Monday Rant: Server Hangup

I know I'm way behind on my Monday rants. I assure you, it's not so much lack of rage that has slowed my ranting as it is a percieved lack of concise, well-defined targets. Much of what makes me angry I have either already ranted about (and the universe has not changed to suit my tastes! Grrrrr!), or constitutes a very broad topic worthy of more than a semi-coherent word salad on a poorly-structured blog.

Something has been happening at far too high a frequency lately. My email program, Eudora (v. 7.0) more often than not "gets tired of waiting for the server" when I ask it to check my email. The obnoxious little yin-yang symbol spins around for five minutes or so, then it displays that message. Idiotically 'cute' error messages are a subject for a rant another day. Like I said, this happens more than 50% of the time. I know of no way to prevent it, and short-circuiting such an event (by closing Eudora and restarting it) has no discernable effect on the probability of encountering the same error the next time I click "check mail".

Similarly, sometimes (less often, but still commonly) Eudora may pause part-way through downloading the current batch of recieved mail; the little blue bar-graph at the bottom of the screen simply stops, until I see an error message about "waiting for the server". Of course, like all proper errors, this error invariably leads to no emails getting downloaded until after I shut off Eudora, restart it, and try again. Also, when those emails do get downloaded, many of them come through duplicated.

These problems never happened when I was at SFU, using Eudora v. 6.0. So it's an uncontrolled experiment - I changed two variables at once. Oh well.

I also occassionally get server errors ("505") on some blogs and other websites, particularly when I try to leave a comment. Of course, this results in the total loss of the comment to the Void - why does the back button never preserve user-entered text?

I can't think of anything else to say on this topic, so just imagine that my own brain suffered a server error now instead of generating a concluding paragraph.