I am sixteen, going on seventeen...
Current mood: chipper

Just call my Liesl.   Busy times, as always:   the stretch from sixteen to seventeen is a huge one, from both a blogging and a jailbait point of view.   In both, it seems the anticipation outweighs the outcome...you're waiting, expecting, hoping for something new, a grand change, an explosion of realization that what was before is no longer -- but, then, everything's the same.   I'm still a blogger, and a seventeen year old girl knows no more than she did the day before.  That's why Liesl needs Rolf:   he's got a bunch of really creepy lines in the song, in case you never listened close enough.  If I were a young girl and some older guy who wanted to get into my panties was singing to me about how men wanted to write their story on my blank slate, well,  the innuendo there is thick enough for even the most naiive ingenue.   Me, I'm no ingenue;  I've been blogging for 8 years now, online for 15, so I'm dominating this whole internet thing.     Sadly, the internet isn't a spring chicken, though, and stays a step ahead of me.   So much happens online that I can barely keep up;   time moves so fast, and, well, blogging suffers for it.   So much does change between sixteen and seventeen online, that when you look back, it's quite clearly a lost and gone age.   Liesl and the internet:  dissimilar things.   Remember that.

Anyways, yesterday I was ordered to blog -- here's how it went down:

"You should put that in your blog."

Um, well, maybe it started a little before that....let's back up.

I'm working, and the office is being rather loud; I'd already had to interrupt a 15-minute conversation that, while not a problem in itself, replaced rather than enhanced the work;   four employees completed three documents.   That should have happened in around 20 seconds, but I digress.   The weather is nice, everyone's returning with full stomachs from their mealbreak, and the debate is over the proper descriptor for a Mr. Pibb.    Pop, soda, soft-drink.

"Why do they call it a soft drink?" was asked of me.

"Drinks with liquor are 'hard' drinks.  A 'soft' drink is non-alcoholic, and started really being used during Prohibition, to tell them apart."

"Really?"

"Really."

"You should put that in your blog."

"Maybe."

"People need to know that."

"That I blog?"

"No -- why they're soft drinks.  You should put that online so everybody knows."

Well, I'd be late to the game;   I think I learned it on the Anheuser-Busch tour in St Louis in 1988.  On the scale of the internet, that would be around the time that people first tied a rock to a stick to help their hunting skills.    The internet desires new things.

Sadly, there's so many new things to put in my blog:  I could do it all day long, like the Wifey, but that doesn't bring in quite as much as working for The Man.   Most of the new things I need to put online are actually quite old things:   the Rusk Auto-House, further history of theAOUW, creepy pictures of old guys and little kids, and the fastest painter in the world, and the Idelkope building.  At Collector's Quest, I wrote about a list of all the cool old things people can collect,  old foreign money, several articles(1 - 2 - 3) on how museums take care of old things, and another list on all the cool old computers people can collect., and I even touch on how I steal old bricks when necessary.  And that is only the tip of the iceberg of my old links.  Well, new links to you -- that little gap between sixteen and seventeen was big enough to let a whole lot of stuff slip through.  Don't blink when it comes to the internet -- things move so fast, you can hardly keep up.  I know I can't.

Today's music selection comes from the fact that I drove to the White Banner in Grand Forks to internetiffy them this past week.   Hours alone in the van == listening to whatever the hell I want.   The Revolting Cocks sound like a madeup band name from a 1st-season episode of WKRP, but they were a real group; actually a side-project of Ministry.  Beers, Steers, and Queers was an earlier record that got more airplay, but I like Linger Ficken Good better;   more industrial, less dancy.   The Do Ya Think I'm Sexy? cover is excellent. 

