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2002

Harry at 16

Quick thought: does anyone else find the fact that Prince Harry smoked pot and tried to lure girls to “wild parties” at age 16 to be huge non-issue? And is anyone else getting huge laughs out of all the overanalysis of this “troubled boy” and how big a part the death of his mother may have played in his scandalous horrendous descent into experimental teenage drug abuse?

Actually, I find it rather refreshing that a member of the British royal family actually managed to behave so much like a normal 16-year-old boy…

Why Bother?

Earlier today, I’d composed a nice long rant about why I don’t want to live in San Francisco anymore (largely because it’s expensive, pretentious, and a big time pain in the ass), and I was trying to decide where to put it. Then I decided not to put it anywhere for now, because it didn’t cover any really new ground and almost sounded more whiny than ranty. But if anyone really wants to read it, let me know. I’ll send it to you, or maybe even post it, if enough people care. Which is doubtful. I’m not sure if I even care that much anymore…

I took a nice computer sabbatical tonight instead. I spent last week being really geeky, what with getting the last of the sites and domains moved, and trying to learn obscure Apache directives and all. It was a little rough on the eyes and the rest of the body (bad posture, extra nicotine comsumption, not enough sleep, etc.), so I’m not going to do it again this week. Tonight, I read the Sunday paper (yes, I know it’s Monday), listened to Steely Dan, and got reacquainted with the first Imperial Teen CD, which I found at Rasputin a week or two back…

But all the same, here I sit in front of the G4 at 10:00, remembering one bit of work I need to do tonight and also that I’d planned to flesh out yesterday’s journal entry. The former is almost complete; the latter will have to wait. But it was a great weekend. And Friday is only four days away…

Happy Anniversary to Me

I forgot all about Planet SOMA‘s sixth anniversary today. I was rather happily preoccupied…

Thanks to Becky for remembering and for saying really nice things…

More on all the above tomorrow, probably, along with other exciting features and maybe director’s commentary or the original theatrical trailer or something. I’m bushed right now…

Post-weekend

Mmmm. Happy post-Mark glow. It was another quite wonderful weekend featuring a birthday party for Mark’s friend Amy, as well as a quite tasty out-of-season turkey dinner with his sister. Top it off with a truck stop lunch and a trip to Mendota (not to mention lots of time strategically intertwined at home), and it’s left me contented and tired…

The only down side was fighting my way through Tracy and across Altamont Pass on the way home. I stayed in the right lane, which was (as is so often the case in California) moving faster than any of the others, and I eventually made it. I rewarded myself with a Wal-Mart run in Livermore…

Now if I could just get rid of this new Coumadin-enhanced butt zit (yes, another one) which has been making my life miserable for five days, I’d be pretty well satisfied with life right now…

Of bloggers and codes

OK, I’ll bite:

B9 d++ t++ k s+ f i o+ x+ e++ l c-

But does it cause problems fro this code that I refuse to use the term “blog”? This is only partially due to the fact that it sounds like something I might cough up on a Sunday morning when I’ve been out drinking and smoking too much the night before…

“Dude, you’re spittin’ big ol’ chunky blogs all over the floor.”

Awww, I remember when I used to be able to drink…

Anyway, I’m gone to Fresno for the next few days, so don’t expect updates or email. I haven’t seen Mark since New Year’s Day. Needless to say, I’m rather anxious. I may even get to fondle his sexy new toy…

Let There Be Idiots

This is a scream (thanks to Juan Felipe). I have to admit that it takes chutzpah to do something really stupid and possibly illegal, and then to threaten a lawsuit when someone calls you on it. I’ve had moron spammers threaten me for reporting them to the ISPs too. Usually makes me tremble in my boots. Really…

Send this one to the “give me a fucking break” file. The man sells his own NAME to Gucci and later retires, wealthier than I’ll ever be, complaining that the fashion industry is more about commerce than art…

Please. We’re not talking about someone who puts together a really cool outfit to go out to a club here; we’re talking about a major corporation. Yes, innovation is more essential in the fashion industry than in most others, and there may even be something vaguely artistic involved once in a while, but if no one buys any clothes, there’s no industry at all…

I wonder just which specific artistic statement was behind those cheap Yves St. Laurent hankies I used to buy my dad at Penney’s years ago?

