Uncategorized

There are days when just about everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and the only thing that makes days like that bearable is the knowledge that it’s probably not your fault. Part of me would like to talk about it here, but I’m not going to, because it’s not that big a deal, and because stories like this (found through Metafilter) remind me why I try not to talk about my job where the wrong people might be listening.

But in other news…I’ve been toying with the overall look of this weblog, especially with regard to the sidebar on the left, and I’d welcome any comments or suggestions. Only recently, I found out this page wouldn’t load at all in Netscape, and I think I’ve remedied that, but if something looks off, please let me know. And now, I’m off to see how much cheesy ’80s music Dell tech support can make me listen to this time before they finally help me fix my home computer.

Okay, now the spammers are just trying to confuse me. “Mike,” writes the nonexistent alancrooks@ns1.ehost2102.com, “Thanks again for lunch it was great! Best regards, Steve”. Um…right. Frankly, I think I liked it better when they were trying to sell me something.

Then again, even Amazon, who I know is trying to sell me something, is starting to sound a lot like spam and can’t even bother to get their details straight. “Your birthday is right around the corner –” they tell me, “March 28, to be exact.” Um, no…it’s on the 26th actually. Has been for years. Says so right on the wishlist you’re asking me to update. Why exaclty you thought I would want to add this, I don’t know. But why don’t you and my good friend Steve discuss it over lunch?

Well now, this is interesting:

Found via harrumph. I’m considering joining up.

And because I think this is interesting, too: “I am Google! I find many good things.” Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford.

I’m taking a short break from reading William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! While it’s a wonderful, poetic book — absolutely Faulkner at his best — that doesn’t exactly translate into an easy read, and I find I’ve been making excuses not to pick it up again. In fact, I haven’t been reading much of anything at all, and that can’t be good for me. So, after reading Emma Straub’s entertaining and insightful interview-essay on the appreciation of genre fiction (found via Neil Gaiman’s online journal) — and after I moped around Barnes and Noble for half an hour last night — I decided The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub was the way to go. So far, no complaints.

When all your past experience tells you that you’re an idiot, it’s probably not a good idea to start playing fast and loose with your HTML. For over an hour I couldn’t get Blogback to work, nor could I figure out why it wasn’t working, and finally, when I somehow got it to work again, my weblog was taken over by error messages telling me that my version of Blogback had expired or was pirated, and at the very least should be deleted. Such is life. I’ve switched temporarily to a commenting system from uigui.net, and although customizable features like re-sizing would be nice, it does seem to be working. Leave a comment, why don’t you? Stop for a minute and say hello.