Currently listening : Linger Ficken’ Good... By Revolting Cocks Release date: 28 September, 1993

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Post Sixteen
Current mood: chipper

When you print a book, it's done by arranging the pages on a sheet, tops together, and organized such that, when folded and cut, they all have the same spine and are in a readable order.  Folios are a single sheet, Quartos are a single fold (4 pages) Octavos are two folds (8 pages), and what's 16?  Why, that's a sextodecimo.  One sheet, folded and cut, is called a signature -- a 64-page-book has four 16-page signatures in it.  If you want to see how it works, I made a post on it at Double-Breasted Dustjacket, with downloadable examples.  Modern automated technology isn't as reliant on signature size anymore, but hand-binders and antique-book-collectors pay close attention to such things.  A sextodecimo is a small book, equivalent of a paperback novel's size today.  In other 'sixteen' values, it's the point where American kids can get their driver's license, it's considered a rite of passage, and they probably have to buy a fancy calculator for math class.   Unlike the limited vocabulary of base-10 calculators (BOOBLESS is 55378008 upside-down for you inexperienced calculator-users), these fancy new calculators add a hexadecimal level, adding the letters A-F to the teen's tools.  Hexadecimal, for those of you who don't know, is 2 to the 4th power, or the largest number you can get using four binary places.  Figure out HTML colors yet?  If you know FF is white, then you're familiar with base-16 numbers.   Books, teens, web-safe-colors, and BOOBLESS calculators:  that's what 16 is.

In other news:

At Double-Breasted DustJacket:  Yes, I'm writing there again -- it's a great blog title and a subject I like a lot, so I'm mad at myself for ignoring it so long.   It'll also give me practice writing a real 'blog' -- one where you just take stuff other people wrote about, and add a little more.  So far, aside from the book-folding, I've written about how hard ending a book well is, and how writing a manuscript is more important than writing a book.

At ones-and-zeroes:  aside from the multitude of remaindered links, I wrote a long post about cars, Chilton's, and grandpa. . 

At Collector's Quest I pulled together more posts that I'd written in the past few months -- Thomas Jefferson gets into my pants,  Rolling Stone gets onto a DVD, the wifey and I collaborated on condensing a multitude of shopping trips into one article,   and I don't cry over spilled ink.  And, in case I didn't mention it before, I've uploaded one of my collections to the Collector's Quest user-area:  Whipped Cream and Other Delights.  It seems my enormous collection totals nine covers.

At the Infomercantile, I've done a number of updates on articles -- but the biggest update is to the front page, with new navigation and easier to read recommendations, and a blog, to simplify distributing updates via RSS.  In terms of new content, we meet John Till, a snake-oil hack who blistered hundreds of people's backs, and none would convict him of practicing medicine without a license.  Next, we start to see an ongoing project (the kind that work so well for Lileks), wherein I scan the pages from a magazine and add my cute comments.  This particular subject, in conjunction with regular posts on Kitschy Kitschy Coo,  is a 1934 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics.  I'm slowly updating the New Palace Hotel entry with new information -- see, I'm dangerous when it comes to Fargo history, because I've figured out how to access a hundred years' worth of local newspapers, and I intend on reading & taking notes on everything.  Yes, everything.

About my music selection below:  It's not quite the right version -- the one MySpace can find seems to be a late-90s CD reissue.  The vinyl record we just finished listening to is called "Welcome to the Ponderosa: An evening of songs and stories with Lorne Greene".  The CD seems to be similar, with many of the same songs, but I can't tell if it has the interstitial spoken-word anecdotes from Greene between tracks.  That makes the album worthwhile.   And, did you know that the Bonanza theme had words?  Well, it does, and they're sung extremely fast and are hard to hear, which makes me want to memorize them even more. 

What could make me cooler than knowing all the words to the Bonanza theme song?  Got-damned nothin', that's fucking what.

