I’m not actually looking for a job, by the way. But sometimes it all gets to me and I get fired up and visit Trademe or Seek or whatever. After reading a few of the job descriptions I tend to realise that I am one of those arseholes who doesn’t appreciate what they’ve got.
In 50 years, when I look back on this day, I’ll think to myself: fuck you, Michael Bay. Fuck you to Hell.
We were talking about seeing the Transformers movie the other night and Stew asked Bronwyn if she was going to see it. “Well,” she said, “I’m not really into Transformers-”
“What don’t you like about them?” I queried. “The robot form, or the other form?”
She gave me the most awesome blank look, peering into my head, trying to parse the meaning from my brain. I love that look.* It reminds me how you can be talking directly to someone but be in a completely different mindspace from them. Poor Bron did not realise that my comment was a cold act of conversational sabotage, and was cycling through mindspaces trying to find a context where my question would make sense. (If there is such a context, I would love to hear about it.)
I recently saw a girl I (used to) know, one who also has a very different personality to mine. She would often confirm my jokes with me before partaking of the humour (as in, “Did you mean… ?”). It was a great reminder of why I found her appealing (character! Many people would just nod and smile as their eyes glazed over) and why I found her annoying (sucking the humour dry). How very Greco-Faulk-Shakespearian tragic. Someone should make a play about it.
* Generally writing something like this results in the first comment being, “Actually, I was wondering what you said because I didn’t hear you over the loud music.” This makes you look like an over-analytical, self-important git. But hey. No one ever said writing was fun. If it weren’t for the excellent money, I doubt anyone would bother.
There are some combinations that work scarily well. Imagine taking cat pictures, the internet, and TXT-speak. Behold!
And as if that’s not enough, there’s also a programming language. Behold!
HAI CAN HAS STDIO? I HAS A VAR IM IN YR LOOP UP VAR!!1 VISIBLE VAR IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE IM OUTTA YR LOOP KTHXBYE
My compatriot has such enthusiasm for my linkblog that my non-linkblog-oriented posts have been overwhelmed. We cannot go on like this.
So, I have made a linkblog-oriented post. Here. Let all future Click Here related material accumulate thusly.
Yeah yeah, I should actually make a real blog post. I’ll try.
I’m toying with the idea of allowing “micro-comments” on the links. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, nor have I found the time, but it may happen. Also, a submission form. I’ll try. (I actually have been developing it, in case you doubt me. I’m a strong believer in incremental/lightweight/agile development. First I created a list of links, then archives, then permalinks. Like a glacier on steroids, I churn relentlessly onward. Crushing metaphors underfoot.)
Over to you, Bartleby.
I got texted again:
Wat.up.bitch.cn.u.tel.me.who.d.lykz.g.hz.mate.wants.2.knw.plz .
I.dont.know.what.ur.talking.about. I replied:
Dis Tawhai?
They said:
Hey huz dis an hw u gt ma num
@*%?$+%!
So I tried to do some writing today, and it sucked hard, so no post. On the other hand, I had time to (try to) write! Yay! In your face, work! But no post.
I learnt a new word today. I mean new, as in, someone made it up. Tumblelog. I had two thoughts.
One, suck. What’s the point in having a blog if you don’t get to inflict your unfounded, ill-thought out opinions on the internet?
Two. Click Here is like a Tumblelog. I am becoming that which I (as early as five minutes ago) despise. What I mean by this, though, is that I am, if you will, microblogging, in my “small note” attached to each link. Eventually those notes are going to get so long that it will replace my blog entirely. Circle of life, yada yada.
The phone rings.
I’m in about fourth form. I’m on the computer in the lounge, playing one of the games on this fantastic list. This is not an unusual after-school activity for me. You might get the impression I don’t have the most happening social life, and you’d be right. Of course, there’s only so much happening when you’re 14.
