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So, I was getting a bit tired of how the old thing was pulling together and tossed this up. I think it's a bit brighter and maybe a bit easier to navigate around. At the very least, it's a lighter download, so the site should appear up even faster.

What the hell is up with companies these days? They have basically dumped customer as something that is needed to keep customers around and guess what, we accept it!       This has all been made of so clear as I am dealing with a glitch in my DSL connection. Oh yes, my DSL connection. My wonderful, stupid DSL connection. This great, high-speed connection to the world of information that seems to keep getting taken offline for some reason or another. Well, it's down again today. Not really a big surprise after all, since someone in my building got their line shut off, so hey, why not take out this other one as well. God damned SBC! While I don't know for sure that it's them, since it could very well be my provider, Speakeasy, I'm pretty sure that one of their flunkies has hosed me again.       The best part in all of this is that I'm the one getting screwed, because I don't have a line that I'm paying $100 a month for and if for some reason, someone decides to, I get billed $200 for them to come out and fix their problem!       Of course, I don't expect to get billed, since I've run line tests as far down the phone system in my building as I can, to find that there is, as I expected no problem. I don't know where the problem is, but I do know that it's not mine and yet, it is going to take four days for them to come out! Four days! It's a good thing that I'm not an actual business and am not trying to do consulting work anymore, or I'd be out a lot of money. Oh yes, the last fun part in all this is that they expect me to be at home when the service tech comes out, which is grand, since they expect me to be at home, on a weekday to wait for someone that may or may not show up. It's such a load of crap! I think we should figure out some way to reverse bill for all this garbage, since it costs my time to deal with it. Argh!

Everyone seems to want to a chunk of the business that is managing all the contacts that people tend to keep these days.       You got your ACT, your Palm, your Pocket PC, your Entourage Address Book, your Outlook Address Book, your Netscape Address Book, your Mozilla Address Book, your Now-up-to-Date, your Lotus Notes, your Microsoft Exchange, your oh god knows what else. This is a list that goes on and on. To add to the troubles, there seems to be a new piece of software made by someone that comes and then some other piece of software that goes. It's a tough deal, since people start to rely on all these things to keep track of all these people that they apparently don't call that often, since they have to have a record of them in this system.       One of the biggest frustrations if probably ACT, since there were a lot of Apple users who used this heavily during its OS 9 incarnation and now there is no OS X version of the system, which is problematic to say the least. And think, that's a big software manufacturer that did that. You can only imagine what some small thing like this Now-up-to-Date system that appeared around my system has been doing and where it may possibly go.       I don't know if there is an explicitly good way to go about keeping track of all these things, but I think the best decision is to go Open Source, since A.) It's free! B.) There's usually a team of people that are working on it. C.) They're usually cross-platform and work independently of any one specific operating system.       Ultimately Open Source solutions may seem self-defeating, but because they're not working in one specific system or some proprietary database, you can modify the hell out of them and upgrade them as you may need to. So, what are some suggestions for this? Well, two of the most popular and practical ones that I've found have been egroupware and egs. You should check them out and see what you think. Their forums (at least as of the time of this writing) are pretty active and they're well built. Of course, the added fact that they're free certainly doesn't hurt in the least as well.