Bad news? Maybe...

partly_bouncy sent me a link last evening, saying that it might affect me directly. Boy, was she right! The link is here, and the gist of it is that Microsoft will be shedding their MSN Groups as of February, 2009. They'll be launching a new "social networking" service called Windows Live Groups in November, but existing MSN Groups won't be segued over to the shiny new service, they'll be sent to this other one, called Multiply.

Now, I've seen this happen before. Back in 2005, they sent all their groups that were listed as "adult" or "18+" off to World Groups - a situation that both pleased me and displeased me. Pleased me because it meant that the groups started by Loony Lucie the plagiarist were sent off to the gulag, and displeased me because I had to go to World Groups to keep an eye on her from time to time. (I did not like them!)

Now they want to send everyone else off.

I'm of two minds about the situation. I haven't been happy with MSN Groups for a while now. The storage space they allot you (unless you are an MSN subscriber) is abysmal; I paid $20-$30 last year to have enough for the two groups I run. The HTML coding allowed is limited, and though I was able to work with it, there was always more I wanted to do. The upshot of it is that I've been seriously thinking about getting my own domain and webspace and creating my own site. It would be a stiff learning curve, but I think I'd like the challenge.

And truthfully, I haven't been too impressed with what Multiply (or Google Groups, or Yahoo Groups, or some of the other services I've looked at) have to offer. I've seen a screenshot for the new Windows Live Groups and haven't been impressed with that, either. So, I might find myself with a lot of HTML coded pages and nowhere to put them.

Well, I still have time to see what's what-- the utility for moving the site over isn't ready yet. I'll probably have a better idea of where to go once I do some more exploring.

This would have to happen at the roughest time of the year, financially... sigh.

But it all makes me very, very glad that we moved IR:TNP off to its own site, even with all the problems we had with the forum.

At last! I think the inet is fixed....

We've been having increasing "connectivity" problems since we got our router. It started off slow, but over the past few weeks, it has seemed like we've been online for a few minutes before being cut off. I talked with the router people yesterday (call center in India!) and they've tested the router and found it fine. I talked with ATT, and the nice lady there helped us out (resulting in a glorious evening where we weren't cut off once!). But this morning, we were back to the same old, same old, worse than before. I even went to the point of shutting everything down and rebooting, checking all the connections to see that they were okay.

So, it was back to the router people, who told me to try something different. When that didn't help, it was back to ATT. And this time I got a really sharp gal named Connie (Hi, Connie!). Connie helped me "bridge" the modem with the router. Now, why didn't anyone else think of this before? There was one thing happening that puzzled her, and it was that the DSL synch kept going down. She couldn't figure that out, but having the router and the modem bridged was good.

Still, after I got off the phone with her, I kept having those odd drop off where the DSL synch quit for a few seconds. By the time I managed to navigate through ATT's phone maze, it would be back up, and in good old Murphy's law fashion, stayed up while I talked on the phone. Finally, I got a guy named Corey. He tested the line, and at least once during his testing, the DSL Synch went down. So, this enabled him to send the problem to a higher level of tech. And they put our line on a different "profile" (whatever that means) so the synch wouldn't go down again.

It's been about an hour or so, and things have been functioning the way they should... knock on wood. I hope they stay this way, but I'm not holding my breath.