Month: January 2002

Adios 2001

With the exception of a major positive near the end of the year, 2001 pretty much sucked and I’m glad to see the back of it. It’s hard to be sentimental about a year where one of your oldest friends dies, you spend time in the hospital with heart problems, your country is attacked by terrorists, and Bravo replaces “St. Elsewhere” reruns with “Thirtysomething” reruns…

That’s not to say the whole year was all bad. I met some great people (notably Becky, PJ, Sparky, Juan Felipe, and the aforementioned Mark), went some great places (the road trip from hell, Fresno, and more), and actually got things accomplished. I put together a lot of websites, one of my own had a record traffic day, and I somehow managed to support myself…

But what a great end to the year, depsite the fact that I was sort of sick, Mark was sicker still, and even Rick was sick for a while. I had great visitors, great food (which may explain the rash of stomach-related illnesses), great snogging, and I even found a used copy of “Willie Wonka” on DVD…

As I move into 2002, my ticker’s still a little problematic, I’m planning to quit smoking by the end of the month, I’m pondering how to support myself this year, and I’m entering a bit of uncharted territory in my personal life. And I’m pretty excited about all of it…

Happy New Year, and thanks to everyone who’s hung around thus far…

TV for a New Year

NBC has now moved its affiliation from KRON to KNTV and, despite the hype from the newspapers and the stations involved, the world has not suddenly come to an end. As a matter of fact, I suspect that few people’s lives have been impacted in any meaningful way…

But it was sort of cute watching the countdown last night as Jay Leno started. I imagine that the studio audience in Burbank (where they get neither station) could barely conceal its enthusiasm…

At least some things never change for long: starting next week, we’re back to three Simpsons reruns a day on KBHK…

Hernias for All

How’s this for a creepy New Year’s Eve: Rick and my dad BOTH got hernias on New Year’s Eve and BOTH went to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Makes a little stomach distress at my house seem pretty tame by comparison…

Anyway, more Christmas pictures here and here. In case you missed ’em, mine are here and here…

Plagerism?

Say you’re doing a web search looking for some information. In the course of this research, you find a cached copy on Google of a published article from a recently-demised business weekly. The author of said article (a college professor, professional writer, and former Libertarian gubernatorial candidate in a certain southern state) might very arguably have plagiarized your work, quoting some passages almost verbatim and all without attribution.

How exactly do you express your displeasure to this individual? He was presumably compensated for his “work” and, given his profession, should presumably “know better”. Is it worth seeking him out, if only to let him know what an asshole he is?

Better

I’m pleased to announce that, as of tonight, my mild stomach distress is all gone and everything’s solid as a rock. You may read that last statement as a metaphor or as too much information, at your sole discretion…

And I’m sorry not everyone can say the same…

Speaking of sorry, I’m very sorry to have purchased a Chronicle today and noticed that Zippy is no longer there. At the rate it’s going, the Incredible Shrinking Chron will soon be even smaller and more pointless than the Examiner, which ain’t easy…

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…

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…

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…

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?

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…

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…

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…

Urban Blah

Some days I have a morning like I had today, and I get to thinking that for half a dollar, I’d move out of San Francisco tomorrow. Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, but being a resident of a large, urban area seems less and less worth the effort with each passing year…

it’s more pronounced since I’ve been spending so much time in the relative sanity of the Central Valley the last few months, but it’s been building for quite a while. There’s just not much here which excites me enough to compensate for the fact that living in a crowded, compact place like San Francisco is a bit of a pain in the ass…

I crave the ability to park within a block of my house. And to actually HAVE a house, rather than to pay rent which would cover a nice mortgage anyplace else. I fantasize about not having to stand in long lines everyplace and not ending up in a homicidal rage if I decide to go to the Safeway earlier than 10PM…

I no longer want to wait 45 minutes for buses which are supposed to run at 10-minute intervals, nor to be packed into these buses like sardines with people who never learned the basics of personal hygeine and etiquette. I’m tired of being panhandled twice in every block and of never being able to light a cigarette without some complete stranger walking up and assuming I owe him one too…

I am not impressed with the ability to walk to a corner store and pay nine dollars for a box of stale corn flakes and four dollars for a quart of curdled milk. I am also unimpressed with the array of pretentious and overpriced restaurants at my disposal. The fact that I can walk a block and have sex with a speed freak in a dark bar also holds very little charm anymore…