Currently listening : On the Ponderosa: Lorne Greene & His Western Classics By Lorne Greene Release date: 16 September, 1997

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Post-thirteen: Post Fifteen
Current mood: calm

Nothing makes for a better horror story than the thirteenth floor:  nothing's scarier than getting trapped in a place that doesn't exist.  Same goes for staircases -- ever meet one with thirteen steps?  Even escalators are tuned to avoid having 13 steps out at any time.  The superstitious and traditionalists avoided such numbering.   Even when I worked in theatre thirteen was avoided; when unavoidable, a nonsense word was used in its place.  To have a thirteenth of anything was inviting something horrible to happen...I mean, who looks at their thirteenth year on this planet as a fun one?  The thirteenth cookie isn't even acknowledged as existing.  That non-existent thirteenth floor must have harbored a horrible, demonic resident for it to be completely skipped when manufacturing the elevator's number pad.  Nothing goes to thirteen.  A Friday the Thirteenth is the darkest night -- the new moon -- if you tie the first of the month with the first of a week with the full moon.  A perfect night for hiding evil.  Nothing good happens on the thirteenth of anything.

Is that why I didn't do a thirteenth post?   Nah; I just slipped up by accident.   No biggie. 

Anyways, I've been up to:

The Infomercantile: Spent five or six hours today producing a highly-detailed scan of a 1893 map of Chicago, IL.  It's too bad my map was so beat up; the seams are a little annoying.   Why'd it take so long?   The real map is 12" x 24", scanned in 10 parts, and all the color parts were  re-colored by hand in Photoshop because the yellowed paper caused too much color-shift.   I may sell copies via CafePress.  Updated a few parts about the AOUW and Pioneer Mutual, including pretty logos.  Wrote a little article about a local guy who's irrepairably tied to one of those hoax emails you hate when your mom's friend from work forwards them to you for your own safety.  Finally, met Ole Sageng, a fine example of a hardworking Minnesota politician, which precipitated the "Advertising Blotter" category...and you can't have a category without more than one, so a Cenex blotter was added, too.

11111001111: nothing major -- just a bunch of remaindered links.  I'm trying to update over there more often, with just interesting stuff (even if it's already linked from other websites), so to attract a more constant audience.  Not sure if it's working.

Collector's Quest:   I write a boring (and creatively overwraught) article on collecting tax revenue stamps.   No, really; it's a hard topic to make sound exciting.  Good thing is, there aren't many other articles online about the topic, which I supposed makes me an authority on it.  Hooray.  I'm getting mad at myself, though; I've been slacking, letting the wifey do most of the writing at CQ -- which isn't a problem for her, but makes me lazy.   August should go better.

Constant Content: I have tried submitting an article on buying an MP3 player, but it's been rejected as "invalid characters in file."   I'll try and be more valid next time -- however, I did sell an older article on PHP programming to prevent comment-spammers in a registrationless blog ...it's probably horribly dated, I wrote it a year ago, but I put many of those techniques into my own blogs and haven't had much of a problem.   No links, since they're articles for sale -- gimme money and I'll send you one!

In "listening to":  I'm no big fan of Dixieland, but the wifey is, so that's what's on.  We're not listening to a "Best of" Dukes of Dixieland -- but one of their actual vinyl releases from the sixties.  Gotta love the vinyl!

Currently listening : Best of Dukes of Dixieland By Dukes Of Dixieland Release date: 15 August, 1995

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Post Fourteen

Projects: completed.  For the most part. White Banner's FPD site is all done save debugging; the book is out, and in the next few weeks I need to do a massive server upgrade -- replacing everything that hasn't been upgraded yet -- and that means physically removing computers, swapping drives, and putting them back in.  Not a light undertaking.   See, our servers -- in colocation at Multiband -- were put in a networking rack in October 2003.  I had to replace the email server in November, because it just wasn't working right, but other than that the past 4 years have been entirely uneventful.   They've had to be rebooted five times (three times in the past six months, hence the pending upgrade), and they've been down twice for reasons not caused by themselves or myself (power outage that the colo facility is supposed to prevent but didn't; the had to move the rack once in 2005.)   So, these two powerhouses of computing need a rest.   Four years is a long time  to handle webtraffic, domain names, and email for 40-50 different websites.  The computers?  One us a dual-processor PII 300, the other a single processor PIII-400.  They were well past their reasonable service life in 2003 when I put them in.  I laugh when hosting services tout their quad-processor Athlon with 3gb of RAM, as though it's a Big Deal -- websites rarely need faster processors; they need bandwidth.  Bandwidth is expensive; hardware is cheap.   It's like buying a car because of the sound system, OnStar, and in-dash DVD screen, when what really matters is gas mileage and safety.   Gas mileage and safety: expensive;  DVD players: cheap.   But back to the servers:   What am I upgrading them to?   AMD Athlon 850Mhz and Celeron 1Ghz processors -- well, yeah, they passed their reasonable service life a few years ago, but, hey, they've lasted this long, they should make it to 2010.

