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Bratty Coworkers

I should know better than to do favors for my co-workers. When you work largely with spoiled 12-year-olds (most of whom happen to be in their twenties and thirties), you can expect that any favor will result in either (a) your getting screamed at by the very person you were trying to help, or (b) an expectation that said favor will continue indefinitely, and will also breed newer and better favors…

Today’s result was (a). I went out of my way to help and I caught shit. To hell with them. They can fend for themselves, unless my intervention will somehow make MY life dramatically better or easier…

There. I feel better now…

Invoice Day. And Idiots.

I prefer not to count, thanks…

Anyhow, it’s invoice day. That usually puts me in a good mood, even though I won’t see any checks for about three weeks. If something doesn’t change, this might be my last really big invoice day for a while; it actually even covers some stuff dating back to last summer. There’s not a lot on the horizon right now…

Of course, it’s also bill-paying day. I’m not so fond of that part of the transaction…

Must be rough all over: I had someone email me asking me for a job at Planet SOMA today. I have to say I’d probably never hire someone who was incapable of determining that Planet SOMA is a personal website, especially when the page from which they contacted me says at the very top “this is a personal website”…

Remember when people used to be able to read and used to actually do so before embarrassing themselves?

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Response

OK, due to popular pressure (maybe that’s too strong a word), here’s here’s the rant about how I’d leave San Francisco in a minute if inertia and the weather didn’t continue to exert a certain pull. It’s not art, it makes no great statement, it’s not a dig at dotcommers nor yuppies, and much of it is applicable to any large urban area, not just San Francisco…

And no, I don’t really think it’s a great idea for 16-year-olds to smoke pot. I also don’t think that it is, by definition and in all cases, particularly abnormal nor indicative of some greater problem. Lots of 16-year-olds try it. Most of them grow out of it…

I’d already pretty much grown out of it by the time I turned 17. It takes some people a little longer, I guess, but still…