, the perfect ringtone. Crisis averted! Still, the sinking feeling lingered, reminding me of what could have been, so last night I sat down and got it done. Now I bring to you the absolutely most perfect ringtone ever.

Feel free to preview it using that link, if you really feel that’s necessary, but frankly you should just charge ahead and download the .m4r AAC for instant ringtoniness. If for some reason you’d rather have the audio source and do your own ringtone conversions, you can get the same file as a .m4a AAC or a comfy old .mp3. And for all you completists, there’s a .zip archive of all three formats.

Go. Ring. Enjoy.

Shortly after hanging up, I put in place the temporary home page I’d prepared ahead of time, complete with errors of fact which had grown out of my inability to think clearly about what I knew beyond any doubt was going to happen. The next day, I noticed and corrected the errors, and then realized after a while that my corrections were incorrect and corrected them. Correctly, at last.

When I appended the block of text a day or two later, it was a straight copy-and-paste job, and I was able to avoid introducing errors. I was able to find a perverse solace in that.

To mark this anniversary, I’m publishing the piece I read on stage at Vox Nox 2005, which was the only time it was shared publicly in the last five years. The stunning part, even to me, is that every bit of that piece is the raw, unedited, unaltered truth.

In some ways, I still can’t believe that it’s been five years and that she’s really forever gone, that she’s missed everything that’s happened in my life. In some ways, I can’t accept that she will never know her granddaughter, and that her granddaughter will never know her. And in little ways, I do my best to bridge that yawning chasm with myself and what I learned, what I was taught, over all the years of my life… minus just a bit less than five.

Five years. Five very busy years. Five awful, wonderful, stressful, liberating, irreplaceable years.

I miss you, Mom.

Good for you.

Seriously; no sarcasm or passive-aggressiveness intended. If I thought my reset styles, or really anything I’ve ever published or advocated, was a be-all end-all ultimate solution for every designer and design that’s ever been and could ever be, I’d be long past due for six rounds on the receiving end of a clue-by-four.

Reset styles clearly work for a lot of people, whether as-is or in a modified form. As I say on the reset page, those styles aren’t supposed to be left alone by anyone. They’re a starting point. If a thousand people took them and created a thousand different personalized style sheets, that would be right on the money. But there’s also nothing wrong with taking them and writing your own overrides. If that works for you, then awesome.

For others, reset styles are more of an impediment. That’s only to be expected; we all work in different ways. The key here, and the reason I made the approving comment above, is that you evaluate various tools by thinking about how they relate to the ways you do what you do—and then choose what tools to use, and how, and when. That’s the mark of someone who thinks seriously about their craft and strives to do it better.

I’m not saying that craftsmen/craftswomen are those people who reject the use of common tools, of course. I’m saying that they use the tools that fit them best and modify (or create) tools to best fit them, applying their skills and knowledge of their craft to make those decisions. It’s much the same in the world of programming. You can’t identify a code craftsman by whether or not they use this framework or that language. You can identify them by how they decide which framework or language to use, or not use, in a given situation.

Craftsmanship is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently, as has Joshua Porter. I delivered a keynote address on that very topic just a few days ago in Minneapolis, and my thinking infuses both of the talks I’m giving next week at An Event Apart New Orleans. I’ve started looking harder for evidence of it, both in myself and in what I see online, and I believe striving toward being a craftsman/craftswoman is an important process for anyone who chooses to work in this field.

Because this isn’t a field of straightforward answers and universal solutions. We are often faced with problems that have multiple solutions, none of them perfect. To understand what makes each solution imperfect and to know which of them is the best choice in the situation—that’s knowing your craft. That’s being a craftsman/craftswoman. It’s a never-ending process that is all the more critical precisely because it is never-ending.

So it’s no surprise that we, as a community, keep building and sharing solutions to problems we encounter. Discussions about the merits of those solutions in various situations are also no surprise. Indeed, they’re exactly the opposite: the surest and, to me, most hopeful sign that web design/development continues to mature as a profession, a discipline, and a craft. It’s evidence that we continue to challenge ourselves and each other to advance our skills, to keep learning better and better how better to do what we love so much.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

For those of you not familiar with this topic, the general idea here is that when we look at galaxies outside our own, the light they give off is shifted toward the redder end of the electromagnetic spectrum, which means the wavelengths are getting longer. According to our present understanding of physics, the simplest explanation for this observation that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding from us—thus redshifting the light it gives off, thanks to the Doppler effect. It turns out that the amount of redshifting is directly and linearly proportional to the distance of the galaxy, a ratio named the Hubble constant in honor of Edwin Hubble, the man who first made this observation. (He’s also the namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, of course.)

