Bad Login Page of the Week - Emusic

I've been meaning to start posting when I find bad login pages. They annoy the hell out of me. I understand that logging on is part of the process of creating the whole personalised, big love-in feeling that comes with returning to a site but there are times when it feels like the site just doesn't want to let me in.

Emusic is an example of where it has gone wrong but could easily be set right. When I visit emusic it remembers who I am - presumably through a cookie - and so gives me recommendations. Overall it's a pretty good service and they have some excellent music. But, whenever I "do" something, such as bookmark an album for later download or even make a purchase, I am taken to the log-on screen again. OK, fair enough, I don't mind validating that I want to make the purchase. Firefox remembers my username and password form me so all I should have to do is click on the log-on button or, more likely, press the enter key and sail straight through.

Except that the page is poorly designed. Instead of recognising that I already have an account, and that it even knows who I am, it pre-selects the "create account" option forcing me to click two things in thwo different locations. Then it follows it up by completely forgetting what I wanted to do, forcing me to do it again.

It's idiotic.

It's bad design.

A list of my emusic purchases

Live in Manchester and Dublin - Rodrigo y Gabriela
Violin Concerto/Company - Philip Glass - Adele Anthony
Select Classical Chinese Music - Various
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians - Grand Valley State University
Shostakovich Symphony No 5 - LSO
Best of John Lee Hooker -
Soul Men - Sam and Dave
Chinese Dub - Jah Wobble
Bad Medicine EP - Liz Green
Joys of Spring - John Fairhurst
Steve Reich: Different Trains - David Robertson
Howls, Raps and Roars - Allen Ginsberg
Sound unbound - DJ Spooky
Beethoven Violin Concerto - Isabelle Faust

Icy canal

Test

Nano finish

Despite a higher than average intrusion of real life I managed to finish my novel for Nanowrimo this year. It was a close thing though. I found myself ten thousand words (one fifth of the target!) behind come yesterday morning. I started by spending some time planning that last ten thousand words and then got stuck in. I wrote six and a half of them yesterday, leaving me with a smaller target to hit today. I kind of went for it because I knew I would be out for this afternoon at my parents to see Debbie and family. And it paid off.

But is it any good? Well, probably not. It's quite a different story to ones I've been writing recently. It's not science fiction, but more of a straight, literary novel set in China in the early 20th Century. A time and place that I still find fascinating, and probably stranger than anything I could dream up for SF, it gave me a historical structure that always meant I could find some inspiration. The main pattern of the story came to me pretty much fully formed and I've mostly stuck to it. Despite deviations here, and the odd surprise, it's pretty much the story I had in my head and, looking back now I think that yes, it is good. Not in a letting anyone else read it kind of way, just yet. At the moment it's more like a pre-viz, or storyboard, for a movie. All the pieces are there, sketched out, but the actual film is yet to be shot. That's the next stage. Move it from the flat, cartoony writing that describes what I want it to be into the thing that it actually is. I'm looking forward to it. But for now it's time to read that Hellboy comic I treated myself to yesterday.

(b)ankers

From Doonesbury -

"Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, Race to the Moon, S&L Crisis, Korean War, The New Deal, Invasion of Iraq, Vietnam War, NASA."
-- list of government expenditures which, combined, are still less than the current bailout

We could probably end poverty and go to Mars if we closed all the banks. Hmmm...

Nanowrimo begins

The nice thing about starting on the weekend is that you have plenty of time to do all those things you really have to do before settling down to write a novel. Things like installing a new, untested operating system on the laptop you need to use to write on, catching up on Facebook and emails, trying out the new features of your new operating system and playing with your colour scheme. Downloading some new desktop backgrounds for your PC. Reading about the Royal Australian Navy because it's the Wikipedia article of the day. Still, it has been a successful weekend and I'm even a little ahead. Back to work tomorrow but hopefully I can just keep plugging away at it in the evenings and get to next weekend with a reasonable word count. My mistake last year, when I failed to get much past the second week, was having days where I simply did not write. While that was not entirely my fault once you get behind it is a big challenge to catch up again.

Long time

Took a long break from doing my writing blog but finally broke the dry spell tonight with a silly new thing. Almost tempted to write about the spider from my dream last night but managed to avoid it. It was about a foot across, with legs like gnarled tree branches and strange, bright orange nodules on it's underside that excreted some kind of pus when it launched itself with a thud against the window I was standing next too. But this is much nicer.