I got off the Saint John's Wort before my appointment so I could "detox" and not suffer any interactions that I've read about. (Gurugrrl and I can really tell the difference in my mood; thank goodness she loves me and we are generally understanding of each other's moods.) I got up and made the trek to Angleton, walking in about five minutes before my appointment.

The receptionist in the empty (!) waiting room looked at me like I had a third eye on my forehead.

"May I help you?" she asked, obviously confused as to why I was there.

"Uh, yeah. I have an appointment with Dr. Shrinker at ten."

"Dr. Shrinker doesn't come in on Tuesday, he comes in on Thursday," she said and kept staring at me.

Uhhhh. Okay. That's not what they told me in Alvin. They even made the appointment for me. I was there when they did it. I just stared back, and handed her the appointment card.

She looked at the card and sighed, "okay, take a seat, we'll be right with you."

I filled out a line on the sign-in sheet to give her the idea that yes, I really was serious about seeing somebody, I wasn't here to just give her a hard time, put my pen back in my pocket and sat down wondering why Brazoria county is so ass-backwards. Obviously they weren't expecting anybody else that day, because the last appointment listed was at 9:15 AM. The receptionist wandered off behind a partition.

Before too long she came back. "Sir? I'm sorry, but Dr. Shrinker doesn't come in on Tuesdays anymore, he comes in on Thursdays. They were supposed to call you from the other center to let you know, and we never heard from you, so we thought you didn't want to come in."

"Nobody called me." I don't care who did or didn't do what, I just want to help. Is this unreasonable?

She handed me a new card. Now I have to go back on the afternoon of January sixth. Anybody willing to lay odds on if I get to see somebody then or not?

I've been using Netscape Navigator since version 1.1, when I threw over Mosaic running on X-Windows for it. I have bookmarks from as far back as 1992 or '93 in my current bookmarks file. I like Netscape's interface a Hell of a lot more than Internet Exploder, and while Opera is great and lean and standards-compliant, isn't quite up to the job of everyday surfing if you want to see the widest variety of content.

I want to keep using Netscape, but it... well, okay, it sucks now.

I had been using Netscape 4.61 until recently after upgrading from 4.04 (404 being a humorous version number for a web browser, after all), but I'd been getting strangeness with it under Windows 98. Basically, sometimes I'd try to click links, and Netscape would sit there, saying "Finding ..." and spinning. I'd close the window, and then do a three-fingered salute and apparently some of the background threads of Netscape would still be running as a zombie, because "Netscape" would still be in the process list. I'd kill it, run Netscape again, and everything was okay. Well, for a while, anyway, when it would happen again.

Even more fun is sometimes you'd be browsing along, and quit using Netscape, and after sitting there a while, not loading any content at all, it'd up and crash in kernel32.exe. I think it was actually a conflict with ICQ and/or AOL Instant Messenger (generally both of these are running when Netscape would do this, so I figure it's one or the other, or a conglomeration of both (maybe it's a conflict in the oh-so-stable implementation of sockets in Windows)); you'd think since AOL owns all of these programs and I have the latest versions, it'd be okay with them.

So, like the lemming I am, I downloaded Netscape 4.7 and threw myself off the cliff in hopes that the rocks below were soft down pillows.

I guess they were, but soaked in water, flash-frozen and sharpened to razor edges.

First, being on a dialup connection, I thought I'd be best off trying to download using Smart Update, you know, download just the binaries and libraries that you need.

Uh, yeah.

First, Smart Update told me that I needed to download eleven megs of files. Fun! Sure, go for it. I click on the update for Netscape Navigator and walk away from Gillian for about an hour to go make some pasta sauce.

I come back to Gillian, and she's complaining that the file they sent her wasn't a jar (Java archive) file.

Thanks, guys. Glad I don't pay per-minute or per-bit.

I'm not thinking, obviously, because I decided to download the full package instead, and just be done with it. But, oh, not from Netscape directly. Their FTP site is always full.

After eighteen and a half megs I got the full package and installed it without a hitch, as always. It ran fine, and I didn't find any of the old problems I'd been having.

Well, the first time, anyway.

The next time I rebooted and tried to run Netscape, I got some error in fulldown.dll. Always.

How much do you think Microsoft is bribing AOL to cripple Netscape? C'mon, Mozilla!

Anyway, I went to deja.com and discovered I should just rename fulldown.dll so it doesn't load on startup of the browser, so all is working now. What'd I get for my trouble?

• Netscape loads slightly faster. That's actually pretty nice, and worth the download.
• There is a "shop" icon on the navigation bar. How tawdry. Sure, I have a couple little ecommerce things floating around (not making any money, I might add, but they didn't cost me anything and I don't really pay attention to them, so what do I care?), but at least I don't advertise 'em to the world against their will in the form of an "upgrade."
• No more weird crashes in kernel32.exe. Knock on wood.
• Netscape still has the same throttling and spinning problem, though. Grr!

I guess if I get desperate I can do a clean install. I think I need to reinstall the operating system and everything, anyway, even though that's so much work.

restlessmind