It seems to me that this explanation either overlooks or glosses over one kind of important point: we don’t see those galaxies as they are right now. In fact, we’re seeing them as they were in the past, and the further out we look, the further back in time we’re looking. If a galaxy is a five million light-years distant, then we see it as it was five million years ago. Double the distance, and double the amount of time involved, which would seem to mean that greater redshifts are as much a product of how far back in time we’re looking as they are distance.

So why is it that distance is regarded as the primary factor here? Why don’t we assume that the universe’s expansion is actually slowing down, given that the closer things are (and therefore the more recent they are), the less quickly they’re receding, whereas the really distant (and therefore much, much older) galaxies were receding more quickly back then?

I’ve no doubt this has been explained one way or another by people way smarter than me, but some Googling yielded no decent results—just about everything I came up with challenged the Hubble constant on various and sundry grounds, not all of them sensical (at least to me). Nothing I found addressed this specifically. Though I figure the explanation is straightforward enough, I don’t seem to be using the right search terms to find it. Anyone got any help for me here?

Notacon straddles, like a Colossus built entirely out of recycled motherboards, backtech chips, and loops of soldering wire, the middle ground between regular conferences and BarCamps (though Notacon predates BarCamp by a couple of years). It’s not free to attend, but it is very inexpensive. What it lacks in slick advertising and corporate sponsors, it makes up ten times over in raw, unfiltered geekiness and fascinating material. This is the kind of event where presenters will hold forth on the depths of digital security, the physics of wireless networking, homebrew chip architecture, the coolness of HyperCard, online society dynamics, and more. There’s a running contest called Anything but Ethernet, where you get bonus points for having one of the links in your network architecture incorporate barbed wire.

Yeah. It’s like that.

The speakers will be as wildly diverse as the audience. The lead engineer for the C64 Direct-to-TV (a C64 in a joystick!); the man behind The Daily WTF; some of the folks putting out 2600 magazine; the woman behind CrochetMe.com; and many more. I’ll be there as well, talking about the bleeding edge of CSS and web design, ripping apart some recent projects of mine at top speed while discussing where I think we’ll be in three years. Plus Drew Curtis of FARK fame will be back, as he always is, this year sponsoring a FARK party. The mind fairly boggles. Boggles!

As you’re no doubt gathering by now, it’s hard to describe Notacon in a quick, concise summary—and that’s a big part of what makes it so awesome. For my contemporaries: see you there! To you future historians: okay, you missed out, but drop everything right now to find out when the next one is and I’ll see you there!

“Sure, sweetie,” I said. “What flavor do you want?”

“Banana.”

“Okay, sure. Go ahead and get a cup from the refrigerator.”

“Banana cake!” She started giggling.

“Wait, I thought you wanted banana yogurt. We don’t have any cake.”

“I know,” she said as she walked into the kitchen, “but I want some banana cake.” Judging from her tone, this was the most painfully obvious fact in the world.

“Um, okay.”

She came back to the table, yogurt cup in hand, and started wrenching back the foil top. With the way clear, she picked up her London cabbie spoon—a gift we brought back from one of our rare trips away from her—and splunked it in.

“This is banana cake,” she said gleefully.

“Wow, you got banana cake? Cool. It’s pretty handy that it comes in a yogurt cup like that!”

She leaned toward me and said, conspiratorially, “I’m just pretending it’s banana cake, but it’s really banana yogurt.”

“Ah, got it.”

“Banana cake!” she chortled once more.

I looked across the table at Kat and said, grimly: “The cake is a lie.”

If you’re curious about CSS Sculptor, I posted in some detail about it when it was first released in August 2007, and there’s of course plenty of enthusiastic copy about it on the WebAssist site.

One thing that’s different about the Expression version as compared to the Dreamweaver version is that it doesn’t have an “Apply” button to apply the input CSS ito the preview window. Instead, changes are instantly reflected in the little preview. It’ll be interesting to see how users react to that, since it could mean that the previewed design shatters as the CSS is updated, and then snaps back together upon further changes. Is that good or bad tool usability? Hard to say; it could scare people into undoing the shatter-change and never pushing forward, but it could also help users more quickly gain a deeper understanding of CSS by seeing how things come apart and then go back together. I guess we’ll find out!

