Funk Babblings

After last week's dishwasher debacle, we ended up deciding to just buy a new one. To put the old one back after all that work would've been rather disappointing, and we'd been intending to buy a new dishwasher soon anyway.

So Saturday we dug out the Consumer Reports, picked out a couple of good brands and a price range, then checked websites for what's currently available, and finally headed out to Sears.

The final decision was whether to install it ourselves or have someone else install it for us. Considering the hassles I'd already been through, and knowing that there were further hassles of the process that I hadn't yet ventured into (I'd punted on replacing drain hose in the vain hope that the old one would be fine), I decided to spend the extra money for installation.

The installer came yesterday and did the work, under duriyah's supervision. I think it took him maybe half an hour or so. Much quicker than I could have done it.

Now we have to learn the best buttons to push to best clean dishes with our super-hard water.

One of my Christmas gift's was a Visa Gift Card. It says that before using it I must register it at www.giftcardbalance123.com.

First, what sort of domain name is that for a financial product? It sounds like the sort of domain name I see in spam all the time, and doesn't encourage trust.

Second, when I went to the site, I received this message and nothing else: Error: Internet Explorer is required to access this website.

At least it redirected me a secure connection first, but that's little consolation.

So then I told my browser to pretend to be IE6. This time it let me enter my card information, see that I could use it in-person without registering (though not necessarily online), and see the card balance. Some javascript menus on the site didn't work, though that would've been easy for them to fix if they'd bothered. There wasn't even any ActiveX, the only remaining semi-valid reason for a site to be IE-only.