Every Microsoft product since like Windows 95, or one of the other releases in the stone age, has been accompanied by a 25 alphanumeric code (36^25 = 8.08281277 x 10^38) and after seeing somewhere around 200 product keys and memorizing at least 2 XP volume license keys (including FCKGW) I keep thinking that I see patterns. Maybe that’s a sign that i need to stop doing IT work, but I feel like John Nash (the insanity part, not the genius part) in A Beautiful Mind.
August 8, 2006
Microsoft Brain Professional 2003
It’s like Penny-Arcade, except they have readers
Today’s Penny-Arcade, and I’m using the phrase ‘today’ in the sense that i haven’t slept yet, discussed the nefariousness of monthly recurring charges that sneak up on you without your knowledge or more than your tacit consent. I just discovered that I am currently in such a system, namely Yahoo music. I seem to recall blogging about that recently (very recently for my blogging frequency) and how much I love the system. I still do, I think I’m in the process of downloading an amount of music that can really only be described as obscene.
When I started with the service that lets me engage in unhealthy aural gorging (self referential blog linking is a sign of a corrupt consciousness) I was incredibly satisfied paying $6.99/month for the music, and at the time told anybody who would listen that I would gladly pay $25/month for a service that would let me download whatever I want and put it on my iPod. I’m 2 mp3 players later (I’ve got a Dell DJ that was apparently fully working at the beginning of the summer, if anybody is interested) and now I’m kinda upset that if I want to keep using my music with my portable device it will cost me $9.99/month. I am of course their willing puppet, as Lindsay pointed out to me that any headphones purchase I may consider should take into account that they will live on my neck. Worse than the 3 dollars/month that I’ll gladly pay until I’m wormfood is that they decided to just switch me to the monthly billing instead of letting me renew annually. I guess I can’t really be too angry about that though, since I’m rather dissatisfied with the billing methods of the 2 services I do pay for annually (my web hosting and covenant eyes, the former who I keep meaning to cancel, the latter who weren’t able to successfully figure out my credit card expiration).