“Oh, look, sweetie! Do you see the deer?”

“Deer!? Where?” I could hear her leaning out of her booster seat to peer through the front windshield. Within moments, the does made it off the pavement and bounded across the half-shoveled sidewalk to vanish into the subdivision. Brake lights winked off and cars sped up to reclaim the precious, precious seconds lost to this sudden intrusion of nature into late-afternoon suburban routines.

“Did you see them?”

“Yeah”, she said distantly, still craning to look. “Where did they go, Daddy?”

“They ran between those two houses”, I said, gesturing toward the driver’s side window as we passed the spot.

“Do they live there in those houses?”

“No, sweetie, deer live in the woods.”

“Then what are they doing in between the houses?”

“They’re probably looking for food in people’s yards.”

Silence fell for a moment. I spared a half-glance toward the back seat and caught a glimpse of her in my peripheral vision, a half-formed vision of intense concentration. In my head, I quickly ran through everything I knew about deer from my years of rural living, preparing for the expected questions about what deer eat and when they sleep and where their houses were.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Why did the deer cross the road?”

But there really is something different about SXSWi. It’s the annual tribal gathering for our field and a couple of related fields, or at least is the annual tribal gathering who aren’t freaky/insane/hardcore enough to hit Burning Man. The default assumption is that you will be in Austin in March, which is actually a symptom of the conditions that led me to opt out this year.

I can sum up why I’m not going in just a few quick bullet points (and if you’re going to attend any panels, get very used to bullet points):

• I can’t concentrate above a certain noise level
• I don’t function well in large crowds
• I don’t drink alcohol
• I’m not single

There is a last selfish reason to go, which is to see a bunch of friends and acquaintances I don’t get to see other places. Only SXSWi has grown so incredibly huge that I didn’t really get to do even that last year. There were people who were there the whole time I was that I never saw, like Matt. I don’t mean that I didn’t have enough time to talk with them, either. I mean that at no point did photons scattered by their bodies land on either of my retinas.

Don’t get me wrong: SXSWi is a huge buzz. You can get a geek high just standing around soaking up the ambient energy, and you never know who you’re going to run into. I once shared a cab with Cory Doctorow and Lisa Rein without, I think, any of us really knowing who the others were until halfway through the trip. The opportunities to meet and greet and get to know people of every kind are just incredible. Like I said, it’s a tribal gathering.

So there is of course a part of me that’s sad I won’t be there, because the great thing about SXSWi is the people, both those I know and those I don’t know yet. There’s a much bigger part of me, though, that’s glad I’ll be spending those five days at home with my family instead of feeling frustrated and lonely in a crowd notably bigger than the town where I grew up.

Anyway, if you’re going and especially if you’re going for the first time, I urge you to pay special attention to the wisdom of Mr. Bag:

Want to meet that OMG OMG OMG blog A-lister?! Fine, just go do it. Nobody, and I mean nobody in this industry is so huge that they can’t be bothered to say hello and shake your hand. And that’s it, done.

To which I’d only say “that OMG OMG OMG blog A-lister” should be replaced with “anyone who interests you”. Blog A-lister, design rockstar, code guru, startup maven, whoever. Just go up and say hi and spend a few minutes chatting. It’s totally cool. In fact, it’s kind of the point.

In case you hadn’t heard about the CWSA yet and are wondering what the group is like, allow me to quote the About page:

The CWSA is an organization grounded on the premise of sharing information in a relaxed atmosphere. We hold monthly gatherings that include presentations on best practices in web development. The gatherings are open to any person interested in web design/development, no matter what their current skill level is.

This isn’t just a social club, though. We’re not just sharing our skills with each other, but are also working to use those skills in the service of helping others. I don’t want to steal any thunder, so if you want to find out the details, you’ll just have to come find out for yourself.

We’ll be having our next meeting in a week, 5 February 2008, in our usual space at Tri-C (and many thanks to the college for giving us a home!). This is definitely a meeting to make, because the topic will be the current and future direction of the association, including deciding the topics on which we want to have presentations and figuring out how best to use the raw talent and enthusiasm of the group for maximal good. If you’re in the area, you should absolutely come check things out. If you know someone in the area, kindly pass the word on to them.