I wasn’t really expecting a call. Odds are good that it’s someone calling my parents who, would you believe, are at work at 4:30 in the afternoon! Somehow I never quite managed to carry that sarcasm over the phone line. Or maybe someone’s calling to try to sell us Sky again. Yes, I’d like the cricket and the rugby. No, not at that price. Maybe if you stopped calling people so often you wouldn’t need to charge so much.
I answer it anyway – no one else is home. Turns out it was neither of those. “Hello,” a girl begins, “is Dave there?”
“Yeap,” I respond, already off balance. I can count the number of girls I know well enough to have my number on one hand, and I wouldn’t need all the fingers. It’s interesting, too, how playing computer games puts you into a socially disadvantaged frame of mind. I’m a wing commander over there. All the talking heads, they love me. It’s like real life, except awesome and fake. Reality knocks you back.
“What are you up to?”, she asks. Now, shit. I hate answering questions like this with “playing a computer game.” (Perhaps I should spice it up with “fighting the Kilrathi!”). Not that I feel it’s such a bad thing to be doing. It just sounds so lame. I make some sort of feeble reply. “Oh, just on the computer aye.”
“Oh yeah.” By now, I have gone completely on the defensive. Just absolutely and completely. Self esteem issues, peer pressure, bad time of day, whatever, I’m holding a negative self-image and feeling the spotlight on it.
The conversation only lasts a few minutes, if that. I suppose I was too young to realise it at the time, but man, did I turn Opportunity into a negative experience. It seemed that she got hold of my number via a friend or something and was just trying to make a social connection. Looking back, I feel rather sorry for her. She was just being friendly and got a bitter pill for her efforts. I guess it’s unfortunate that someone would have to suffer because of my insecurity. That’s not fair.
I never found out who it was. She never even said how she got my number. In fact, I don’t think I even got her name. After I hung up, followed by an irritated couple of minutes, the experience was largely forgotten (apart from the minor psychological trauma that follows most teenage experiences). It certainly wasn’t a turning point, as you may have thought this post was building up to.
A couple of years later, though, I almost completely stopped playing computer games. Whether it was a phase I grew out of, or I got busy with other things, or I just played them so much I got sick of them, I don’t really know. And it’s not, of course, it’s not as if whether you play computer games or not determines your life. It was merely a crutch. But for whatever reasons, I just completely lost interest in them. Now, I actually have some quite fond memories of the games themselves. But I can’t help but wonder if it should’ve happened sooner.
The interesting thing is that it wasn’t until a number of years after, when I did have a social life of at least some description, that I was able to realise any of this. It’s so easy to sit at the PC and pilot your Sabre to the glory of the Federation, so much easier than actual life. Life, though, is going on without you. It’s not a good place to be. At the time, I didn’t even realise what I was doing wrong. It’s only looking back that I can be so glad I got out of there.
For all the promise of the Free Market, it’s a little unfortunate that incompetence and poor customer service seem to be the rule more often than they are the exception. Where’s the market forces? I guess it’s hard to vote with your feet when hot coals constitute every single option.
Web hosting is an interesting one, because of course it is so new that there are no large, established names that can rely solely on their brand. On the other hand, demand has absolutely exploded so new customers are everywhere. It’s also a pretty unhindered market – location doesn’t matter, there’s not really any lock-in (just re-point your domain), and as said above, no companies are large enough to mess things up. Frankly, I’m pretty happy with what I get – a domain for $US10 per year and pretty good hosting for $US44 per year is a drop in the bucket compared to all the hours I spend on it. I would like to know why going with a New Zealand host costs so much more – surely our costs aren’t higher than those in the US? Surely there’s enough New Zealanders to get some economies of scale? And how come .nz domains cost so much more?
For the most part, when I see people talk about their hosting companies on their blogs, it’s overwhelmingly positive. (Compare this to comments on, say, cellphone carriers, or broadband.) But you also get the other side. Recently Dreamhost had some rather significant downtime – not unusual for them, I hear. In what seems like misguided PR at its finest, their apology was “ha ha, did you see that, LOL!”
