In Which I Am Thwarted by Computers

1) I downloaded the demo version of Corel's Grafigo program, which a colleague really likes on his tablet, and earlier this week, I spent a short time playing around with it. A very short time, because there are controls on the top menu bar that simply disappear when you have the tablet in portrait mode-- they're off the screen to the right. These include "Settings" and "Help," making the program significantly less useful. I won't be buying that.

2) A few days ago, I tried to buy a bunch of new music at iTunes. After successfully adding two or three albums to the shopping cart, it suddenly decided that it could no longer reach the iTunes store, and everything went "poof."

3) Last night, I managed to get everything I wanted into the iTunes cart, and when I hit "Buy Cart," it popped up an error dialogue saying "Items in your cart have changed," and telling me to check the prices and hit "Buy Cart." Whereupon it popped up an error dialogue saying "Items in your cart have changed." Etc.

This has happened to me before, and the only solution is to delete everything, and start over. Having already killed a bunch of time tracking everything down, I saud "screw this," and went to bed.

4) Annoyed at iTunes, I decided to buy the stuff from Amazon's download store instead, at least those albums they had from the stuff I tried to buy last night (about 2/3rds of what I remember of the order). they insist on treating each individual album as a separate transaction, requiring me to select a credit card and billing address from a long list of expired cards and defunct addresses every time.

This is, no doubt, an incorrectly set cookie or a conflict with Firefox, but I'm taking it as an omen, and turning off the computer before I get to a number 5), which would undoubtedly be "Playing Scrabulous on Facebook somehow wiped out my hard drive..."