Journals : 2001 : March
1 March 2001 | Link this
It's going to be a long month. Three sites in mid-redesign, one starting from scratch, one porn series in mid-bang, and a mad rush to finish it all before taking a three-week vacation in April. I probably won't be very chatty for a while. And I'll probably be cranky when you hear from me at all. Don't say you weren't warned...
Yeah, like I'm ever NOT cranky...
Actually, I was almost giddy a few minutes ago. I've made an important discovery: an entire block on a South of Market alley with NO PARKING RESTRICTIONS. None. No time limits, no curbs of any color, no residential permit requirements, and (get this) no street cleaning...
In theory, I could legally leave my car there until the end of time. Or until the Department of Parking and Traffic catches on. Which will be soon, I imagine, as this is likely one of the only streets in the whole damned city where parking is completely unregulated...
And no, I'm not revealing the location....
5 March 2001 | Link this
In case anyone was wondering, I'm still here. More soon...
5 March 2001 Later
OK. Where was I?
Juan Felipe was here on Friday, which made for a more entertaining than usual afternoon. We ate lunch. We walked around in the Mission. We talked about our parents. I like him. I knew I would somehow...
Photos above are from my new favorite Italian restaurant in Oakland. They're there because I like the place, because I love the grape chandalier, and because I don't really have too much else to say today other than that it rained this weekend. A lot. I just sort of watched it, which is probably why I feel so groggy today. Who says you have to get drunk to have a lost weekend?
Random unrelated thing I don't understand today: why will a guy who has no problem letting you spooge in his mouth shy away from a friendly kiss afterward?
5 March 2001 Even Later
Actually, I misspoke before. I have plenty to say, but I don't much feel like saying any of it. Be relieved...
6 March 2001 | Link this
Another obnoxious unscientific test (courtesy of Dan). I got a 45, placing me once again in the very same boring middle I always manage to find. God knows I'd hate to be too straight or too gay. I stay awake nights worrying about it...
Bad news of the day: Hamburger Mary's has been purchased by the guy who owns Harvey's on Castro Street. I can scarcely imagine the potential horrors to be inflicted upon this South of Market institution in the coming months. I can only predict it will be brighter, much more "gay", and unspeakably boring. Blecch...
Speaking of food, two people I work with have expressed surprise this week upon learning that I cook. Is that good, bad, or just a sign that I eat crap at lunch?
Other common misconceptions about yer humble host (a continuing series):
- That I spend a significant portion of my life trolling for sex in Folsom Street sex clubs and backroom bars.
- That I spend hours online every day (possibly doing the same thing).
- That I'm a "bear" or that I'm "into leather".
- That I eat a steady diet of fast food seven days a week.
- That I have a particularly exciting or interesting life.
- That I will believe a piece of email is "urgent" just because it's marked that way.
I have a headache. I will stop now...
7 March 2001 | Link this
My three most powerful memories of junior high:
- Finding a spot behind the cafeteria building at lunch and sitting there alone so that no one would see me and realize I had no friends to eat with or talk to.
- Carrying all my books and my dirty gym clothes around with me all day because I couldn't work the locker and was petrified of asking for help.
- Walking four miles to school one morning because my dad couldn't drive me and I couldn't cope with the fact that no one on the bus was going to let me sit with them.
Reading about the latest high school shooting incidents (a disturbingly common pastime lately) always gets me a bit reflective about my own teen years. Why? Simply because, under slightly different circumstances, I could have been that unpopular, isolated kid doing the shooting.
It wasn't that I didn't have many friends in junior high. I could have dealt with that. My problem was that I didn't have ANY friends, not even of the similarly unpopular "reject" variety. I even felt inadequate even compared to the loser kids on the ABC Afterschool Special; at least they had Kristy McNichol or Leif Garrett on their side.
At school, I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't go to after-school events or the mall because I didn't want everyone to see me by myself. I looked up the phone numbers of classmates I barely knew (and would never call) just to write them down in an address book I was given. I never spoke to anyone first, and only mumbled responses when someone spoke to me. I was embarrassed by my voice, my walk, my clothes, everything.
I often feigned illness for a week at a time, because I just couldn't cope with school. I thought about suicide, about ways I could make my parents move so I could "start over", and about any number of ways I could make people notice me in any way at all, especially in a manner which didn't involve snickering or open taunting.