The cable sucks. The newspaper sucks. Getting from point A to point B is difficult enough, and dealing with point B once you arrive is even worse. There WILL be a line, no matter what the establishment, and it WILL be full of people in big, ugly square-toed shoes who have “issues” with everything from the service to the chemical content of their braised tofu to their parents, and will spend ten minutes discussing these issues in the most annoying and long-winded terms possible, everyone else in line be damned…

I want to pay reasonable amounts for groceries and gas (and housing). I want to go to Target on a whim without it seeming like an expedition to Mars, and with the assumption that I’ll be able to splash down somewhere near where I live when I get back. And I want never to get on a bus again unless it’s by my choice and at my leisure.

I imagine I’ll get arguments from the “urban sophisticates” who believe all civilization ends at the SF city limits (or even worse, at Twin Peaks and Bernal Heights). Tough. I don’t go to art museums nor to the symphony. I don’t shop at any of the trendy boutiques in Union Square. I frankly don’t care how much of a “gay community” I’m surrounded by. I don’t go to nightclubs with $15 covers and $20 cocktails. My lifestyle does not require a large selection of headshops, leather shops, and gourmet cookware stores. I do not crave constant interaction with “colorful” (read “crazy”) people, and I do not believe that stepping in human excrement or syringes on the street adds anything particularly beneficial to my life…

There’s basically almost nothing I do here which I couldn’t do just about as efficiently in any mid-sized city in the country. So why I am I here? Inertia and the weather. That’s about it, and they’re both losing their grip on me…

Barter

You have to love the idea of barter, which is the system by which I may ultimately end up paying my cardiologist bills. Design a website and get your ticker serviced in return. Everyone wins, right? I love my cardiologist, and I also love his slightly salty account manager for suggesting something I’d actually proposed up front six months ago…

For those who care, my condition has, as of today, been deemed not life-threatening nor terribly debilitating, and I could continue along with my life pretty much just fine if I kept up with the medication and blood testing. But that’s obviously not the ideal ssituation, which is why I’m getting so frsutrated at the lack of response from my potential new (and somewhat pricey) insurance carrier…

But if any of you were worried I might keel over and die at any moment, you can probably stop now. If I do happen to keel over and die, it probably won’t be related to my current heart and thyroid problems. That’s not to say that all the nagging (if relatively mild) side effects of the drugs aren’t continuing to get on my nerves. And I sure would like a beer. I meant to mention that to the doctor today…

All the same, it beats continually sweating and panting and dealing with my body thinking it’s on speed all the time because my thyroid doesn’t know when to say “when”…

Strange day. I didn’t expect to be reading two different articles about road reflectors in two different newspapers on two different ends of the country all in the same day…

Nor did I expect the Symbionese Liberation Army to lead the 6:00 news tonight. Can we maybe expect the 10:00 news to be all about Squeaky Fromme? Or maybe some newspaper articles about the controversy surrounding “Roots”. Oh, wait…

Thursday Night

Should I have found it more disconcerting that there was a large pigeon flying around the Safeway tonight or that no one much seemed to care that there was a large pigeon flying around the Safeway tonight?

Ahh, Thursday night. Which means I can sleep as long as I want tonight and watch a surprisingly good bunch of movies tomorrow. Even better, it means a visit from Mark tomorrow evening, along with presumably the traditional Friday night dinner with Dan and Jamie…

I had more ideas for filling this space tonight, but I’m going to get horizontal now, and I’ve yet to purchase a wireless keyboard…

Randomly Monday

Pretty damned good weekend: a visit from my favorite boy, I nearly tripled my DVD collection, and I have a new mouse. Yes, everything’s listed in order of priority, and the mouse is definitely at the bottom, as I haven’t decided if I like it yet or not. Dreamweaver doesn’t seem to care for it much at all…

Y’know, as a confirmed hermit, it’s really unusual for me to spend so much time with any one person. It’s even more unusual for me to find myself wishing I could spend even more time with him. I’m not sure what this means…

OK. I have a pretty good idea what it means…

Random thoughts for a Monday afternoon:

  • I need to avoid spending significant parts of two consecutive days in Berkeley; I’m stifling a significant desire to beat up some hippies right now. Yes, I turn into a reactionary right-winger every time I’m in Berkeley. Any sane person would.
  • The lack of communication skills and systems may be the single largest cause of inefficiency in corporate America today; I realized this today as five different people showed up for a training class at five different (incorrect) combinations of time and address. I had the correct time but the wrong address. My co-worker (with the same supervisor as me) had the wrong time AND address.
  • Leave it to the Examiner to present a decade-old issue as hot breaking news. Wow. Fags are doing too much speed and it’s causing problems. Who knew?
  • A new almanac is a wonderful thing.
  • Zippy is back in the Chronicle. Yay.
  • Why do so many commercially-released DVDs have such low audio levels? I’m talking REALLY low here.

