Category: Technology

Interviewed

Interviewed. Me. Imagine that. And with only one inconsequential misinterpretation regariding hits…


Still life with Kleenex, Alka Seltzer, and orange juice (Me, 1996)

So the time has finally come. I’ve managed to develop that annual nastiest cold in the world. Maybe even the worst cold in a couple of years. Oddly enough, this one seems to have moved from my chest to my head, instead of vice versa which is my usual pattern. It kept me away from my part-time job today (like that’s particularly difficult…) but it didn’t stop me from looking like a heroin addict at a meeting about some freelance work.

What really sucks about being sick in San Francisco in February, though, is having to drag your ass out in the freezing cold and pouring rain to move your car on street cleaning night. Of course, just about anyplace else, the cold would be colder and the rain would be harder, so I guess I shouldn’t bitch.

But I’m sick and I’m cranky. I’ll bitch if I goddamn well please. Why should this be different from ny other day?

Things I love today:

Things I hate today:

    • Kleenex rash.
  • That useless, tough, taste-free corned beef brisket I bought at Safeway this weekend.
  • The aroma of that homeless guy who sat down next to me at lunch today.

Surreal Things, Love, and Hate

I didn’t think it could get much more surreal than hearing “Stairway to Heaven” on a pipe organ in a pizza parlor on Friday night. I was wrong.

I was changing channels tonight and something caught my eye on one of the local PBS stations: a rerun of “The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show” from about 1961. The strange special effects in the first musical number were bizarre enough, with singers “floating” against a blue sky background (body parts kept disappearing). The “Peanuts” opening sequence as a little odd as well.

Midway through the show, though, came the piece de resistance: Ernie Ford and Tony Bennett and a full orchestra singing Hank Williams songs. This was about a strange as it gets. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” with a horn section was followed by “Jambalaya” with both the horn section and a collection of about 15 perky white singers in evening wear. All in brilliant, headache-inducing color on semi-demagnetized 2-inch videotape.

I sort of hoped it would all end in a commercial for Martha White Flour, but it didn’t…

Things I love today:

Things I hate today:

  • This chest cold, which is showing signs of getting nastier and nastier (no doubt spurred on by cheap cigarettes in San Bruno).
  • Hot, sticky weather in February.
  • Waiting until the last minute to pay my car insurance and finding AAA closed for the holiday.

Randomly Friday

Lifestyle links du jour:

And now, our regularly scheduled journal entry…

I was home sick most of the day yesterday. I’m over it now, but I was feeling moderately crappy, an definitely felt no urge to drg my ass to the evil part-time job. So I watched movies and TV all day. I sat through an entire half hour of Misterogers Neighborhood. It’s been a long time, but I still instinctively recognized that musics and I knew that we were about to go to the Land of Make Believe when he started rolling that toy trolley across the table. I still got a little excited too. Should that worry me?

I also started the tedious process of teaching myself both Dreamweaver and Adobe Golive. And the other tedious process of doing my annual pruning and re-modeling of Planet SOMA.

The re-modeling won’t be major; I’ve fiddled with the design enough over the past year and I like it the way it is. But I’ll be eliminating lots of older, weaker, and out of date pages. Some of them are already gone, the seriously outdated sex club guide being one of the first to go. Some older rants are being edited and dropped into the journals. The road trips are being edited as well, in hopes that I might actually go on a new one sometime soon.

Of course, deleting pages is not difficult. Deleting all the links to them is, especially when there are several hundred pages on the site.

I’m also working on the long-overdue new issue of Did You Bring Bottles. Stories and pictures are, once again, actively solicited. In addition to a few more pages on the Safeway saga, I’ll be starting an A&P section. Soon.

It’s time for lunch now, methinks…

Randomly Thursday

Tuesday’s urgent plea about ATM Deluxe produced not one, but two replies from Planet SOMA readers at Adobe. Oh, the power of the Internet. Now, if I could just develop a fan base among people who work at RAM factories…

I like Verdana today. Maybe you could tell by its proliferation on the front page. I think I’ll be changing all those “arial,helvetica,geneva” tags to “verdana, arial,geneva” soon. I also started liking today’s journal entry on the evils of historic preservation so much that I made it into its own page.

