Pen-Elayne on the Web

No Good Deed

Speaking of Doonesbury weighing in on blogs, I finally found a free e-mail service that would enable me to create a fake and anonymous identity for the sole purpose of signing up to read NY Times articles. (Apparently Hotmail no longer does this, now that MSN has taken them over.) This is a rather momentous occasion for me, as it's the first and, I hope last, e-mail persona I've ever constructed - click here to read why I don't care for online pseudonyms - and I've already lost track of the details, but the principle behind it is that I refused to sign up as myself because it's none of the NY Times' business what my income level is or where I live or anything, all I want to do is read an article from time to time, but you can't omit the answers to any of these personal questions during their registration process. So I'm finally registered as this fake person and I go to find that Lisa Guernsey article on the supposed dearth of women bloggers for purposes of linking to it directly as a service to non-subscribers. But I get the feeling anyone who clicks on the link I just set up still won't be able to get it, even though I now can. Let me know if the link works (and one hopes my Haloscan code won't blink out again). If you want to read the first two paragraphs you can search on the Times' website but they'll make you pay for the rest (presumably a percentage of that goes to Guernsey, thanks to the Tasini decision). Ah well, if it doesn't work you can't say I didn't try. (There you are, a triple negative to get you through the day!)