Some stuff & maybe a few cohensive thoughts

'Follow the rain home'

Just some stuff that may or may not be worrying me. The above art had nothing to do with anything I said below. I just happened to redo it and I thought I share it.

01 | Email subscriptions for this blog is... still unknown. I still can't decide which service to use so I decided to not decide, at least for now.
    I was going to go with mailchimp but they needed a mailing/physical address for reasons I can't understand. I'm not comfortable sharing my address with a company or any company that I might not like it enough to keep using it. It's always a pain to have your account deleted and I had a lot frustrated experiences with that.
    If you have email subscription for your blog, which service did you use? Do share.

02 | One of these days, I might switch to Wordpress or some other blogging format because these days  I find Blogger to be less friendly, less likable and more likely to frustrate me. Here are things that are currently on my 'stop annoying me' list:
    (a) Why did they removed the edit tools for the gadgets on a blog's front end? I don't know but I'm certain it's a dumb move. Now whenever I want to edit one of the gadgets I have to go to the Dashboard and under Layout. It's not a terribly hard thing to do but why did this change this at all? What was the point?
    (b) Don't know if it's just some glitch or the fact that google had updated FeedBurner and shut down email subscriptions for all blogs that makes some blog link list on people's sidebar not updating or not showing the recent post. I have noticed a few blogs where they have my blog on their link list and it's not showing any updates. Technically, I started this blog after July so it may had an effect, I don't know. I just thought I bring it up to see if anyone's else blog is like that.
    (c) Why aren't we allow to turn off autosave? Technically, autosave is good because it saves the post we are working on but sometimes it's bad. Last week, I lost an entire post because autosave saved a blank post before I could close the post. This rarely happened to me but when it does, it usually happened when I have time constrain or when I'm at the most annoyed.

03 | Finally Strand Books "announced" the winner to the tote bag design which I had entered in July. I put quotes on the word announced because as much as I tried to find out who the winner was after the contest is over, there wasn't any type of notice on any of their social media. Only this month, I found out who the winner is in an subscription email (I subscribe to their newsletter or whatever they are called these days.)
    The winning illustration is by Luke Wohlgemuth. (I thought one of the rules was to use four Pantone colors but clearly this seems like they had used full colors which is a completely different process but whatever, I guess they can just change the rules.) Wohlgemuth's art does have charm but it's not what I would have chosen. I guess I have different taste than most people or maybe I have no clue what people likes. So what do you think of this art? Worthy of being printed on a tote bag that one carries around?

Photo source: Luke Wohlgemuth

04 | Passwords are annoying sometimes. One week, (I forgot which week but I'm pretty sure it wasn't yesterday), I forgot my computer's password and I sort of freaked out. I had set my computer to start without having to sign in so I never had to use my password. So one day, when I needed to use it, I completely blanked out.
    I searched for ways to recover the password and there are ways but they all seemed a bit complicated. Then I look through my various accounts and one of them reminded me of the password. So I suppose I should set my computer so that I have to sign in so that I can use the password every day so that I can remember it, right? Did I do that? No. Because it's a hassle to sign in and because I shut my computer down every time I used it and not because I want to save energy (which it kind of does), I just know if my computer is on all the time, I would be using it all the time.
    I really wish there are no such thing as passwords for gadgets - every single gadget you own (computers, phones, etc.) has password protection - yes, it's good that it has it but it's bad for those of us who doesn't even use it. Plus, if someone stole your phone, for example, I'm pretty certain they can get pass the password without any problems. So what these passwords protection is mostly used for is against their users.

05 | I'm hoping to finish The Cursed Princess and the Land of Happiness before the end of the year. I still would like readers to choose one of the options or give their opinion/feedback to continue the story. I've already completed the second part which means you now have the choice to choose what happens in the third part. It really is more fun if more people are participating. Here's the link to the two parts so far.

How is your September going?