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2008

Let’s Active and Pylon

I saw Gravel Truck (which Mitch Easter describes as his “new Let’s Active cover band” and Pylon (who are occasionally calling themsleves “The Pylon Reenactment Society”) tonight.

I first saw Let’s Active twenty-five years ago last month, about two miles north of where tonight’s show was. I met both Mitch Easter and my future San Francisco roommate at that show. REM was there too, but I didn’t meet them. My first brush with Pylon goes back even farther, to my first college road trip in 1982, when I saw them open for Talking Heads at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta.

I think most of the people I used to know around these parts either don’t live here anymore or don’t go out much. That’s not surprising; this is the first time I’ve gone to a show (or a bar, for that matter) since I moved back three years ago. I did, however, run into my faculty advisor from my undergraduate days at UNCG, which was sort of odd. I’d forgotten that he’d been in grad school in Athens in the early 1980s; he was all excited about seeing Pylon again. And we were both excited (relieved?) that there were people there who were even older than we were.

It was a great show, and when I left, it was cooler outside than it had been in a month, and there was a breeze, and I was walking around downtown Winston-Salem, and it was really nice, and I was thinking I really need to vary my pattern and do something other than the same old things once in a while. Not bars or shows specfically (I just can’t stay up that late and, well, I don’t drink), but just any sort of thing that I don’t ususally do. A change of routine is a good thing, especially for someone like me, who’s in danger of becoming exceedingly boring.

Late night frolic in the bedroom

Last night about 3AM, I woke up needed to take a whiz. This is not in itself unusual. What was unusual was that I had apparently been dreaming I was in a motel room right before I woke up. When I got up, I couldn’t see anything but some light leakage around the windows, and I couldn’t remember how to get to the bathroom because I thought I was still in the motel room from my dream. I was stumbling around my bedroom, not knowing where the bloody bathroom was.

I didn’t really wake up and clue into where I was until I started feeling my way around the room and managed to find my way to one of the windows and open the curtain. At that point (maybe it was the light from outside), it finally hit me that I was in my own bedroom, that the bathroom was just a few feet away, and (best of all) that I remembered where it was. I was very relieved.

I hate those creepy half-asleep, half-awake experiences.

Randomly Tuesday

I’m back from my own road trip (photos and details to come), and very much intrigued by this forthcoming book about someone else’s road trip 35 years ago.

Random thoughts for a Tuesday morning:

  • My heart goes out to those poor upscale hiptsers who signed leases for overpriced apartments in Bed-Stuy only to find that the nightlife in the area didn’t live up to their expectations. Poor things.
  • Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to remember that White Castle locations in the midwest didn’t put ketchup on the burgers. The ones in New York apparently do, much to my recent dismay.
  • I’m not sure if I like the new Charlotte Observer website. The layout is OK, I guess. I think what bothers me is the logo. Or the lack of one, as it were. It looks like one of those cybersquatter placeholder sites.

In Jersey

Had a great time with Duncan and Rick, touring the Capital Region and briefly skirting the Adirondacks seeking a few remaining Grand Unions and an amazing abandoned Loblaw’s. Today, I took the self-guided Robert Moses Tour of New York City, followed by thirty hot, sticky minutes in Lower Manhattan.

Again, more soon.

In Schenectady

Alive and well and sitting on the couch at Duncan and Rick’s house in Schenectady. I’ll be venturing south on US1 through New Jersey and Pennsylvania tomorrow.

Did I mention I was finally on that long-promised road trip?

More later.

War with browsers

I’d mention that today’s frustration also extends to Microsloth Internet Exploder and its annoying tendency to make text do things you never told it to do (today, a couple of form elements started sponteneously centering themsleves without a relevant tag in sight), but that would be too easy.

Not, mind you, that the new Mac version of Firefox is a whole lot better. Especially if you don’t like random and unpredictable freezes, or do like having your computer be able to enter sleep mode.

Aaargh

Current mood: frustated.

I’ve spent a week dealing with a client situation that had any number of quick and simple solutions, but none of them could be implemented, because a corporate IT department got involved. As many of you know, this is the kiss of death for simplicity, as IT departments seem to exist for three reasons only:

  1. To provide a forum for pissing contests where distance and size are measured, and where the people who get pissed on are the ones who need help from the department permission to solve problems they’re quite capable of handling for themselves if given the chance.
  2. To answer 50% of all requests either with “we can’t do that because (insert bullshit reason they don’t think you’re smart enough to recognize as bullshit).”
  3. To answer the other 50% of requests by saying “we can only do that by implementing the most convlouted solution possible, preferably by installng some obscure and expensive utility on a new server that we’ll have to spend six months buying and testing and that don’t have the budget for. And by the way, it may also make the user experience a little clunky since they’ll need three passwords and a specific proprietary FTP client to use the email form.”

I could have had my client set up with a solution to this problem a week ago. Instead, I have a big pile of bullshit hanging over my head, most of which I can’t even bill for, because I’m not really doing anything other than sitting around waiting for them to make up their minds about how much more complicated they can make the whole fucking process. This is a really small and simple thing, the kind of thing that I probably would’ve billed an hour or two for, and they’re acting like I want to rewrite their whole bloody webserver from scratch, while creating free admin accounts for Ukranian spammers in the process.

Note to certain corporate IT drones: web designers nowadays are pretty gosh darn tech savvy and often know more about many aspects of webservers and PHP than you do. We also know when you’re bullshitting, overreacting, and overcomplicating, and we’re not afraid to share that knowlege with our clients, most of whom are as frustrated with you as we are — and are therefore inclined to trust us more than they trust you.

Sometimes people need to understand when a solution that works fine and causes no problems will suffice. The perfect “by the book” solution is not always necessary, particularly when it takes twenty times more effort to implement than the current problem demands. Yes, I know that complicated solutions are sometimes needed, but not for every small issue that arises.