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A Thankless Job

I warned that I wouldn’t be very chatty this month, what with all the work I have piled up before my trip back east and all. But then I discovered something: being chatty allows me to avoid doing any of that work for just a little while longer. Cool, huh?

Annoyance du jour: people who email me asking for help with a project, essay, or whatever, and then don’t even bother to thank me after I respond with the information they sought. I know I may not be the best person to complain about breeches of email etiquette, but jeez…

A good portion of the time, the information requested is peripherally-related (at best) to information contained on my sites. Still, I try my damnedest, and almost always respond in some way. And about half the time, the person on the other end even thanks me. Which is a pretty fucking pitiful rate, I think…

Note to assorted high school and college students: I am not getting paid to do your homework for you. I am helping you because I’m a nice guy (no matter what people say). So the least you can do is have the common courtesy to express some appreciation. If you don’t, you may find yourself involuntarily subscribed to several random mailing lists on the subject of etiquette…

OK. I’m kidding about the last part. Really…

Besides. most of the offenders won’t know about this threat, because they never read a damned thing but the one page Yahoo directed them to. Context is a concept surprisingly few web-surfers seem to comprehend. Otherwise they’d probably have found what they were looking for anyway…

TV Party

One of those interesting web kinda things: I find this site for a link in yesterday’s journal entry. After digging around a bit, I realize both that I know the guy who runs it from many years ago, and that it originates in my home town. Cool. Someone else to hang out with when I go home next month…

And he’s looking for a copy of the Valleydale commercial now too. Yes, I promise to stop writing about that soon…

My God. Could it be possible that it’s really not going to rain this weekend?

New Scanner

There’s a new scanner on my desk. Tiny. Nice. It’s approximately a tenth of the size of the old one I bought used last year (which never really quite worked anyway). Other than that, and finally getting out of the house on the first non-rainy Saturday afternoon in about a year, it’s been a remarkably uneventful weekend…

I did finally get past my writer’s block and get Adam and Eric a litte farther down the road to, ummm, brotherly love. But you’ll have to pay someone else to read about that…

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?

Mystery Solved

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…