Update

Y’know, I really should proofread once in a while. The earlier entry is now slightly edited so that it actually demonstrates a little bit of sentence structure. And makes some sense…

As of tonight, all the domains seem to have transferred successfully and email may be back to normal. I’ve even given Planet SOMA a very mild (almost imperceptibly so) facelift. The headlines which took so long to load have now been banished to an internal page and the counter (it was so, like, 1996, plus I couldn’t get it to add my total from the old server) is gone. The slightly ugly front page is temporary…

Looking forward to sleeping a whole lot tonight, and looking forward even more to the weekend. You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to the weekend…

I know it’s an easy target, but there’s still not much which is more funny than the “Pop-up Video” treatment of a Backstreet Boys ballad…

G’bye, Dave

Everyone at work was quite nice during my period of mourning today…

Folksy marketing aside, you have to respect someone who manged actually to build a fast food empire based as much on quality as on quantity. Wendy’s made its debut in the late 1960s, when the American fast food market was already saturated (pardon the pun); no one expected it to succeed. But an alternative to the miserable fare at other fast food chains proved very successful indeed…

And you also have to respect Dave Thomas for being considerably less of a horse’s ass than Ray Kroc (of McDonald’s) and for running a much tighter operation than any of the assorted half-assed custodians of Burger King…

Dave’s focus was always on the quality of operations, and as a somewhat avid reader of corporate and retail histories, his is the kind of story always I find most interesting. These are stories of actual individuals with visions that also just happened to be profitable. Unlike a Bill Gates, who largely succeeded through a series of coincidences and the exercise of questionable ethics, Dave Thomas was the sort who succeeded through actual innovation. You have to respect that too…

Now give me a #2 no pickle, please…

The Idiot Factor

It’s no secret that I have a very low tolerance for idiocy. Like the new California law which mandates that even stores which sell nothing but cigarettes (and don’t even allow minors to enter) may not allow any self-service sales of cigarettes. This is just plain asinine…

About the only effect the law has is to make the job of the minimum-wage clerk running the register a good bit more difficult, but he deserves it for trying to support himself by being a death merchant, I guess…

Of course, it also punishes customers who have to stand in line a few minutes longer, but they also deserve it for being filthy repulsive individuals who have the audactity to engage in an activity which is still legal, despite the best efforts of the State of California…

A clue: not one person is likely to suddenly give up smoking because of this law. Just who exactly benefits from it?

Even more annoying, though, are the belligerent idiots. You know the type: the ones who do something stupid and then get defensive and threatening when you call them on it, rather than realizing they screwed up, apologizing if needed, and moving on with their lives. They’re the ones who flip you off for blowing the horn when they cut you off or almost kill you on the freeway…

Like the nice lady who emailed me the other day looking for a job. I sent her a wry comment about how it might be prudent if she actually READ the sites she was trying to get hired by. It was neither profane nor abusive. Had I received the same message, I might have chuckled, said “oops” and let the matter drop. She didn’t. She got bitchy. Yes, she’s the one who fucked up, and she’s the one bitching at me about it…

I imagine she’s now trying to find ways to blame her mom, or General Motors, or the Democratic Party right now. Anything to avoid accepting responsibility for her own stupidity and lack of attention span…

Heck, at least I wrote back rather than just ignoring her. Which is what most other potential employers will be doing, I fear…

Geeky Weekend

If nothing else, it was a rather geeky weekend. I’m in the middle of transferring the last of my domains over to Pair; Planet SOMA should arrive there in 24-48 hours, and I’ll be through with Verio for good. I will be happy…

I’ve also transferred the contact forms on all the sites (as they all lived at Planet SOMA), fidgeted with the SSI (sometimes successfully and sometimes not), and made other tiny changes to my assorted Apache configuration files to clean up the mess that my hosting had become over the past year. If you run into anything strange, please let me know…

Other than the above, my weekend involved burgers at the Bullshead, getting pissed off that no store I went to had the TV I wanted in stock (although every one had it on display and Sears even had about ten of them on the floor), and the consumption of multiple doughnuts…

And yeah, I miss you too…