As the engineering staff at Netscape prepared a new release of Mozilla, the browser off which we branched Navigator, those of us in the Technology Evangelism/Developer Support (TEDS) team were testing it against high-ranked and partner sites. On a few of those sites, we discovered that layouts were breaking apart. In one case, it did so quite severely.

It didn’t take much to see that the problem was with sliced images in layout tables. For some reason, on some sites they were getting pushed apart. After a bit of digging, we realized the reason: the Gecko engine had updated its line-layout model to be more compliant with the CSS specification. Now images always sat on the baseline (unless otherwise directed) and the descender space was always preserved.

This was pretty new in browserdom, because every other browser did what browsers had always done: shrink-wrapped table cells to an image if there was no other cell content. The only problem was that behavior was wrong. Fixing the flaws in the CSS implementation in Gecko had broken these sites’ layouts. That is, it broke them in standards mode. In quirks mode, Gecko rolled its behavior back to the old days and did the shrink-wrap thing.

We got in touch with the web team at one of the affected sites, a very prominent social networking site (of a sort) of the day, and explained the situation. We already knew they couldn’t change their DOCTYPE to trigger quirks mode, because that would break other things they were doing. We couldn’t offer them a simple CSS fix like td img {vertical-align: bottom;}, because their whole layout was in tables and that would throw off the placement of all their images, not just the sliced ones. All we could offer was an explanation of the problem and to recommend they class all of their sliced images and use CSS to bottom them out, with assurances that this would cause no change in other browsers.

Their response was, in effect: “No. This is your problem. Every other browser gets this right, and we’re not mucking around in our templates and adding classes all over just because you broke something.”

The truth, of course, was that we were actually fixing something, and every other browser got this wrong. The truth was not relevant to our problem. It seemed we had a choice: we could back out the improvement to our handling of the CSS specification; or we could break the site and all the other sites like it, which at the time were many. Neither was really palatable. And word was we could not ship without fixing this problem, whether by getting the site updated or the browser changed. Those were the options.

Let me reiterate the situation we faced. We:

1. Had improved standards support in the browser, and then
2. Found sites whose layouts broke as a result
3. Whose developers point-blank refused to alter their sites
4. And we had to fix the problem

We couldn’t back out the improvement; it affected all text displayed in the browser and touched too many other things. We couldn’t make the site’s web team change anything, no matter how many times we told them this was part of the advance of web standards and better browser behavior. Two roads diverged in a yellow web, and we could choose neither.

So we found a third way: “almost standards” mode, a companion to the usual modes of quirks and standards. Yes, this is the reason why “almost standards” mode exists. If I remember the internal argument properly, its existence is largely my fault; so to everyone who’s had to implement an “almost standards” mode in a non-Gecko browser in order to mirror what we did, I’m sorry.

We made “almost standards” mode apply to the DOCTYPE found on the offending site—an XHTML DOCTYPE, I should point out. While we were at it, we rolled in IBM’s custom DTD. They were using it make their site validate while doing all kinds of HTML-invalid stuff, and they were experiencing the same layout problem. And lo: a third layout mode was born. All because some sites were badly done and would not update to accommodate our improvements. We did it so as not to break a small (but popular) portion of the web while we advanced our standards support.

(By the way, it was this very same incident that gave birth to the article “Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps“.)

Now take that situation and multiply it by a few orders of magnitude, and you get an idea of what the IE team faces. It’s right where we were at Netscape: caught between our past mistakes and a site’s refusal to accommodate our desire to improve support for open standards.

Some have said that Microsoft is in a unique position to take leadership and spread the news of improved standards and updating old sites to its customers. That’s true. But what happens when a multi-billion dollar partner corporation refuses to update and demands, under the terms of its very large service contract and its very steep penalty clauses, that a new version of IE not break (for whatever value of “break” you like) its corporate intranet, or its public e-commerce site? It only takes one to create a pretty large roadblock.

For all we did in publishing great content to DevEdge, proactively helping sites to update their markup and CSS and JS to work with Gecko (while not breaking in other browsers), and helping guide the improvement of standards support in Gecko, we could not overcome this obstacle. We had to work around it.

