{"id":416,"date":"2010-12-10T20:07:09","date_gmt":"2010-12-10T20:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/?p=416"},"modified":"2023-04-12T04:30:04","modified_gmt":"2023-04-12T04:30:04","slug":"backing-away-slowly-from-the-keyboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/backing-away-slowly-from-the-keyboard\/","title":{"rendered":"backing away slowly from the keyboard"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

it’s snowing really heavily; andy won’t be happy, as today we’re driving to frankfurt, but i can’t help but be excited by snow’s magic. i’m also excited that i’m going to have 3 whole days afk, offline, work-free, as i really need it!

recently i’ve had cause to be dissatisfied with two of the online businesses i deal with. i’m in the process of closing my paypal account – or should i say, TRYING to close it – after running into a stupid security measure which prevented me from being able to access the account. 10 days of circular emails (their advice to me constantly beginning with “log into your account and … ” & my responses of “i cannot log in to my account because …”) was ridiculous & frustrating, then i learned that paypal has arbitrarily decided that wikileaks<\/a> is illegal & closed their account. i happen to think that wikileaks is providing a vital service to the people so i have no desire to work with a company that acts in such a way. however, i’ve discovered that closing a paypal account is far from simple! excuse me, but why should i have to provide proof of address in order to close my account? (in fact i have moved twice since i opened the account so any “proof” i can provide now is not going to validate anything!). why should i have to change my password & update security questions when i just want to CLOSE THE ACCOUNT??? AARRGGHH!!!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"make-shift,<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

the other thing that happened last week was that discountdomainregistry.com – a domain registration service that i’ve used for more than 10 years without problem – went offline & for several days was completely uncontactable. their site was down, emails bouncing, & i could find no physical address or phone number for them anywhere. i still have not received a proper explanation (let alone apology) for what happened, but it appears that they were redesigning their site & something went majorly wrong. the problem that it caused for me was that i had a number of domains that were forwarding to other urls, & all of these stopped working. most importantly, one was make-shift.net<\/a> – a networked performance that we premiered on sunday. we needed the web site to work as it was from there that the online audience could enter the interface, & we also needed the email address to work so that people could send us things after the show.

since we had no idea what had happened with the company & whether or not it would start working again in time for the show, we had to urgently change links everywhere & make sure that emails going out about the performance had the actual url, not the domain name – which looks less professional & is less memorable. however by sunday it was all working again properly. there is always some weird tech problem that comes out of the blue in the week before a show, & the good thing about this problem was that it was actually nothing to do with the performance technology; the show itself ran beautifully but now i must think about whether to change to a more reliable domain registry …

so after 3 months going from one thing to another – (the 101010 UpStage Festival<\/a> then working intensely on make-shift<\/a>, plus travelling to austria<\/a>, the uk, serbia<\/a> & italy<\/a>) – with no breaks & lots of technical dramas to deal with, i’m now very happily backing away from the keyboard to have a computer-free weekend of socialising & relaxing in frankfurt – as long as the snow will let us get there! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

it’s snowing really heavily; andy won’t be happy, as today we’re driving to frankfurt, but i can’t help but be excited by snow’s magic. i’mRead More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1324,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions\/1324"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}