i move that the long weekend doesn't count. i worked straight through it, using free moments to finish up the redesign of the mog. im coming down a particular stretch at work, the one where you have finished writing the code, you have tested said code and you feel ready to deploy something somewhere. and you do. and then you realize that this place where you are deploying is a completely new and different system configuration and a bunch of system stuff has to be tweaked.
so it involves a lot of opening tickets with the people helping with sys admin and waiting. a lot of fun, i highly recommend it.
it's honestly not too bad; i was just enjoying being snarky about it. an old friend asked me yesterday if i enjoyed my work. the question surprised me a bit. why would i be working in a field that i didn't enjoy? i have the knowledge, the experience, the skills. but i wouldn't be doing what i do if i didn't love it.
and i'm sorry for the state mog has been in the last 6 months or so. we moved to wordpress back in august and i spent a good deal of time trying to get the green version of the site (v5) working with wordpress. it wasn't smooth and sometime in oct, i switched the look out for a pre-built template. this was the yellow and blue crap that has been on the site since. i switched it, thinking it would last a week or two, thinking to myself 'i wonder how easy it is to switch the look and feel of the site?'
and then work consumed my life and the design overstayed its welcome. the new design was on my radar for thanksgiving. then christmas. finally, i worked on the look on my train rides the last week or two and i built it this weekend. i showed it to carter last week when she was here and she seemed to like it. i hope you do too.
i wondered last night if the previous designs was a reason that some people had slacked on posting. if so, i hope this helps bring you back to life. if not, well, like flavor flav said, 'i can't do nuthin' for you man.'
may i highly recommend the stanton warriors 'fabric live 30′ mix cd to you? it might not be your cup of tea (and in fact, probably isn't). but it's a damn fine mix cd of chunky breaks and some nice bouncy bass. and if you just read that and thought 'ug', i would like to point you to 'the trip' curated by jarvis cocker. (aubrey, i believe this one might have your name written all over it.)
we went to ugly's last night for drinks. it was kurt, rachael, myself and then later, aparna and brian. and let's not forget the crazy random guy who accosted us. here is a short version:
we get there. we have a couple of sips of our drinks and kurt points out that 'back to the future' is on the tv. we talk about zemekis for about 3 sentences and the man next to us interjects himself into our conversation by asking who we are discussing. from this point, he takes over the conversation, steering us away from movies into a realm of 'self-awareness' and talking about how 'back to the future' really makes you think about identity. that and how 'meta' the movie is. right. sure.
kurt goes to play pool. the man keeps talking. he talks to us about evolution. about the space shuttles blowing up. about women raising babies, with and without help from mothers. then wikipedia comes up and he launches into a 20 minute story about a plastic surgeon. this person is someone who he has followed and has written up on wikipedia. there is a lot to it, obviously.
the key is that for close to an hour, rachael and i said nothing to this man. he just kept talking. and talking.
then brian and aparna show up and we begin to regroup and wrestle ourselves away from him. it takes 15 minutes or so to get away and the 5 of us (kurt lost pool by this point) start talking. but the man insists on standing behind and singing. not lyrics, mind you, but some sort of humming the tune of what is on the jukebox. but he clearly doesn't know the song on the jukebox and what he is humming has nothing to do with the song.
we are there until about 9.30 and he tries several more times to engage us. now, im all for being nice to strangers. i'm all for chatting up strangers. but this was something else. i was nice to this guy for an hour and let him have those minutes of my life. i let him talk about whatever he wanted, i let him drive. and he failed to actually have a conversation and failed to actually say anything to me that showed any interest in me. he just wanted to hear himself talk and mistook our passiveness as some kind of interest.
the bartender warned us early on, but we couldn't escape. i went to the bathroom and, on my way back, stopped on the other side of the bar and asked how often he was around. both she and the man i was standing next to offered to throw him out. i declined. this time.
when we left the bar, he actually followed us out. and then tried to engage aparna again in a religious conversation by asking a completely random question about hindu, before he stumbled off.
annoying? you bet. but entertaining in a train-wreck way.
Two words: Proxy Server. Same principle as what happens in a hotel room - you navigate somewhere but are presented with the login screen for the hotel. Your ISP is simpy capturing all search traffic bound for Google and aiming it at their own page.
Ah. Thanks. Now it makes sense…technically. Still, pisses me off a mite ethically, tho.