2009 has not been a good year for me in the chat room

heck, even the main site has been impossible to get into some days

currently when i try to get into chat, i get a notice that the connection was interrupted during negotiations

a few days ago i got in but it was as if i was a voiceless fly on the wall

one recent day when i got in there was absolutely nobody else there, even after i hung around and did a few things at my desk, waiting to see if anybody showed up

has something happened to the site that makes it difficult for those with 56k dial-ups?

all of my software is 100% up-to-date (done daily), the computer is barely a month old, i clean up all history items daily when i shut down, it doesn't matter if i use IE or FireFox... that is just some background info