I'm not sure why some kids turn out so isolated and bitter -- and sometimes so angry. I was painfully shy and lacked social skills. I had no talent for sports and was a "brain". But other kids like this manage at least to find a few like-minded friends. Why didn't I?
And why did I somehow manage not to kill all my classmates? I hated them and I knew where to find my dad's gun. But I'd also convinced myself that I was the one with the problem, not my school chums. And frankly, I was a bit of a wimp. I'd never even been in a fistfight. Still haven't.
But if things had been a little different, who knows what might have happened?
Eventually, I coped by dumbing down a little, by getting in some trouble, and by hanging out with the bad kids. My "in" was smoking and a talent for forging sick notes and hall passes. It's unfortunate that it had to happen that way, but I don't regret it. Otherwise, I most likely would have done myself in before my sixteenth birthday.
I'm 36 now. I have friends. I sometimes even engage in social activities. I'm OK now.
But I'm still lacking in social skills and I still spend most of my time alone. I get embarrassed doing things like yelling "back door" when the bus driver doesn't open it at my stop. I rarely initiate a telephone conversation except with my closest friends or for business purposes. I don't like crowds, and I'm uncomfortable walking up to a group of people I know for fear I'd be jumping in unwanted.
And I sometimes still feel like a lonely 13-year-old who's embarrassed that everyone is looking at him and laughing at him for being dorky and all alone. I'm just glad I no longer see this as a reason to kill anyone. Myself included.
I promise to return to my usual sarcastic tone tomorrow. Sorry if this was a bit of a downer...
7 March 2001 Later
Becky, thanks for sending this. Good timing, too...
8 March 2001 | Link this
In my estimation, there are two glaring casualties of the "digital revolution". The first, of course, is San Francisco. The second big loss, however, is Radio Shack. It's still here, of course, but it just won't ever be quite the same again.
What a wonderful thing Radio Shack used to be. You could wander in with the most obscure request and be helped pretty quickly by a rumpled-looking, slightly overweight guy with a pocket protector who really knew his shit. His customer service skills may have been lacking, but he could carry it off. He probably knew more tan you did.
There was an art to it, of course. If you knew exactly what you wanted and how to ask for it, you were all set. He'd walk over to the left rear wall, pull it off a hook, make out a handwritten sales slip for 89 cents, and send you on your way.
If you were less sure of yourself and didn't know the jargon (e.g. you called your turntable a "record player"), things were a little trickier. You'd still get what you wanted, but not until you'd learned a little about electronics, and maybe joined the Battery of the Month Club.
Now, of course, these rumpled guys have well-paying jobs which don't involve discussing the superior performance of Realistic™ audio components or helping teenagers steal HBO. Their replacements at Radio Shack are, ummm, not exactly brain surgeons. Hell, they don't even know what brain surgery IS. And they sure don't know what you mean when you ask for an RJ-45 female to DB-25 male adapter.
Nor do they make up for this lack of knowlege with superior customer service skills. But what can you expect for nine bucks an hour? Been to Kinko's lately?
8 March 2001 Later| Link this
Ooh. New Fetch beta. Windoze types and those who don't get all squishy about cool FTP clients may skip that link...
8 March 2001 Later Still | Link this
Jot was way cooler than Davey. But you could catch them both here when I was growing up...
8 March 2001 Way Later | Link this
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...
9 March 2001 | Link this
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?
10 March 2001 | Link this
Thanks Mark. I wanted to stay up all night playing this. Really. Damn you...
I stumped it too, by being Chet, the hippie son from "Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home". I'd provide a link, but I'd rather go to bed. The picture above is all you get...
I haven't chosen an appropriate dictator yet...
11 March 2001 | Link this
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...
12 March 2001 | Link this
Tonight's KRON news mentioned a new survey of American cities and their relative merits for female residents. Two hundred cities were surveyed. According to the reporter, several Bay Area cities scored in the 150th percentile. This is apparently a bad thing...
Methinks she needs to look up the usage and defintion of the term "percentile". She'd probably learn that there's no such thing as the 150th percentile, but that, if there were, it would be a pretty phenomenal place to be. Scoring 150th out of 200 does not put one in the 150th percentile; it puts one in the 25th percentile...
Sorry. I was a social science major. Sloppy statistics and sloppy reporting both annoy me no end...
