Well, this is ridiculous.

This is my first and only blogger.com complaint. To date.

W and I have had some issues with our internet provider. We've got satellite service, which means our monthly download limit is...well, limited. Hasn't been a big problem up till now, but all of a sudden I'm watching what the provider says we're downloading go up and up and up to the point where we're about to lose the service we're paying for, and neither he nor I is doing anything unusual. Even if some demented freeloader were creeping up to our ridge with a wifi laptop and downloading Lost episodes, he wouldn't get away with it because the uber-router is encrypted. I'm not sure why it's encrypted, given our physical isolation, but this is W we're talking about. He encrypts pancake recipes, just on principle.

So anyway, W checked out his own (Linux) computer for something that might cause the browser to run in the background or something, and then he did the same to my own (Linux) 'pooter. He found nothing wrong, specifically, but did comment, "Wow, man, you've sure got a lot of cookies. You need to change your settings."

"Cookies," to me, are confections you make with flour and chocolate chips. I have a vague idea what they are, but really they don't mean anything to me except "vaguely bad from a privacy POV." I like being able to open forums without signing on, but then over the past year or so I've pretty much gotten away from web forums anyway. The only setting I could find on Firefox that concerned cookies was pretty much an on/off switch. So I set it to block all cookies, and (hopefully) cleared all the cookies in memory.

Sometime later I tried to open my own blog. I expected to have to log back on.

Blogger wouldn't let me. I got some sort of nastygram about how my cookie function had to be enabled. I went back into the settings and attempted to add my own blog (and blogger.com, just to be ecumenical) to the "exceptions." I tried to log back onto the blog.

Blogger wouldn't let me.

I don't like being told what to do, unless I'm getting paid. I especially don't like it when an inanimate object - my own property, no less - starts issuing diktats as to what I'm allowed to do. I will now attempt to explain to my computer, calmly, that I do own an axe.

ETA: Okay, looks like the axe won't be necessary at this time. Having logged onto Blogger, and so presumably planted a cookie or ten on the 'pooter, I closed the tab and then went back and disabled cookies, having first made sure the exception was in place. Then I opened the blog again, and was still logged on. So I guess that satisfied the lack-of-privacy gods. For this site, anyway.

Still haven't figured out why our provider thinks we're downloading craploads of...whatever it thinks we're downloading.