So I’m sitting in this hotel room in DC working from my laptop. On the road I use AOL, just because of the variety of connections I’m likely to encounter. I have got to say, though, I hate the darn thing. Perhaps it gets better with real familiarity, if you use it all the time I mean. For occasional users like me, though, it’s a dog. I can never find anything. After a couple of years of this I now know that F% does a screen refresh, but I don’t know much else. And what are all those darn pop-ups you get at sign on? What on earth is a “buddy list”? Why should I care? Isn’t there an option to make these things NOT pop up when I sign on? I spent half an hour looking for one, but couldn’t find.

There must be a lot of folk like me who connect with one of the common browsers most of the time (MS Internet Explorer in my case) & only use AOL on the road. Couldn’t AOL make our lives easier by just simulating our normal browser? So at sign-on you get a panel saying: “What is your normal browser?” and taking it from there. They have a nice billing plan for on-the-road users, why don’t they have a nice interface?

Now how the heck do I send this darn thing?