Year: 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…