dependency

So, I'm all for the open source movement. To take away some of the monopoly of these big software companies I think is a good thing. But I'm wondering today, why there can't be a happy medium. I find myself using several "Free" resources on the internet such as gmail, this blogger thing (also owned by google), flickr (which I pay for), and email (which I pay for). It started Sunday, when my email was going buggy on me. It would work, then it would go down for about an hour. It's not worth complaining or calling tech support, I've found... usually if you have enough patience, it's better to just wait out the glitches, because chances are there are other people having the same problem, and they have called the company to complain and the company is fixing it. So sure enough, by Sunday night my email was back to normal. Today, I tried signing onto my flickr account... it was so slow, and many of the photos would not load, no matter how many times I hit the refresh button. So again, I figured I'd wait it out. By about 4:30 it seemed to be working again. NOW, for the past hour or so, my gmail is not working, and it says they're trying to fix it.
The other day, while surfing, I stumbled upon a small post that said that godaddy (one of the largest web hosting company) was hit by a DNS attack (Denial of service). This basically brings their servers down to a crawl. So that probably explains my email bug, but now I have to wonder if these other bugs are tied to this DNS attack as well.
Regardless, It is a bit of an eye opener as to how much I depend on these companies for my entertainment and communication. It's great when they're working, but a pain when there are glitches.
Hmm. I'm just realizing now I don't really have a point to all this. Sorry to take you down this dead end road.

Quick follow up on the dried anchovies... I dove in last night! I opened the bag, and was immediately hit in the face with the smell of fish food! Yep, it smelled exactly like when you feed your goldfish those little fish flakes. Guess what... cause it's the same thing. (something bizzare about humans feeding pet fish other ground up dried fish!) Then I picked one of the little anchovies, looked at it for a second (mistake) and popped it in my mouth. It was fishy no doubt. But it wasn't that bad. The next one, I looked at even more closely... it really is gross looking... the one had the top of it's head pealed away and I saw his little dried brain... I picked it out, it was about the size of a sesame seed (I threw it out). But once I told my mind not to think about what I was eating, I was able to push on and enjoy these little fishys. I found a recipe today for them, that is probably better than eating them like potato chips... It was a bean sprout soup. Sounded good actually, I might try to make it. One of the things it said after boiling the dried fish, was to scoop them out and throw them out. Um... I hope these things aren't poisonous or anything. If you don't hear from me on my blog in a few days... it was nice knowing you all. So long and Thanks for all the fish (a Douglas Adams book!)