Some Days in the Life - May 1, 1999
As for this morning, most of what I can say for it is it's early. Too early. Painfully early. Yes, I know it's no earlier than my work week mornings, but it's Saturday. You don't get up this early on Saturday. It's not right. It's practically illegal. Or it should be.
But here I am. For this week, anyhow. I have a few more I'll have to work, as well before the end of May. All part of the fun, right?
I've worked worse before. I used to work at the Municipal Streets and Facilities department in Ithaca, New York. This was a winner -- I had to be at work at seven in the morning, and at the time I didn't have a car. So, I'd take the bus, which meant I had to be there at about twenty after six, waiting. My first day I didn't know the bus route, so I left the house at five thirty and walked, about six miles, to get there. It was sleeting that day.
Not a huge deal, except for the hour of the morning. That was ugly. I'm not a morning person. Mornings are best described to you by people who actually like being up at that hour. Give me nights. Around three in the morning, most of the world is asleep and the bits of it that aren't ususally have nothing to do with you, and if they do, that's all right because they understand.
Immediately after the clocks changed for Daylight Savings Time, this year, I became a spontaneous morning person for the first time in my life. I found myself falling asleep at ten, no matter what I was doing. Around four or five in the morning, I would be awake and no back talk.
It sucked. Yes, it was nice getting up, drinking tea, showering and getting ready for the day at a leisurely pace. But that's all you can do at five in the bloody morning. There's no good television on, there's nowhere to go except breakfast and if you're not used to early breakfasts you don't want that either, and your night owl online friends have all fled the sunlight like a pack of vampires in a Leslie Neilson movie. This is not how I want to live.
GoLive is powerful. Perhaps too powerful. It has all these featues it makes way too accessible. I don't want to put frames on my web page. Frames are the work of the Antichrist. I don't want DHTML making my graphic float around the page like a ghostly meaty face. I don't want to have java sending scrolling banners across the page like Rommal marching across Africa.
But I can do it in a couple of seconds. Heck, the Javascript plug-in looks like a coffee bean. I've already added a Meta keywords tag to my Journal's front page. Why? No good reason. It was simple. I could add a scrolling box in here in six seconds, no trouble.
I resist these corruptions of the pure HTML ideal. I resist in the name of good clean government and the Seattle Mariners. I am strong.
But many are weak. HTML is now where Desktop Publishing was in the mid-eighties. It is now painfully simple for anyone to make really ugly layouts. Over on the Space Ghost section of Cartoonnetwork.com, they have the home pages of Zorak, Moltar and others. They're triumphs of satire, because they have all the really stupid HTML tricks people throw on their sites to make it seem like they know more than you do.
Whereas I have incorporated a graphic of my own meaty face. Distinctive, yet pretentious. That's a winner in my book!
All right. I clearly just don't have much to say this morning. I'll try to have exciting adventures to report tomorrow. There's just so much I can say about the car ride home (I got the car washed. Which made it a target for birds today, of course). There's just so much I can say about my evening (the net sucked and I zoned). There's just so much I can say for my night's sleep (it happened).
I'll leave you with the weather. Warm and dry, with cool evenings because we don't have the moisture to trap the heat down here. It's supposed to reach the seventies over this weekend. A perfect, beautiful weekend, if only there were leaves on the trees.
(Ten years from now, I'll reread these entries and say to myself, in a choked voice, "man, I was obsessed with rain.")
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