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2002

Randomly Monday

Random site stuff:

  • For those of you who care (and opted out of the email notification), I’ve posted the answers and results to that “How Well Do You Know Me?” quiz from several weeks back. And may I say that I’m shocked that so many people thought I was a big fan of Adobe GoLive? Blecch. Thanks to all who played…
  • Once again, I’m flattered and all, but I wish they’d warn a guy. Bottles was a “cool site of the day” at Webshots today, bringing me hundreds of extra hits and potentially costing me several extra bucks in bandwidth charges…

Six Months

Six months ago this weekend, I made one of my semi-regular drives to Fresno. A little bit of research for Bottles was on the agenda, but the top item was meeting this guy I’d been trading email with for a month or two…

Damn, I’m glad I made that trip. I knew it would be lots of fun but I didn’t know it was going to change my life quite so significantly…

Mark’s gone now. We saw Siouxsie on Thursday, had dinner with Sarah at Tad’s on Friday, and hit Santa Cruz via Highway 1 and El Camino Real on Saturday. And now I’m sporting the standard stupid, happy grin and thinking about how it’s only five days until Friday…

The weekdays have started seeming more and more insignificant…

 

For those of you who are following the story, two more new pages have been added to the Northwest Tour journal. I may try to do more later tonight…

One last note: when you lift images from someone else’s website, it’s wise not to (a) link them directly from the other person’s server, and (b) neglect to include attribution when you place them on your own server after you figure out that I have a script preventing you from leeching them off mine. I’m just saying…

Dreams

Must be going around. I went almost ten years without remembering a single dream, but the past several months I’ve been averaging at least one biggie a week. And there’s no real logic: for example, they’re just as likely to hit when I’m sleeping alone or in tandem, and my general state of mind seems to have no effect either…

Fortunately, mine haven’t been particularly disturbing, although there was that one about running into Tony Randall and Jack Klugman in a sex club…

Let Me Just Pull That Out of My Magic Asshole

I had two email messages time-stamped between 5:30 and 5:45 this morning from someone who posts to the message board on one of my other sites. He was having trouble posting and accessing messages, and he requested that I “fix it as soon as possible” and that if I couldn’t, I should set up a new message board account. The implication was that I should do THAT as soon as possible as well…

Never mind that this was probably a short-term glitch (about which I had no other complaints) and that it may very well have been a problem with his own browser or ISP. And never mind the fact that I don’t do ANYTHING at 4:30 in the morning, least of all try to figure out glitches with some company’s free message board server for no compensation whatsoever…

What I’m pointing out here is the really annoying sense of entitlement that has accompanied the Internet era. Because people have become accustomed to having instant access to so much information for free, they have begun assuming that it is their absolute right to continue doing so ad infinitum, and that providers like me, who do this purely as a labor of love, must provide whatever they want, whenever they want it. For free. And cheerfully, please…

Fortunately, it’s not a really widespread phenomenon, but it’s enough of one that I’ve written about it several times before, and I’ve fumed about it on even more occasions. I’m amazed at the sheer audacity of anyone who would tell me that I “need to provide reviews of dance clubs, even if you don’t like them” or who are “appalled that you showed a picture of yourself smoking a cigarette on your site” (both more or less actual quotes). And anyone who tells me I need to fix some problem “right now” deserves whatever response I choose to give him…

How dare anyone presume to tell me what content I “must” provide on my own sites, which I do at my own (considerable) expense, for my own amusement, and for no compensation at all. Fuck ’em…

That’s not to say, of course, that I’m not open to hearing other opinions or to rational debate, when presented ina respectful manner. Nor does it suggest that I don’t want to hear about it if something’s not working right…

But this whole entitlement mentality which gives people the impression that they can visit my free website (I don’t believe they were coerced into doing so) and insist that I make certain changes immediately just on their say-so leaves me really cold. These are the same people who somehow manage to convince themselves that their “rights” are being violated when companies start requesting payment for certain content, or (God forbid) begin actually enforcing copyright laws…

My thanks to the 98% of you whose minds don’t work that way. The other 2% can suck my ass while I cheerfully offer them a full refund of all the subscription fees they’ve paid me to date…

Meetings

Most efficient way to make a boring, pointless meeting you had no real need nor desire to attend even MORE pointless: have it run long, so that you don’t even get to make the brief presentation you were scheduled to make at the end…

I want this week to be over so very badly…

Too Stupid to Own a House

Well said. I keep thinking of all the yupsters who were, a couple of years back, moving into “live/work lofts” in San Francisco neighborhoods largely populated by PRE-EXISTING warehouses and nightspots. Imagine their horror at discovering that, hey, warehouses and nightspots (like airports) tend to be noisy neighbors…

It rather makes one wonder where they found the intelligence required even to save up a down payment for their luxury homes and condos. What’s that old saying about fools and their money? The way I see it, any individual too stupid to find out what an area is like before buying a home there is thoroughly deserving of whatever problems and discomforts he experiences. It’s a shame that it’s probably illegal to require an IQ test of mortgage applicants…

The scary thing is that, in Chapel Hill (and arguably in San Francisco), the fools pretty much won. Where’s Darwin when you need him?

Friends of Irma

Kudos to whoever did the search last month on “I am a plant and David is my master”. That one gave me a chuckle. I don’t quite understand why someone searched for “spaghetti warehouse recipes”, though…

Posted the exciting finale of the Northwest Tour Journal tonight. I now realize I definitely should have made my customary notes; the narrative is not stellar, but the pictures are fun. As always, you can start with the new stuff or at the beginning…

Eleven days until I see Mark again. It’s not going to be pretty…

Broad Suckage

AT&T Broadband, let me count the ways that you suck. Could it be your antiquated cable system and your limited channel capacity? Your frequent outages? The fact that I could get a more watchable signal on my local stations using rabbit ears? Or maybe it’s just the very fact that you’re a part of AT&T at all, which by default means that customer service and a quality product are foreign concepts to you?

Anyway, you’re history at my house as of next Friday. And when your telemarketers call, begging me to come back, be assured that I will not treat them gently…

Sorry to be so out of touch this week. I’m using the fact that Mark will be doing the Mother’s Day thing this weekend as an excuse to do some long-delayed work on Bottles, and I’ve been getting an early start all week long. It’s rare for me to feel this industrious; I have to use it while I have it. Look for the updates by Monday, if you care…

Now it’s back to Cops (assuming the cable doesn’t go out for the next half hour) and promoting sweeps month on The WB…

Randomly Friday

So my high school reunion is tentatively scheduled for the first week in November in Greensboro. I used to have dreams of going to it with a drag queen in a sequined nightgown as my date, to show my contempt for the people I graduated with. Now I just don’t care anymore. I never cared much for my high school classmates. And I prefer to think the feeling was mutual…

I overslept this morning, and now I fell all fuzzy-headed and dehydrated. The latter probably has to do with the fact that my dinner last night was so garlic-soaked that I can still taste it, even after brushing my teeth twice. Gotta love Rocco’s on Folsom…

For the record, I already hate this idea…

And I’m lukewarm about this one too, but you sort of have to respect this guy for having enough geek in him to do the job right. Even CalTrans seems a little impressed…