I know, the only reason you're here is to see what else I've been doing -- it's been a slow restart after weeks without writing, but it's been very satisfying. 

At the ones-and-zeroes blog:  my brother-in-law gets ever closer to being television's new darling, a visitor came to Fargo (whom I do not know nor have never met), but found myself playing "I know where that is" on his Flickr account, and dumb criminals, Lileks crossing the street, Worth1000 in two different ways -- and the Pioneer Mutual sign coming down, which also appeared...

...at AreaPhotos, where I posted my pictures within minutes of the sign reaching the ground, and then they were posted...

...at the Infomercantile, where I put up more pictures after I had time to color-correct and crop them nicely.   But that's not all -- I used my SMET (Saturday Mandatory Entertainment Time) to scan and upload advertisements, post some downtown photos taken on a walk to the bank, and more early farming photos, but the most fun article was the New Palace Hotel, now an empty parking lot at the corner of Broadway and Second Avenue.  Believe me, it wasn't just torn down -- read all about it, as much as I could find out from a box of newspaper clippings that once belonged to a tenant of the building.

At Kitschy-Kitschy-Coo all I did was post a Where's Waldo of record collecting, taken from a blurry photo I took for the wifey's Collector's Quest article about the kids and their newfound record album lovin'.

At Collector's Quest I even managed to post an article about a book I got for Father's Day, that breaks the mold of most retro-cool coffee-table photobooks.

So, there you go -- and, for our record album selection today, is Trini Lopez at PJ's, the first of two live recordings he did at PJs.  We found the second half in my record collection quite a while ago, and the "More Trini..." at the top gave us a quest to find the first-from-which-there-would-become-More-album-at-PJ's.   On Saturday, at St Vincent DePaul's our quest was completed -- an original copy of Trini Lopez at PJ's.   If you have a chance and like early rock-and-roll, Trini is da bomb, something quite different than even Ritchie Valens of the time; he's fun, bright, and stylish in his own way, deserving of inclusion in the Latin Music Hall Of Fame, an honor he achieved in 2003.  It's good summertime listening -- if you're illegal that way, you should be able to find MP3s of him online.  "Sinner, Not A Saint" off an earlier, rarer album (also in our collection) is highly recommended.

Now that Trini recollections have made me lateish for work, I must depart.  Excelsior!

Currently listening : Trini Lopez at PJ's By Trini Lopez Release date: 09 October, 2001

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Twelve
Current mood: chipper

Now we're on number twelve:  it's a dozen, but only if you're not a baker -- carpenters work in dozens, timekeepers work in dozens, eggmen work in dozens; Dave Brubeck's musicians work in dozens less than you'd think -- but Leo Kottke does; astrologers work in dozens -- but differently depending on the hemisphere.  In a dozen posts here, I've rambled crazily, written wittily, pimped my other stuff, and dwindled down to minimal writings.   A dozen is a lot more than I had thought.   Still, I'm here to talk more about other places than here -- I had (well, 'have' -- there's still debugging) three very large projects, most of which wrapped up just before the 4th of July -- a new webserver in our hosting rack, a 612-page typesetting & design project, and a website for the Fargo Police via White Banner Uniforms.  All proved very time consuming, me staying up until 3am two nights in a row to get everything done...now that's hard on the body.  I just turned 33 -- I'm old, you know.  Still, remember I'm required to write, for commercial and personal reasons, so I can't say I've ignored my composition obligations.