I am with Total Choice Hosting. This is because they hosted our previous site, nocents.org (RIP), since the first bunch wiped out our forums without warning or backup due to some obscure T&Cs violation. Frankly, TCH are pretty damn good – it’s a cheap service and you get good performance, good uptime, and great service – people actually reply (!) to your support requests. There was one incident recently that soured our relationship – our site went down, I combed their site, forums, status pages and found nothing about it so filed a support request. Oh yes, they said, there was a hardware failure and we are restoring from the backup now! Check the forums for updates! Well, that’s cool I guess, but I don’t think I see anything in your forums. I checked back later, and again, couldn’t find anything anywhere referring to it. So, had we not noticed, we might never have known it was down. Which is unfortunate, because their backup was a day old and my most recent blog post had disappeared. (Yes, even at my posting rate. How unlikely was that?) Fortunately, I still had a copy of it in my text editor. This was purely by chance, and if I hadn’t, it would have just been outright lost. Not so cool, but… all in all, considering what we pay, this isn’t too unreasonable. My only real issue was with their poor communication. Where I mean, poor from my point of view, but also dumb from their point of view – it is much cheaper to post in your forum than answer lots of individual support requests. This is the incompetence bit, where everyone loses, as opposed to being screwed over, where only the consumer loses. Not sure which one is worse, but at least if someone screws you over and is up-front about it, you can respect that. It’s hard to respect stupidity.
Here’s what sucks, though. PHP5 came out in 2004. It’s now 2007, and PHP5 is fast becoming the standard. I have been quite patient about this. But, you know, there’s patience and there’s eternity. Apparently TCH have opted for the latter:
With PHP 5 having been out for so long now, and many of todays applications beginning to require it, I am surprised that TCH has no plan to migrate. How about making some new servers available with PHP5 so that new or existing customers can choose or migrate to them? [etc]
[Jan 14 2007] Currently there are no plans to migrate to PHP5.
I mean, it’s bad enough that they haven’t done it yet. But they don’t even have plans to do it? I really like being a customer of TCH. I just don’t understand. Why would you force your customers to leave?
Hi, I’m DB. You may know me as the guy who used to post on this blog. Well, I still do, just not as often. You see, I have been trying to alter my life to the extent that I can get up in the morning without first fighting a massive internal battle against the forces of sleeping in, and start work without wishing I was still home in bed, a headache just one bright light away.
It has been quite successful, and my archives page shows a large part of the reason why. Simply put, I don’t spend as much time writing anymore. I check my RSS feeds and my email, and I go to bed. It’s a win, but not for my blog. Which is kindof a loss. I was going to write a post about how I don’t get time to write enough posts anymore, but, well, I haven’t found the time to write it. Which is a real kick in the teeth, actually. Thanks, universe.
Even when I find time to write I rarely find time to finish. One of my friends once asked me why it was so hard to keep the post rate up (given I was only doing about one per week). He figured, it only takes about 20 minutes to write a post, right? Well, not for me. This is how much I can do in 20 minutes. My typical blog post – such as there is, but one with some body to it and maybe a few links and/or pictures – takes perhaps 4 hours. Many of them are months in the planning, involve 30 minutes trying to find that one link I saw in 2003 that would be really appropriate right now, and 10 minutes deciding if that fourth joke in paragraph three is just pushing it a bit too far. Some of this time could be put down to perfectionism, but frankly, I’m not here to write shit. The idea is to achieve something. Anyway, it’s bloody hard work, very draining, and very rewarding. I would highly recommend it, but I suppose that’s hypocritical given the current situation.
One of the side effects of this is that I have, amongst the apparent 23,000 word count of my toblog scratch file, a fast-building list of really good links that I should totally show to others it’ll be awesome! Well, this problem I can fix. I have long been considering some kind of Daring Fireball-esque link feed, and its time has come. Introducing Click Here! Also available on the front page.
Incidentally, I do still plan to post. But I have adjusted my goals. Once a fortnight. For sure. Maybe. In between, I’ll be blogging vicariously through my links. See you there.