Looking back on it now, it’s likely this experience subconsciously predisposed me to eventually accept the version targeting proposal, because in a fairly substantial way, it’s what we did to Mozilla under similar conditions. We just did it in a much more obscure and ultimately fragile manner, tying it to certain DOCTYPEs instead of some more reliable anchor. If we could have given that site (all those sites) an easy way to say “render like Mozilla 0.9″ (or whatever) at the top of every page, or in the server headers, they might have taken it.

But had we offered and they refused, putting us back to the choice of backing out the improvements or changing the browser, would we have set things up to default to the specific, known version of Mozilla instead of the latest and greatest? The idealist in me likes to think not. The pragmatist in me nods yes. What else could we have done in that circumstance? Shipped a browser that broke a top-ten site on the theory that once it was in the wild, they’d acquiesce? Even knowing that this would noticeably and, in a few cases, seriously degrade the browsing experience for our users? No. We’d have shipped without the CSS improvement, or we’d have put in the targeting with the wrong default. We didn’t have version targeting, but we still made the same choice, only we hinged it on the DOCTYPE.

A short-term fix for a short-term problem: yes. Yet had we not done it, how long would Netscape/Mozilla’s standards support have suffered, waiting for the day that we could add that improvement back in without breaking too many sites that too many people would notice? Years, possibly. So we put in a badly implemented type of version targeting, which allowed us to improve our standards support more quickly than we otherwise would have, and it has been with us for the more than half a decade since.

So maybe I’m more sympathetic to the IE predicament and their proposed solution because I’ve been there and done it already. Not to nearly the same degree, but the dilemma seemed no less daunting for all the difference in scale. It’s something worth keeping in mind while evaluating what I’ve said on this topic, and whatever I will say in the future.

I know there will be many people who disagree with my take on version targeting. As did I, at first. Originally I wasn’t even going to be part of this ALA issue but as I argued with Aaron about it on the ALA editorial board and started to shift my perspective, we realized that having someone document that thinking process would be valuable. So I did.

Already I’ve seen a lot of negative reactions to the idea, and they remind me of my initial reactions. That’s not to say that my views are more advanced, nor that everyone will eventually come to the same way of thinking. It’s entirely possible that after due rational consideration, many people will come to the conclusion exactly opposite my own. I still thought it might be useful to share my thoughts on the matter as someone who has been concerned about browser compatibility and standards advancement for a very long time now.

Comments are closed here, but discussion is open at ALA.

Update: I wanted to point to some other material about this topic. I’ll probably keep updating this as time goes on.

• Compatibility and IE8 — a post by Chris Wilson about the challenges faced by browsers when advancing standards, and the particular situation experienced in the IE7 deployment. You don’t have to agree with the conclusions, but understanding the problem is important.

• The versioning switch is not a browser detect — this is vitally important to any hope of useful debate on this topic. I tried to clearly make the same point in my ALA article, but reiteration doesn’t hurt.

• Broken — Jeremy objects to the default behavior. I actually agree with him, and made that case at length with a member of the IE team. I couldn’t make what I wanted square with their requirements, and came to see that I couldn’t, and was deeply saddened by it. I sincerely hope that Jeremy, or indeed anyone, can succeed where I failed.

• That Red-headed Monster Next to You? Yeah, that’s Anger — no, I didn’t link this because of the hair-color reference. I’ve been deeply disheartened by the overall tenor of the reaction. Disagreement is fine, in fact welcomed; but the level of vitriol, name-calling, and outright personal attacks came as a rude and unwelcome surprise.

I recently came upon a way to while away the lonely hours of a long plane flight and thought I’d share. Two words: commentary track. More specifically, listening to the commentary track (or tracks) of a movie you’ve already seen and enjoyed.

How is this better than just watching a movie? Well, because you’ve seen the movie, you don’t really need to watch it: you can just listen to the commentary. Thus, you can crank your laptop’s screen brightness down to “off”, thus saving some battery power. Which you’ll need, thanks to the power required to drive the DVD. If the commenter says, “Ooo, look here at this bit of the screen”, you just pip the brightness up enough to see what’s going on, and then crank it back down after.

Of course you can rip the movie with the commentary audio track to your hard drive to save the battery even more. Also, if you’re willing to live without visual reference, you can rip the audio track itself and listen on an iPod. But honestly, how many of us will go to that level of effort? It’s a lot easier to bring along a single DVD and pop it into the laptop. I also like this approach because plane flights are one of the few times when I have enough enforced downtime to get through a whole commentary.

