TuneBelt.com has been a bad business to deal with. Their prices are almost twice the price everybody else charges for the same products. While their website says they use USPS Express Mail, they actually only use First Class. When requested to rush the order, they sat on it doing nothing for five days--without notice. Communication with the customer is nonexistent. An order number was presented on the website, but no emails were ever delivered with an order confirmation, invoice/receipt, shipping notification, or ETA. And they don't take Amex. » read more »

TuscanyCircle is back again. We went offline for registered users (anything that used SSL for access) for over an hour due to a mistake by my hosting service. All should be well now. Let me know if you see anything not working fully, though.

TuscanyCircle has undergone some minor changes recently. First, you'll notice the link colors have changed. Next, you should notice that the URL for its "All nodes" feed has changed from http://tuscanycircle.net/node/... to http://tuscanycircle.net/view/.... The former is now named "Front Page" and does not contain all new content but only that which has been promoted to the front pages. » read more »

Maybe just a sign of the times, but the mindless service provided by Marta (Atlanta's excuse for "public" transportation) is even worse than one would expect from a government monopoly. The average Marta employee has an IQ approaching single digits, or so their ignorant, English-challenged behavior seems to suggest. They all (all we've ever encountered) have unwarranted chips on their shoulders, and they're itching to start some kind of trouble with otherwise peaceful customers. Being government employees--performing at the same level as any other welfare recipient--they are mad with power far beyond their ability to responsibly wield, leaving frustrated riders with no alternatives should they be cheated. » read more »

If you'd like to stay current with new front-page content added to TuscanyCircle (blogs, forum posts, comments, shouts), there are three RSS feeds to which you should subscribe:

• "all nodes"
• "all comments"
• "shoutbox"

There are listed as feeds on every page (under Firefox' feed icon, for example) as well as under the "rss" menu item for your convenience. The "Front Page" feed only catches those nodes promoted to the front page.

If you're new to RSS, try this brief tutorial. » read more »

We recently had all new siding installed on our home, soffets and gutters included, by Remodel America. Yes, those guys who have minutes-long commercials during weekend TBS movies. The process was quite painless and very quick. Start-to-finish, it took about a week, and this included the original in-home consultation. » read more »

If you find any links on TuscanyCircle that appear to be broken, let me know. So far, they've all been caused by news articles and such that were removed by the linked site. You gotta wonder why they might do that! Sometimes I can find copies of the missing articles online and restore them locally. The major media obviously fails in its job of holding our rulers accountable, so it's up to the blogosphere to perform this duty--except that we have to hold the media itself accountable, too.

TuscanyCircle is now on its new server. Hopefully, the new and improved hardware and software services will make this site better (e.g., faster). Please let me know immediately if you notice anything wrong with the site as a result of the move. » read more »

I have unintentionally deleted several, old forum posts. They are not recoverable.

I was cleaning up the forum structure and changing the node types for some of them. Unfortunately, and unknown to me, when changing the type from forum (to anything else), there was still a little forum-ness left behind. When the forum category--now seemingly empty--was deleted, these previously forum-type nodes were found and dutifully deleted. Apparently, this is a bug in the module I use to change node types. I'm disabling that until it can be fixed.

In the meantime, if you know of a node that has been deleted (found a link, searched, etc.) and are able to find its cached version (Google caches what it finds), please send me the text, and I'll recreate it. I'm doing this on a few nodes I know were deleted incorrectly. » read more »

TuscanyCircle is quite slow presently. This is due to the breach of contract our new NOC provider has made (virtual servers instead of dedicated). We'll be changing NOC providers soon (before year's end, I expect). In the meantime, please be patient. » read more »