I sent the following e-mail on Wednesday afternoon to one Jacqueline Cook, marketing director at Tucows:

For the past month, the 'dashboard' on Blogware has worked intermittently for me at best. It's been down for 12-hour stretches, and for days at a time.

 

There are all types of other technical problems making my blog an absolute pain to use.

 

Talking to others and the reseller, it's not just me.

 

Blogware or Tucows haven't posted one word of explanation about this totally unacceptable situation.

 

I'm flabbergasted you people want to toss away your reputation like this, but that's your choice.

 

When my current subscription expires, I'm moving on.

 

Bill Doskoch

Toronto, ON

Two business days and more than three hours later, not a word in response. Can you say "lack of customer service focus," Billy? Arggh, captain, I can.

Not that I get inundated with them, but if you've tried to comment to this blog in recent days and you haven't seen your comment appear yet, you haven't been censored.

The piece-of-shit Blogware publishing tool I'm using isn't letting me approve comments. This has been going on for more than a month.

Better to send me the comment as an e-mail and I'll put it in the text of the post. The addy link is at the upper right.

Still can't get into the control panel.

Take your time, Tucows. This has only been going on for weeks.

I can't really manage my blog right now because Blogware is having one of those afternoons.

I launched this blog on Aug. 12, 2004.

Three years later, I've made 4,561 posts and through them, altered the course of human history in ways that neither myself or overall humanity fully appreciate yet. Or not.

Thanks to all those who, through their loyal patronage, have made this blog number 177,881 on Technorati.

I will now cut the cake.

I ran out of bandwidth. Because it was near the end of the month, I said screw it, I'm not buying any more for now (this blog is hardly a money-spinner for me).

However, I did make some posts here: http://bdoskoch.blogspot.com

When I can figure out how to import them into Blogware, I'll do so. The problem seems to be at Blogger's end; when I try to generate a template using the code Blogware provided, I got a "Your template could not be parsed because it is not well formed" message.

Anyways, I'm back up now, but be advised I'll use the above blog as a backup if I run into similar issues in the future. So if you're among the millions of people who literally cannot get through a day without seeing what I've posted, bookmark the above link for insurance.

I'm on vacation starting Friday morning. For the next several weeks, I'll be posting somewhat less regularly than normal -- although probably something above nothing.

For literally billions of people around the world, this announcement not only won't be considered startling, it will pass totally unnoticed. One can only conclude that the poor souls haven't yet discovered what they've been missing.

However, if you are part of the small, elite group of humanity who might have a crisis triggered in your life by this development, allow me to express my concern:

Too bad. So sad.

And with that pro-active apology out of the way, the trout and salmon await ...