Kitschy Kitschy Coo has a story of temptation resisted: encouraged theft, within limits.   I left with a picture, nothing more.

The Infomercantile, the one I feel worst about letting slide, has the Marjorie Schlossman Chaplet project, a neat little art exhibit in front of the civic center -- if you're in Fargo, go have a look.  Uploaded a downtown sign, mostly because Deanna likes it.  Lastly, I've been slowly uploading more pictures to the Clay County farming set.

At Collector's Quest, where I wrote surprisingly little, I let loose a secret about how I act like an asshole to my wife in public -- at her request and I remember that the future of our past didn't happen the way they thought.

My personal blog seems to be the most active -- these 'summary posts' really show how inconsistent I am in the things I want to write about.   I wrote about divided fowl and dog death, then work versus play, as acted out by my eyelids.  Highlights from my remaindered links are the BOB commercials, talking plastic (a topic that completely blew the wifey's mind), and being called in to the radio on my birthday.

Unrelated note:  MySpace has a blank below, where I'm posting this, that encourages me to "Tell us what you're reading, viewing, or listening to:"   I'm often listening to something -- but it's NEVER available.   See, I generally listen to....wierd stuff.   Old stuff.   Vinyl LPs, sometimes lacquer 78s.  Things that are listened to on vinyl because there's never been a newer re-release.   Right now we're listening to Presley's Mountain Music Jubilee, a live recording made at their Branson, Missouri theatre in the sixties (hold on) -- album change;  now we're listening to Ray Gunn and his Blasters doing a variety of twist-themed songs.  You'll note that both albums are so unbelievably obscure that I couldn't even find any good links to either album anywhere on the internet.  So, rather than telling MySpace what I'm listening to, because it will confuse their webservers to tell them that music existed before DNS arrived, I'll link to one of my most favorite record album covers: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass' Whipped Cream and Other Delights.   I own, like, a dozen copies of this album.   I like the music, too, you know.

Currently listening : Whipped Cream & Other Delights (40th Anniversary Edition) By Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass Release date: 19 April, 2005

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Number Eleven
Current mood: okay

Years ago, when I was beginnging computer programming, I was following along in the book and found a program called "elven.c".  So, I typed it in, ran it, wondering what sort of elves the program was related to.   Alas, I had misread, and ignored the program's lead-in.   The simple program's only purpose was to do a long list of mathematical processes, and then return the number "eleven"...nothing "elven" whatsoever, unless elves are good at math -- which, no doubt, they are, being magical and all, because I'd think any elf being poor at math would already be the subject of a children's book, in which he discovers and wears the magical boots, which improve that component of his SATs and he lands that upper-management job he was looking for, and by the end he discovers the power was inside him, not the boots.   As such, eleven has a special place in my heart.

Which, well, seems out of place, since I'm probably not going to write much here anymore;   I thought My MySpace Space BlogBlog would be a respite from the rest of my online life, some place to ramble about myself without any care to who is reading.  Well, it seems I already had that, in my "personal blog", ones and zeroes.   Why would I spread out my madd ryting skillz anyplace else?   So, the longform posts seen here will appear over there. 

MySpace does offer me a benefit though:  MyMySpaceSpaceBlogBlog is spidered more often than the rest of my websites, and by a much more relevant website than any others I participate in, and thusly it will become my place to link other projects so they start to turn up in search results.    Ever wonder why I always put in the "Elsewhere..." at the end of my other posts?   It's not for your benefit -- it's to longtail myself.    So, stop thinking of this blog as the Derek blog -- it's the aggregator for Derek's other stuff.  

