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I suspect something odd at e-Bay. A few weeks ago, I had what I thought was a problem with Internet Explorer. It was dropping images and entire pages from its cache. After I ran the maintenance program, the problem cleared up. Last night, it returned. Pages I had captured from LJ for off-line perusal were gone. So were many of the postcards I had viewed the previous night at e-Bay. Then I recalled that the last time this happened, I had also just paid a visit to the e-Bay postcard auctions.
Could it be that the sellers at e-Bay are adding some kind of code to their pages which is intended to eradicate their images before they can be saved? If so, it appears to be a sloppy code which spills over into other parts of the IE cache, deleting many other things as well. I will perform maintenance on the computer tonight, and see if the problem clears up once again. Then I will revisit e-Bay and see if the problem reappears. If it does, I think a letter to e-Bay will be in order.
I have no problem with sellers attempting to prevent people such as myself from stealing their scans, even though I doubt that doing so will improve their business. But if they are using some sort of code to do this, and the code is so sloppy that it affects other things on my hard drive, I'm going to be very annoyed with them. If this is what is happening, and e-Bay is unable or unwilling to stop the practice, I won't be visiting their site again. It took me quite a while to go back and re-fetch those non-e-Bay pages which had vanished from my hard drive tonight. The extra trouble this will put me to will make e-Bay not worth my while.
Also, I think the spell-check in my LJ client has quit working. Either that, or my spelling has improved greatly. Let's see, if I deliberately misspell sommethiing, then run the ap... hey, my spelling has improved! How about that? My keyboard skills must have improved, too. Not one screw-up in the whole post! Amazing!