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2001

Percentile

Tonight’s KRON news mentioned a new survey of American cities and their relative merits for female residents. Two hundred cities were surveyed. According to the reporter, several Bay Area cities scored in the 150th percentile. This is apparently a bad thing…

Methinks she needs to look up the usage and defintion of the term “percentile”. She’d probably learn that there’s no such thing as the 150th percentile, but that, if there were, it would be a pretty phenomenal place to be. Scoring 150th out of 200 does not put one in the 150th percentile; it puts one in the 25th percentile…

Sorry. I was a social science major. Sloppy statistics and sloppy reporting both annoy me no end…

The new scanner has now been joined by a new (used) monitor and the long-awaited RAM is arriving tomorrow. I may never leave my house again…

Insomniac

I can’t sleep. Indulge me. It’s been several months since I’ve done one of these…

Things to be worried about at 1:30 in the morning:

  • I’m 36 years old and I’m no closer to knowing what I want to be when I grow up than I was at age 18. I’m coasting along just fine, but with no specific long-term goal nor passion.
  • I’m not convinced that I have much to offer a prospective employer. I know a little about a lot of things, but I’m not an expert at much of anything.
  • I’m even less convinced that I have much to offer a prospective boyfriend, sex partner, or even a casual acquaintance. And I’m not sure that I care, anyhow.
  • My parents aren’t going to be around forever. I live on the other end of the country, and I see them about once a year.
  • I’m smoking more and getting out of the house less.
  • I have a lot of work I should be doing. I’m not doing much of it. Nor much of anything else.
  • I think that my favorite Stouffer’s Hearty Portions entree is about to be discontinued.

I am, however, optimistic that I’ll be sleeping soon and that I won’t be thinking about any of these things tomorrow. But it might do me more good to think about them during the day once in a while…

Music

Music. It used to be one of the primary ways by which I defined myself, although it was usually more about what I hated than what I liked.

I guess it still is, in a way. But I’m not really an active consumer now. I don’t buy music. I don’t keep up with who’s who and what’s what. I’m not constantly looking for something new. I listen to songs. I like some of them and I hate even more of them. And then I’m done with it.

Music has become a somewhat passive, background sort of thing for me, with certain excpetions. And the idea of owning music was never quite the same after I stopped being the music director at my college radio station. In other words, after everything stopped being free. It’s gone downhill for me ever since.

Which is why I like the idea of Napster, but also see a very real problem with it. Yes, many people sample music there, which they may very well purchase at some later point. But I have a sneaking suspicion that more people are looking for something specific that they really want to hear but really don’t want to buy. Ever.

Anyhow, that’s what I’d use it for, given a fast enough connection to make it worth the effort.

Tech Assholes

So suppose you’re working on a site redesign for a client who’s moving to a new proprietary database-driven server application. Suppose you’re given minimal instruction on how to design for this mystical new server application no one’s ever really used before. And suppose you have a question related to the rather uninformative FAQ you were sent.

Suppose their response to your query is “this question is already covered in the FAQ. Please look it up.”

While you’re supposing, please suppose that you’re neither an idiot nor a 12-year-old. Suppose that, had the information been clear, you wouldn’t have asked the fucking question in the first place. And suppose you know that it would have taken this account rep about five seconds either to have cut and pasted the text in question into her message, or at least to have referenced just where in the FAQ this information was.

Suppose you emailed her back with the diplomatic and businesslike translation of this:

“Look, you condescending bitch. I don’t respond well to rudeness and flippancy. We’re working together to help a mutual client here. But this client has a much longer-standing relationship with me than with you, and I’m not above making your life a living hell.”

Suppose that would be a bad thing?

Work and Vertigo

Jeez, what a weekend. I’m working on three major client projects this weekend and they’re all starting to look alike. And somehow I don’t think the book distributor or the soccer promoter really want a site with elements from the site about semi-public cocksucking…

But my mood improved dramatically with a long drive this afternoon, and it’s gotten still better tonight with Vertigo. Twice…

Apologies to everyone whose email I’ve ignored over the past three or four days. It will get better soon. Maybe…

Randomly Monday

Yeah, I know I’ve done that stupid search engine queries thing to death, but really, just who types something like “92folsomstfair” into a search box and actually thinks they’re going to find something useful?

Unrelated:

  • Hey, it’s where I USED to live…
  • I’m in Block 11, so (after today’s outage) I’m safe. For a while…
  • Tomorrow, as it hits 75 degrees in San Francisco, my heat will be working again…

Frustrated and Excited

I give up. To hell with designing websites and writing porn. I’m gonna be a Towerette…

Frustrated:

  • I’m working on three major projects right now which HAVE to be finished by the end of the this week when I leave town, and two of the clients affected did not get back to me with approvals on Friday, making me lose two very-needed days of work on them this weekend.
  • My new monitor is causing interference on the TV in my office, but only on the lower channels.
  • I rented some of my first porn videos in a couple of years this week and they just plain sucked. And not in a sexy sort of way.

Senile or just overloaded:

  • I seem to be forgetting very basic things this week, like where the trunk and hood releases are on my car, how many spoonfuls of coffee to use, and what channel Bravo is on.

Excited:

  • I’m leaving town for three weeks next Saturday, no matter what.
  • I found a really cool That Girl video at the Super K-mart last night, which contains not only all three versions of the opening and closing credits, but also the famed Ethel Merman episode.
  • I found a copy of Repo Man for $3.99 in the very same pile.

Stupid Netscape

Things I’m thinking tonight while designing for Netscape 4.x:

  • This sucks.
  • Miserable piece of shit third-rate browser.
  • Why is 15-20% of the world still using this pile of crap?
  • Fucking useless.
  • WHAT CSS support?