Of course, if you’re lucky enough to be on one of the newer planes with grounded power outlets, your power worries are moot. Still, when you have five or six hours ahead of you, a good commentary track or three is a good way to make the time pass more quickly.

In the end, the web form of this is pretty simple, even though it wasn’t simple to produce. It’s just a series of images, one per year. I have in mind a way to do it without the images, which would be nice, as that way the information would be accessible to the blind. Right now, all the images just have empty alt values, I’m sorry to say. Besides which, creating the same timeline out of structured content would be a fun challenge, albeit one I really don’t have the time to tackle right now.

A few notes:

• Internet Explorer has two lines, one for Windows and the other for Macintosh. I did this because their release schedules often had little or nothing to do with each other. The other browsers represented typically release cross-platform on or about the same day, and so each got a single line.

• The temporal resolution is one month. In other words: no, I didn’t attempt to place the vertical connector bars so they correspond to the specific day of the month a browser was released. In many cases, I don’t have that information—just the month and year of release.

• I was interested to discover that the “quietest” years in the timeline were 1999, 2002, and 2004 1999 and 2002. (My earlier belief that 2004 was quiet was due to my having the wrong year for the release of Netscape 7.2. Um, whoops.)

• Because the timeline was created for a session about CSS, the timeline starts in 1996 and doesn’t include pre-CSS browser versions. I may extend it backward at some point, although that introduces interesting questions like whether or not to include Mosaic, Viola, Cello, and so forth; and whether to extend it all the way back to 1989.

• Yes, I’m missing browsers such as Konqueror and iCab, not to mention the whole forest of Gecko spin-offs like Camino and Flock. Again, there’s the question of which browsers to include and which to omit. This was dictated partly by perceived market share, but mostly by good old-fashioned laziness.

I’ll do my best to address any suggestions for improvement, though this is kind of a side project and so commands a comparatively small share of my attention. Still, even if it never changes again, I’m happy that it’s finally out into the world.

Back in April of 2001, I was preparing to start work at Netscape. I’d be working from home, so I needed high-speed access, and DSL was my best option. Eventually, I decided on Earthlink. It took a bit of effort, as there were some physical problems along the line to my house, but they got worked out and once the line was provisioned (whatever that means), I was up and running. Nice speed, too.

So last week, I decided to find out how my rate—unchanged since I started almost seven years ago—stacked up to current rates. It turns out I was a bit high, paying $49.95 a month for a service that would cost a new customer $34.95 a month, once their introductory monthly rates lapsed. And I noticed that doubling my speed should cost $39.95 a month.

So I called up Earthlink to get my rates (both data speed and monthly fee) adjusted. Guess what happened? Yep: roadblocks. First I was told that those were rates for new customers. I pushed back, and was told that because I’d been a customer for so long, they were willing to adjust my rate to $39.95. For the doubled speed? Oh, no, for my existing speed. If I wanted to go to the higher rate, it would be $54.95 a month.

My pointing out that this was grossly out of line with their current rates had no effect. I assured them that I was more than willing to skip the introductory rates and just go to the base rates. Didn’t help. I could pay $39.95 a month for a service that should cost $5 less, or upgrade to the better service at a rate $25 higher than it should be.

Annoyed, I hung up and resolved to take my business elsewhere, as I’d warned them would be likely. I did some digging and discovered that AT&T/Yahoo! DSL would cost $34.99 a month for twice the data rate I’d been getting at Earthlink with no term requirements—I’m not locked into it by an initial contract. I like that. I called them to find out how long it would take, and found out that DSL service has come a long way in seven years. They provisioned the line remotely in three days, not the three weeks it took local technicians back in ‘01.

So I’m up and running at 6M/768k in three days with no fuss and no term obligations, and best of all, my monthly cost has dropped $15.

Of course, when I called up Earthlink to cancel, they were suddenly able to offer me the rates I’d asked for before, plus they’d even throw in a month for free. Too late, I told them. I’d already tried and failed to get the regular current rates, and I’d invested the time and energy to find an alternative. I wasn’t going to walk away from that just because they had belatedly decided to play fair.

It still amazes me that companies haven’t figured out that customers will make tracks if they’re treated badly. And given the ease with which service can be established these days, if my new provider causes me trouble… well, I can always go elsewhere. Or even go back.