Journals : 2001 : April
10 April 2001 | Link this
Random thoughts from a vacation still in progress:
- It seems like less of one if you're doing a significant chunk of work in the middle if it.
- I will never again attempt to add memory to an iMac. Not pleasant. Enough said.
- Mmmmm. Liver pudding.
- Nice diversion: boy with purple mohawk stuffing the majority of his tongue down my throat.
- Why does it cost less to rent a larger car rather than a smaller one?
More later: critical analysis, disturbing discoveries, unpleasant vagueries, and just plain fun. Thanks to everyone for holding off on all that email. Your cooperation is divine...
16 April 2001 | Link this
Let's just call it the vacation where nothing worked out quite like it was supposed to. I'll elaborate (and maybe even illustrate) when I get home (Friday), but for now it just needed to be said...
21 April 2001 | Link this
Perfect end to a perfect trip.
After a long, stressful drive from San Diego, I walk into my apartment (the one I spent half a day cleaning before I left) and realize I'm in the middle of getting new drywall in my hallway. The lights in the hall don't work, there's a thin film of white dust everywhere, and the TV cable no longer extends to the living room.
Then I walk into the bathroom to take a nice, long shower. There's spackle all over my good towels, my bathroom rug, and my sink. And there's this mysterious unidentifiable gray shit all over the tub.
I'm either going to go get very drunk or maybe just go to sleep in my moderately dusty bed, so I can sneeze all day tomorrow like I did the whole time I was back east...
22 April 2001 | Link this
For those of you who care, I've posted the first chunk of the journals and photos from my just-completed Bi-Coastal Road Trip.
And for those of you who are still waiting patiently for your email to be answered, my apologies. I just haven't been able to make myself do it this weekend. Soon...
23 April 2001 | Link this
More new stuff from the road trip. Or start at the beginning...
25 April 2001 | Link this
More new road trip stuff, which means I'm absolved of all responsibility for any other new content, right? As before, you may start at the beginning if you prefer...
Maybe if I get adventurous, I'll write something else soon. Don't bet the paycheck on it, though...
26 April 2001 | Link this
There's something strange and scary going on with my websites. I just happened to check traffic a little while back and was shocked to notice I'd transferred almost a day's worth of bandwidth in the past hour.
Looking at logs, I think someone may have posted my address to a number of nude binaries newsgroups. Right now, most of the traffic seems to be WebTV related and is coming into Planet SOMA, so I've banned most of Web TV from the site, and closed down portions of it temporarily, so that whatver this is doesn't pull down everything else too...
This pisses me off. If you see anything posted on Usenet, would you do me a favor and send it my way? I'm about to go looking myself...
27 April 2001 | Link this
Final chunk of the road trip journals is now posted. I guess that means I may have to come up with something to say here before too long.
Yesterday's drama has now been traced to a strange conversion of some newsgroup posting at WebTV and someone's PacBell DSL line running amuck. Note to the findividual with IP address 63.201.35.47: you're banned, unless you can come up with a really good explanation for making my life suck for about an hour...
29 April 2001 | Link this
So maybe it's time for my annual rant about how to compose email. I know that some people might suggest that, given how slowly I answer mine, I'm not the best person to be doing this. Sorry.
Be forewarned. The bitterness and crankiness factors in this journal entry are high, and the saracasm factor is moderate.
Point one: An email message is not a telegram.
You do not, in most cases, save money by using fewer words than are needed to complete your sentence. I have a friend back east, a very nice woman I've known for years, who sends me email which is virtually indecipherable. She uses shorthand ("u' for you, "4" for "for", and "pls" for "please") almost exclusively. I'm lucky if every third or fourth character grouping is an actual English word. The overall effect is neither cute nor concise. It's just distracting and annoying.
And, by the way, distinct paragraphs are allowed in email. Really. They are indicated by the presence of a blank line between them. Punctuation is allowed too, and (again) there's no extra charge for it.
Reference is allowed too, whether it just involves quoting the statement you're responding to, or just telling the recipient which of the 500 pages of his website you're discussing. Believe it or not, the one page you found on Yahoo may not be the only one on the site.
Point two: An email message is also not a novel.
While I may read and enjoy every word of a really long email message, there's a very good chance I will not respond to every item in it. While I'll try to do so for friends, there's even less chance that I'll do so for complete strangers who have just emailed me their entire life stories.
While I appreciate that people feel comfortable enough to do this, it's intimidating as hell and I rarely have an extra hour and a half to answer a really long email message from someone I don't really know, even if I want to GET to know them. Start slow and concise, and then build up.
Point three: Email messages should rarely be forwarded.
Especially if they contain jokes I don't care about, virus warnings about operating systems I don't use, or charity pitches.
Point four: Context, context, context.
I've recieved an awful lot of really abusive email from customers of supermarket chains around the country, pissed off about the bad service they received, etc. Most of them emailed me because they thought this site belonged to their favorite chain. This, depsite the notices on EVERY PAGE stating that the site is not connected with any supermarket chain.
And frankly, I don't really think Safeway's website, for example, would have a picture of a Kroger store at the top of each page.
I get a lot of baffling messages on the other sites too. Here's a reality check: while your Google search for "lesbian strip clubs" just happened to turn up one of my pages which just happned to contain all three words, there's no reason to assume that I really know where any are. Or care. When I email someone about their site, I've usually visited most of it and figured out what it was all about.. Again, the one page you found on Yahoo may not be the only one on the site.
Point five: There is still no such thing as "an email".
You cannot send me "an email" any more than you can go to the post office to send me "a mail". There is no such thing, just like there is no such thing as "a foliage" nor "a traffic". It is not grammatically correct. You can, however, send me some email or an email MESSAGE if you like.
Note that none of this is to suggest that I don't like getting email. So feel free...
29 April 2001 Later | Link this
Hmmm. Let's take stock of the weekend:
- Created many ad banners for sex sites. It's amazing how non-stimulating dirty pictures can be while you're tweaking them and making them into phone sex ads.
- Realized how odd it is that Jonno and I are both discussing phone sex ads today.
- Kept trying to (a) minimize my sore throat and (b) figure out why I have one.
- Pissed off a few people (perhaps justifiably) with what I believed was an innocuous comment about literacy levels and education in the south.
- Watched a few "Streets of San Francisco" episodes while nodding in and out on the couch from the allergy medicine.
- Vacuumed up all the remaining construction dust in my apartment.
- Had dinner at the most miserable, useless Pizza Hut in the world with Dan and Jamie.
It seems like I accomplished much more than I really did...
On my mind moving into Monday:
- Damned throat.
- I'm glad I didn't go out, pick up a boy, and stay up doing nasty things tonight like I did last Sunday.
- I have heat again.
- There's really very little good daytime TV on the weekends.
30 April 2001 | Link this
This was unexpected: poking around the Census Bureau's Factfinder, I discovered that each of the inner-city areas I've lived in as an adult is actually less integrated than the suburb I grew up in (where my parents still live). Throws a bit of a monekywrench into both the ideas of segregated suburbs and of the segregated south, huh?
Or does it just say something about gentrification?