The more things change . . .

So, as some of you may know, last year I registered a domain name, poetical.biz. Which I quite like, I thought it was pretty cool. I just dialed until I found a domain including some form of the word "poet" (to be frank, "poetry" was the bait I used), until I found a domain name that wasn't spoken for, bought it for $9.95, and spent a week wrestling with Dreamweaver until I had the thing in some semblence of order, and launched it. I used to have a link to it here, over on the right.

Click on it now, and it leads you to my old fashioned, hand-cranked, lead-based Geocities page. (Not that I am proud of the stone-aginess of my techno-fab.) I concluded that I really was so much more comfortable writing my HTML by hand and diddling with the Geocities file manager than I was using Dreamweaver (which my wife swears by as much as I swear at). This was a casual enough conclusion, meriting no real action, aside from announcing it on the Geocities page, which no one in the known world would have noticed at any rate.

Then the administrating company sent a note indicating that it was time to decide if I wanted to keep it-- another payment of $9.95, due immediately-- and on clicking on the link to my very own site, found they had blanked the content and filled poetical.biz with ads for their own services. On the Geocities page I referred to this as "extortion," so, in the service of variety, I will herein call it, er, um, hmmm . . . "blackmail."

So I did the two petty things required to reflect my dissapointment and disgust with the internet service provider, which were to change the link here and in my e-mail signature. Hurray and huzzah.

In other news, free Burma, dammit. I am in no way what you'd call an activist, but, for the love of God, something's gotta be done.