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 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!!!!

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 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 then working intensely on make-shift, plus travelling to austria, the uk, serbia & italy) – 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!