And now I have nothing much else to say. Actually, I have plenty to say. I’m just too damned tired to say any of it. Seems I’m tired a lot lately. Probably because I’m working a lot and (more recently) because I’m infatuated with the new computer. The complete lack of exercise might play a part as well.

Damn. There’s the garbage men. Back in a second.

OK. Trash dutifully discarded.

Strange. I’ve been living in the same apartment and sleeping in the same bedroom since 1992 and I just now noticed that my bedroom window is about an inch out of plumb from top to bottom. It’s not a problem (nor a big surprise given a wood frame building in earthquake country). It’s just odd that I never noticed before.

Twenty-two minutes ’til the Simpsons. I’m out of creative ideas. I’m tired. But I keep typing. Most likely, this is because I just hate it when the left column is significantly longer than the right one. I’m very anal about balance. My mom says it’s because she passed her Libra blood on to me. I don’t buy it, though.

Anyway, link du jour should fill out the page:

G’night…

Transitions

So I know there’s someone at Adobe Systems who reads Planet SOMA with some regularity. I can tell from my stats. Well, dear friend, the time has come for you to reveal yourself. Why? Because I’d like to get to know you better. To talk. To hang out. Maybe even to share a bowl of grits. And because I’m in desperate need of ATM Deluxe 4.5.2 (for Mac, as if there were any question) and I have absolutely no intention of shelling out 65 bucks.

How much do i love my new G4? Everything’s so much faster. Web browsing is fun again. I can use actual new versions of programs like Photoshop and Flash, although I promise to spare you any trace of animations or roll-over buttons, the latter because I still hate them with all my might.

The only problems so far have been my lack of font mangement and one unpleasant software conflict. Note to all who might consider it: do NOT install ATM Deluxe 4 on top of Mac OS9. Just don’t. Trust me on this one. And, of course, the new Mac keyboards and mice just plain suck, but that will be fixed soon (after shelling out another hundred bucks or so, alas). Oh, and did I mention that new Macs finally use actual normal VGA monitors? This is great unless you happen to have an old Mac monitor from the days of “we don’t need your stinkin’ standards”. Thanks to Dan for help with this mini-crisis.

All in all, though, I’m pretty damned happy. I keep dancing around the empty boxes chanting “I have a new computer. La la la la la la.”


The machine formerly known as “my computer”…

And what of my old machine? She’s still plugged in, although not on my desk anymore. There are lots more files to be moved, and she still contains the only video capture card in the house. But soon, I guess she’ll become my “kitchen Mac” relegated to serving up recipes and some occasional cooking music. I’m still sort of attached to her and I can’t imagine anyone would want the damned thing, despite its place in web history. And no, I wasn’t being serious about the”web history” part, dammit. I’m not THAT self-obsessed.

Oh, and I bought a new TV too, but it rather pales in comparison, being a $129 model from Sears and all. The sound is just plain awful, and I’m not exactly a connoisseur to begin with…

Bland, Slimy, and Annoying

Why is it that every time I see or hear the disposable sounds of the Grammy-nominated Backstreet Boys, I get this uncontrollable craving for a big ol’ mayonnaise and Velveeta sandwich on white bread? Has anyone else had this problem?

While I’m at it, does anyone else find this whole boy band thing to be a big insult to such classic boy bands as the Osmonds or New Kids on the Block? And has anyone else accidentally caught Joey McIntyre on one of his recent VH-1/MTV guest appearances and wondered at what a slimewad he seems to have become?

Speaking of slimewads, has anyone visited Cybersocket lately? I don’t recommend it; it’s a stupid publication with an ugly website. Even better, it features misleading descriptions of sites. Holy Titclamps, for example, is a “celebrity gossip” site while Planet SOMA is a big promoter of “queer culture”. I love the way that professional homosexuals try to re-work the universe to fit their narrow view thereof. If anything, my site’s function is to convince the world what a complete crock of shit the idea of “queer culture” is.

The above would be worth a brief chuckle if these assholes also didn’t keep spamming me (six messages yesterday) and telling me it wasn’t spam because I’d signed up for their “mailing list” Of course, this is bullshit, since the spam comes to specific addresses they harvested from my site and don’t use otherwise. It’s idiots like these who are responsible for the fact that I don’t have direct email links on the site anymore.

