I'm Running B-arely-eta!

By now, I should know to avoid the term "Beta." It's just a decoy. Sure, it has the promise of a fresh package, a rare and exotic novelty, and the exploration of a new toy. With all the successful conversions out there, surely Blogger Beta would jazz up my blog, too! Those stars in my eyes were caused by the light at the end of the tunnel, sure... little did I know it was an on-coming train.

See, Beta really means "unfinished." It's a testing stage. To work out the bugs, glitches, kinks, snags, errors, problems, headaches, frustrations, and moments where you give up and bellow, "What the fook!?" to yourself. I should know this by now. I've tried to be a beta TESTER for video games before. Apparently the true test is how quickly I can catch on to reality. The results are in, but I can't look at my score just yet.

I remember when Beta was a videocassette format -- smaller in size and considered superior in quality to its more popular cousin, VHS. My family would travel to Video Towne, and I remember there was a single Beta rack with a pathetic, paltry selection of movies. Back then, people spent several hundred dollars for a lead-heavy brick cassette player that with a top loader and a remote on a wire. All that wonder, quality, and cash for what? To watch a vivid copy of "Real Genius" or "Soap Dish" because that's all that was in stock? Shortly after, Beta disappeared altogether, the eventual splat of the on-coming locomotive. Did I learn?

If we take a page from portfolio investments, we learn that beta is a measure of volatility and risk in investment. Clearly, in the realms of unfinished business, beta is too risky for me. And yet I already played the market. My blog is now partially Beta-ed, but I can't upgrade the template. And I've searched high and low for a fix -- nothing yet, official or otherwise. Why did I not associate all these bad betas with one another? Was it guilt by lack of association?

So now I wait with beta'd breath for a solution. And in that breath, I say, "You won't beat me, Beta. Not this Army."