The Infomercantile has been my favoritest place at the time being, giving me easy ways to upload and organize stuff.   The ongoingest component are a collection of hundreds of photos from early-20th-century Minnesota life.  Back in those days, there were no interstates, as this scanned map (actually, around a dozen maps overlapped) shows, which compliments a little article on fuel conservation on the US highway system.  That map came from an old travelogue book, which also included some neato (from the nerdy among us) maps of airlines, bus lines, and railroads from the 1950s.   Completely removed from those is the FM Extra, who I included as part of my articles on the local print media.  On a lark at the beginning of InfoMerc I started the "Obscure Musicians" category, to which I now figured I'd better add "Record Albums" category -- no use knowing the artists if their albums are nowhere, right?   We've been buying a lot of records lately, so hopefully this will grow quite a bit in the coming weeks.

Collector's Quest:   I haven't written there as much as in earlier weeks; it comes and goes.   I covered the Adams quarter today, a while back I played an I Spy game to give ideas on identifying photos, and collaborated with the Wifey on a two-parter covering our rural rummage sale escapades across Wisconsin, and offer some tips to remember when rummaging this season. 

Back at my blog I do give some more detail on the MySpace removal, along with the impact of animals on myself and those around me.    There are a whole lot of remaindered links, so just go read 'em all, or my favorite so far:  The state of North Dakota would like to know if your tap water is flammable.  As you might imagine, it's very important.

And, you know what?  I've even posted at Kitschy Kitschy Coo lately!   I share the first "three-some" this season -- the first wierd, obscure item at a rummage sale that still shows up at at least there different sales.  It's so wierd that not just one -- but three -- families would all part with the same thing on the same weekend, that it must be documented.  I've got some other stuff to go up at KKC, too, because it's been sorely abandoned, what with Collector's Quest and my ongoing sporadic writer's block taking up most of my collectibles writing.

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Letter X

Sorry to go all Roman on you, but it's necessary to keep things shakin' up some.  This is my tenth post, at an ever-declining pace.   I've been busy, you know -- as it gets warmer, more things go on.  As school winds down, more events occur.   As work increases...more...work...gets to work on.   Time is short.   Blogging takes time. 

And I've got 5 minutes, twenty-three seconds until my chicken nuggets are done.

You may say, "Derek, isn't the personal-writing exercise supposed to be relaxing, taking the stress off -- a clinical solution to your anxiety and stress?  How can you let it slide?"    Well, dear busybody, I have been writing.   Quite a bit, even, and writing about things of interest to me.

If you pay attention to what I do,  you'll know  I registered the domain "infomercantile.com" in 2003, simply because I liked the term, and the basic concept, which is a rather Web 1.0 idea:   information as a commodity.   It may still happen (especially if the RIAA and MPAA finally figure out a way to do it), but that concept has less to do with the domain name lately.      Last spring, for around a month and a half, I made it a personal writing project, a satirical-news site a'la the Onion, updated as often as possible -- the unique thing being that I wrote satirical articles based on news found in real-time, as it happens, including a link to the original news.   It did get quite a few readers, but it ate a lot of time, and it was difficult to maintain consistency.   Then, well, there was the personal impact of last summer's events, which have more influence on the demise of the satire Infomercantile.

(nuggets are done; I can eat and type at the same time)

In my writing exercise quest, I was interested in figuring out a non-blog format for writing.   Chronological blogs are, you might not realize, quite limiting:   their information exists *now*, not later, not in the future.   Tags can allow some cross-referencing to the past, but for the most part it must, absolutely must, be read in chronological order to be of any use.   The only way to view a blog is in date order.  Archives are by month or year, again sorted in date order.  It's a very arbitrary constriction.   Why are most blogs organized in date format?   It isn't necessary, unless the date means something.   You can still post 'most recent' info on the front page, but the rest needn't be chronological unless it has some meaning.   A diary is chronological;  a list of reviews is not.

