it’s become obvious to me now that the dream of calling in posts from payphones and having those calls automatically posted to this web site is going to have to be modified. there are just too many things that can go wrong. earlier today a call made from a phone i’ve used many times already was completely silent, as if i wasn’t talking, when in fact i spoke for about 2 minutes. a later call was about 3 minutes but for some reason the call did not end when i hung up the phone, recording an mp3 file that was over 20 MB and over 9 minutes long, with 6 minutes of silence. had to edit down the file. payphones are just weird creatures. i’ve noticed that a lot of times the call takes a few seconds before it really starts. i dial the number, deposit the quarter(s), the call is connected, but the first 7 or 8 seconds of the call can not be heard by the voicemail system. that’s a strange quality of payphones. i’ve gotten to where i think i can tell, though, when the call is basically mute on the other end. there’s an acoustical feedback sort of effect that makes the phone sound like it’s talking back to me. and of course call quality in general is all over the place, with some calls sounding better than any landline i’ve ever used and others sounding feeble. and a lot of times the call quality deteriorates as the call continues. fade to nearly nothing. i guess it’s all good, though. i might have to abandon use of the software i bought with the expectation of using it to automate this process, and i may have to give in to post-processing the audio even though that’s against the spirit of what i wanted to do here. no disaster by any means but kind of annoying to take this long to realize that things just don’t fucking work. every day i sit in front of a computer it’s just a continuous stream of shit that doesn’t work. i put this site on a cheapo hosting account but cheapo doesn’t explain why ftp passwords work a few times in a row then don’t work. i send mail through yahoo’s smtp and today it returned a 421 unavailable error when i really needed to send something. then the obnoxious MEMEO backup software barfed up an error from the bowels of backup, then the toilet wouldn’t flush, then i felt weird all day, then …