The new scanner has now been joined by a new (used) monitor and the long-awaited RAM is arriving tomorrow. I may never leave my house again...
13 March 2001 | Link this
I can't sleep. Indulge me. It's been several months since I've done one of these...
Things to be worried about at 1:30 in the morning:
- I'm 36 years old and I'm no closer to knowing what I want to be when I grow up than I was at age 18. I'm coasting along just fine, but with no specific long-term goal nor passion.
- I'm not convinced that I have much to offer a prospective employer. I know a little about a lot of things, but I'm not an expert at much of anything.
- I'm even less convinced that I have much to offer a prospective boyfriend, sex partner, or even a casual acquaintance. And I'm not sure that I care, anyhow.
- My parents aren't going to be around forever. I live on the other end of the country, and I see them about once a year.
- I'm smoking more and getting out of the house less.
- I have a lot of work I should be doing. I'm not doing much of it. Nor much of anything else.
- I think that my favorite Stouffer's Hearty Portions entree is about to be discontinued.
I am, however, optimistic that I'll be sleeping soon and that I won't be thinking about any of these things tomorrow. But it might do me more good to think about them during the day once in a while...
13 March 2001 Later | Link this
Music. It used to be one of the primary ways by which I defined myself, although it was usually more about what I hated than what I liked.
I guess it still is, in a way. But I'm not really an active consumer now. I don't buy music. I don't keep up with who's who and what's what. I'm not constantly looking for something new. I listen to songs. I like some of them and I hate even more of them. And then I'm done with it.
Music has become a somewhat passive, background sort of thing for me, with certain excpetions. And the idea of owning music was never quite the same after I stopped being the music director at my college radio station. In other words, after everything stopped being free. It's gone downhill for me ever since.
Which is why I like the idea of Napster, but also see a very real problem with it. Yes, many people sample music there, which they may very well purchase at some later point. But I have a sneaking supspicion that more people are looking for something specific that they really want to hear but really don't want to buy. Ever.
Anyhow, that's what I'd use it for, given a fast enough connection to make it worth the effort.
15 March 2001 | Link this
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?
15 March 2001 Later | Link this
Is it just me, or does a Donny Osmond special on KQED sound just about as out of place as a Lifetime special called "Intimate Portrait: Fred Durst" might?
16 March 2001 | Link this
Mildly disturbing realization of the day: if you do a Google search on Double R Bar Burger, one of my pages is the first listing, and this is one of the only six others. Bodes well for me if I ever decide to do a site on the history of Roy Rogers Resturants, huh?
Working like a dog. Hating this weekend. Loving this...
18 March 2001 | Link this
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...
19 March 2001 | Link this
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...
24 March 2001 | Link this
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.
25 March 2001 | Link this
Best way to eliminate frustration on Sunday night: have a nice boy copulate you orally in a semi-public setting while several other cute boys watch. Surreptitiously, of course...
Second best way: return dirty videos to the video store and, while there, watch the very queer clerk explain to a very non-queer woman how to use the masturbatory aid she's buying for her boyfriend. Notice upon leaving that said boyfriend is waiting in the car outside and is probably getting revenge for the time she made him buy tampons for her at the Safeway...
Honorable mention: visualize the crocheted apron Becky has offered to make for your new career as a Towerette...
27 March 2001 | Link this
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?
29 March 2001 | Link this
In less than 24 hours I will disappear for three weeks. I make no promises that there will be updates until I get back. I make no promises that I'll be answering any email until I get back. On the other hand, I also make no promises that I WON'T be doing either of these things...
What I will definitely be doing is visiting Mom and Dad. And eating well. And visiting numerous supermarkets and thrift stores, and the occasional roadside diner. And hopefully seeing Duncan and Rick, PJ, Becky, and assorted other people without websites. Not to mention Stan and Eugene in San Diego, one of whom will have temporary custody of my car.
Apologies to anyone whose email remains unanswered as I depart. You can't possibly imagine how much the past three weeks have sucked...
Note to cyber-stalkers: look for me in Greensboro, Charlotte, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Atlanta, and maybe DC. I'll be travelling US 29 rather than I-85, just because that's what I do...
Note to potential thieves: the apartment is being watched. Please don't throw any wild parties while I'm gone. Lock the doors. And turn off some of those lights, dammit...