The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.

The walls are empty. The bookshelves have been disassembled, and the books packed into boxes. Addresses on magazine subscriptions and credit cards, and with HR from my old job have all been changed. In five days, I will be leaving San Francisco, and moving to Eugene, Oregon, to start on yet another new career, which is already keeping me busy. I'll miss The City, but can't wait to get to Eugene, my tiny room in a big house, upstairs from the office, with three roommates, four cats, and one tiny dog.

Oh, yeah, and I found this in rhonan's journal, and had to share.

A few years ago, I sang this song in the filk room at Orycon, replacing the last line with "These were the only ones of which the news had come to Harvard, but since Tom Lehrer wrote this song lawrenciumrutherfordiumdubniumseaborgiumbohriumandhassium have been discovered."

God DAMN yahoo sucks.

I have had a yahoo email address for about three years now, and never a complaint. Until now. I just got off the phone, after spending three hours being given the runaround, and talking to a particularly clueless account rep on chat.

Six months ago, I had the misfortune to order DSL service through SBC. Since I'm now moving to Oregon, where they don't have SBC, I am not taking my service with me. Unfortunately, and without telling me, they merged my sbc email, which I get through the DSL service, with my yahoo ID. So now that I am canceling my SBC service, they are also canceling my yahoo email. So, seven phone calls later, I find I can keep my yahoo email, but only if I pay them $120/year ($9.95/month). I asked them that since the service I will now be getting is the service they advertise for $29.99/year, how come I couldn't get that price. That's only for new accounts, apparently. Since I had SBC DSL for a while, now I have to pay the extra special price if I want to keep my account at all. I was told that it was because of the extra features provided by the DSL account. When I tried to get the information about what extra features I'm getting now for my $120/year, they put me on hold for twenty minutes ("penalty hold" as we used to call it when I worked customer service), and came back with the list read straight off of the web site, which I still had up. So I pointed out that everybody else gets those features for $29.99 a month, I was told I couldn't "because of the service agreement".

So now I'm going to have to change my email address, and I have no idea what the implications of that for my yahoo messenger, which I use to communicate to everybody, including the GWoB board of directors, or for the yahoo groups that I administer, or the ones I'm on.

This majorly sucks big time, but there's no way in hell I'm paying these bastards $120 every year just because they think they can get it.