Other things I hate today, dammit:

  • All versions of Microsloth Word released after version 5.1 for Mac in 1992. It’s been downhill ever since for this increasingly bloated piece of crap which now does just about everything badly, except for word processing, which it barely seems to do at all.
  • A 15% price increase on Sausage McMuffins.
  • Radio stations with formats like “smooth jazz”, “new country”, and “the hits of the 70s and 80s with no rap, metal, or spontaneity”. OK, I made up the “spontaneity” part.
  • Those stupid “people do” Chevron commercials (still).

Links du jour:

New G4?

I’m thinking of buying a new computer. Of course, I’ve been thinking of buying a new computer for a year, but this time I’m thinking of buying one this very week, since I’ve found a nice new G4 on sale for about $1300. Strangely enough, this will be considerably less than I spent for much less machine four years ago.

Of course, my move into the USB universe will require new peripherals, etc., so it’s not like I’ll get off quite as cheaply as the above might suggest. But it sure would be nice to be able to open big files and not to worry (for a while at least) about cataclysmic disasters involving my hard drive. It would be great to get DSL without having to buy a new card and without worrying whether it would do any good with my wheezing old 1995 machine.

And why not spend all this money right now? My finances are always precarious, but this way I’d be broke with a much faster computer. That’s an improvement, right?

Maybe it’s time for the first annual Planet SOMA Pledge Drive. I could insert pledge breaks right in the middle of all my most popular pages, making appeals to guilt and offering overpriced premiums. For a $10 pledge, I could offer an autographed JPEG. For $25, a color copy of my Best of the Bay award from 1998. And $100 could get you a cum-stained jockstrap or a pair of official Planet SOMA used Nikes. But I hate to think what I might have to do (or to whom) for $500.

It could work, couldn’t it? Or did I piss everyone off yesterday with my email sabbatical?

Things I love today:

Things I hate today:

  • “In the Heat of the Night” at 6:00 instead of 5:00 on TNT
  • Michelina’s Signature frozen entreees
  • The new condo-loft project which is about to obscure the Herb Caen mural on Mission Street
  • This damned “freezing cold inthe morning but warm in the afternoon” weather which renders a coat first a necessity and then a burden

On Email

Hmmm. How will I remember the final week of 1999? Probably as one where I was working an awful lot. This, of course, bodes well for things like eating and paying the rent, but not for answering email nor for site updates. Methinks the newest installment of Do You Bring Bottles will be delayed by a few weeks. Sorry.

It might do the whole site a world of good if I took a little break anyway. It seems I’m not writing about anything particularly interesting lately. I’ve been in a relatively good mood the past few weeks, which is cutting into my traditional crankiness. My life has taken a rather subdued turn of late. And I’m finding it increasingly difficult to spend leisure hours sitting in front of a computer, particularly with all the freelance I’m doing right now.

This is not to suggest that I’m giving up the site or even taking an extended break. I’m just threatening to pay a litle less attention for a few weeks, or at least until I feel inspired to write about something interesting or do something exciting. And I reserve the right to change my mind at any time. So there.

What I am admitting is that I’m taking a bit of an email break. It’s just gotten to be too much, I’m way behind (again), and I get this creeping sense of doom each time I look at my In Box. So I’m not going to worry about it anymore.

I used to answer all site-related email almost immediately, often at length. Two things have changed in the past few months: first, I get much more mail now and second, I’m less inclined to spend a couple of hours a day answering it. My lack of response has nothing to do with how I perceive the sender; in fact I often brush off interesting people more readily than quick questions, simply because the intersting mail requires a more thoughtful response (and therefore means more work).

I’m so very flattered that people take the time to email me about the site, and I feel bad about it, but I can no longer beat myself up about every single message I don’t answer (or take three weeks to answer). I just can’t spend so much time attached to a keyboard anymore.

This is, of course, not to say that I’m no longer answering email or that I don’t like getting it. I’m just answering non-essential, non-urgent mail at my leisure. And that means some of it isn’t going to get answered.

Ooh. That felt good.