the everyday adventures of sabrina

this is the email i just tried to send:

From: sabrina l. downard
To: iTunes Music Store Customer Service
Specific Request: Computer Authorization

Hello. This message is actually not in regard to computer authorization at all, but this was the only form I could find after jumping through at least a dozen pages (half of which just directed me back to http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/musicstore.html, which has no actual "contact support" option on it beyond the one at the bottom of the page which tells me I'm not entitled to support -- honestly, guys, you need to make it much easier to get in touch with billing; this is nuts.)

I was in the middle of downloading a bunch of stuff and my computer wigged out on me (iTunes started skipping during playback and everything else was completely unresponsive), so I had to shut it off and restart. After restarting, I used "Check for purchased music," and it started downloading again -- except for one particular track, which it doesn't see and didn't complete downloading prior to the crash (perhaps it was writing it to disk when the crash occurred?). I would like to get that one track without re-purchasing it. It's track 11 from "200 KM/H in the Wrong Lane," by t.A.T.u., called "Show Me Love (Extended Version)." Please contact me with instructions on how I should go about getting this track, since iTunes won't see it, or credit my account (sld+somethingorother@uchicago.edu) with the $0.99 it would cost to re-purchase it.

Thank you.

but the form rejected it because of an “invalid email address.” so i modified the address to just “sld@uchicago.edu” and added this paragraph:

Oh, for Pete's sake. This web form is rejecting my support request because it claims my email address is invalid because it contains a plus character (sld+somethingorother@uchicago.edu). A plus is perfectly valid in Internet email addresses, and has been since NINETEEN EIGHTY-TWO. Read the RFCs -- a good place to start would be RFC 822. Argh!

but then it still rejected it as invalid.

so i guess i don’t get my pop music.

at least until monday, when our apple campus rep gets to work and checks his email, wherein i’m going to ask him who i should yell at for this particular stroke of customer-care genius.

so, lisa is all over. it was a pretty good one, this year. i hear that that the expanded tutorials program did a good job of helping recoup some funding that’s been lost since attendance has been down after the dot coms bombed. i was sort of bummed about my two-day ‘hacking and securing web applications’ tutorial overlapping the technical programs so i couldn’t go see some talks i wanted to go to, but it’s hard to bitch too much because, frankly, that tutorial rocked my socks. web applications security isn’t my area of specialization, i mostly just took the tutorial to get some more exposure to webby stuff since i feel kinda behind (hello, i was running wwwboard on the soapmaking site until like two years ago, when i finally got sick enough of deleting the spam to take it down), and because i thought it would be neat. and the tutorial was awesome. the instructor, a gentleman named david rhoades from maven security (a consulting company), was obviously very comfortable with the material and the work, and it was all very interesting. and his tutorial materials — seriously, i’ve been to a number of lisa tutorials since ’98, and i have seen very few tutorials as well put-together as this one. first of all, the book was not just printouts of the powerpoint slides — it had a ton of additional text with explanations, anecdotes, how to do things, and stuff like that. second of all, since it was a hands-on tutorial, he’d worked with the guy who forked the auditor security collection/knoppix distro (kinda like STD), and up with a customized distro cd for the class. it was extremely slick. i asked him for a couple of CDs to take back to folks in the office, actually.

anyways, i have about ten million uris to stuff into diu out of my tutorial notes, but i haven’t gotten around to it yet. soon. soon.