Great Week

Monday just keeps getting better. There was the miscommunication (already mentioned), getting locked out of my apartment (forgot about that earlier), and now, upon going out to move my car, I just realized that my battery’s dead because my trunk caught and didn’t shut all the way yesterday, causing the light to stay on for about 30 hours…

It’s shaping up to be just a great week. I’m going to bed now…

Lousy Logo

Supposing you have a client for whom you’ve been working for several years. Suddenly this client decides out of the blue to change its logo. You see this new logo and realize it looks like something created by a little old lady on a computer she bought yesterday, using Microsoft Works with nothing but pre-installed Windows system fonts. In short, it’s amateurish as hell and it’s really ugly, like something that should only be printed on a cheap plastic sign for a nail salon in a strip mall in Fremont.

Considering that image is very important in this client’s industry, how do you make your feelings known to said client? Or do you? Would it be pushy to suggest that you could spend about five minutes and come up with something much better? For free, if necessary?

Sweeps

John Edward does a psychic reading (or whatever the hell kind of reading he does) on Ricki Lake, who says “I was traumatized by that”, probably more than once. Oh God, spare me…

The promos for February sweeps have started…

Between that and watching John Walker Lindh’s parents tell everyone how much their son loves his country and (earlier) how he’s just a boy (at 20) and not responsible for any of his actions, I’ve almost lost my lunch twice today. And I haven’t even had any lunch yet…

Email and work today. Mark tomorrow. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to the latter more than the former…

Our Mayor Is an Idiot

San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, quoted in today’s Chronicle:

“You know I do talk to God regularly. I get down on my knees and I pray and I pray — and then God comes to me and says, ‘Yes, Mister Willie?'”

I’m not religious, and therefore I can’t really call this “blasphemous”, but if I were a politician who (a) was widely regarded as extremely arrogant, and (b) derived a large part of my continuing support from African American churches and religious leaders, I think I might have caught myself before making this particular little joke…

Having had some religious indoctrination as a child, I can tell you this is several points more offensive to your average Christian than John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment from the 1960s. If this were just about anyplace but SF, the death threats would have commenced immediately…

Here, of course, it was the last paragraph of the second section of a running column. Which would probably be appropriate, if it weren’t such a fucking stupid thing to say given Willie’s position…

It never fails to amaze me how often Willie Brown, who basically defines the cliché of a crooked, corrupt machine politician, can show so little political savvy sometimes. He may not have to answer to God, but he could find himself answering to a great many pious little old church ladies (who used to be among his most enthusiastic supporters) soon…

Anyway, great weekend, crappy Monday, and I hope I’m not coming down with a little bug. No snow is expected tonight in SF proper, for those of you who are keeping score. But I did just have a self-inflicted power outage when I made the mistake of turning on the microwave and the space heater at the same time…

TV Truck

So NBC, faced with what seems to be a woefully inadequate new affiliate in one of the largest TV markets in the country, is now considering doing it the old-fashioned way: delivering its programming to certain San Francisco neighborhoods via truck…

I remember summertime when I was a kid. The NBC truck showed up every afternoon about 2:00. It was a glorious sight with that peacock logo and that hypnotic bell playing the NBC jingle. All the kids in the neighborhood would crowd around, hoping they had enough change in their pockets for a “Sanford and Son” or maybe a “Chico and the Man” or two. Sometimes the driver would throw in an “Adam 12” rerun for free…

But then there was that scandal in 1982, when the new driver invited one little boy inside the truck and gave him a “Love Sydney” for free. After that, Greensboro banned door-to-door delivery of network TV programming, athough I think some syndicated shows are still delivered by bicycle in areas with low cable penetration…

it’s nice to see a big, cosmopolitan city like San Francisco return to such simple old-timey pleasures, though…