So, I turned to a very complex, but ultimately satisfying, piece of software:  Wikipedia.    The software is freely distributed, and with a few very minor tweaks it can be reduced to single-user mode.  The result:  The new Infomercantile.   I can write about whatever I feel like, put it on the front page if it's important enough, but internally things are organized by category and relation to other articles.   That's what makes the official Wikipedia so browsable;  everything connects in a fluid way, without constraints of date, class, or category.   There's not just one category -- categories are created on-the-fly by adding an article to a category.  New articles exist by typing its name in a URL.

So, I start with my favorite building in Fargo:  The Pioneer Mutual Building.  Now, there's relevant information that I don't want to explain in the article about the building, so I create some additional pages:  Keith and Kurke; the AOUW, Lincoln Mutual.  These all fall under another term I created last spring:  Fargophilia, my affection for this town.  I remember my favorite map of Fargo, which came from a now-defunct magazine, which was bought by the local paper, which also owns the local shopper.   Connections, categories, information -- the excellence of Wikimedia. 

So, now my nuggets are all gone, and you see that I have been writing an awful lot.   Why still write here?   for the chronological order:   this is a blog -- a me-blog -- where I write about what I'm doing, now and in the recent future.   It won't matter by the time I write another entry.  Read it now, and then come back later.

In other news:  No, I haven't given up all my other writing, either;  there's a hell of a lot of it besides Infomercantile.   At Collector's Quest I talked about collecting gray-market items, real-photo postcards (echoed at Kitschy Kitschy Coo), camera-junk, and what to do with your collection when you're gone.  At my blog I talk about a money-belt adventure, retrodigitized movie film, a car with my favorite album cover on it, amongst other things.

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Number Nine

The ninth in the series -- I'm be remiss to not make a Lennon/McCartney reference, so I'll quote from his least-understood yet most humorously remembered song,  and say that this post is based on a novel by a man named Lear.   The weeks go by quickly;  work piles up, I visit freelance accounts, prepare to work more full-time than I already do, we take care of the kids and do our best to take care of ourselves, and everything becomes a blur. 

Excitement has been at a low, though;  the Week of Things Falling Apart referenced in blog post Number Eight, petered away.   I still need to do something about the tire (we're riding on the full-sized spare for now), we still need to figure out how to get an electrician here to fix the box and make sure the landlord is on the bill rather than us, and the servers are definitely still in need of an upgrade, but things are holding together for the short-term.   

This week, the Boy is here for a visit -- he is experiencing spring break, so D's parents picked him up and delivered him to Minneapolis (a task that the ex-inlaws are supposed to do, but feel they can lie in court about their intent to help with travel and get away with it).  We drove to the Cities Saturday morning, dogs and kids in tow, and met at the Denny's on the Rogers exit.   Food was eaten by all, then we loaded our engorged gullets into the van and headed out. 

My obsession with tire pressure (generated for obvious reasons, as you may agree) forced me to stop at a station I knew had free air just to top everybody off.    We couldn't reach the air-hose, though, as a puzzled looking aged gentleman was having difficulty with his tires.   While he was working, I'd check my pressure, I figured, but as soon as I was out of the van, the gentleman summoned me over.

"Can you see where they say what the pressure should be?"

Sure, I'm always glad to help.    You'd think, since proper tire pressure is a high priority for the tire companies -- Firestone went so far as to force Mario Andretti to lecture us on the necessity, waving a pressure gauge in our faces and frowing angrily at our allowances of diminished pressure -- that the pressure would be the largest text on the sidewall of the tire.   Not so, it seems.   We can expect the tire company to place their own name most prominently, but the text seems to go through the least essential information to the end-user in the largest text, moving town until it finally gets to tire pressure, in the smallest possible type, mixed in with a few lines to less-relevant text.   It took me a good thirty to 45 seconds to find it myself, let alone an older man whose eyes seemed to be failing him a little bit.

"Ah, 44 pounds," I said upon discovery.   

I went around and checked my tires as he filled his.    Before he was done, he had another question:

"Do you know how to turn off the 'low tire pressure' light on the dash?"    Sorry, I didn't have that info.   I drive a van that would've gone to its junior prom (if anybody had asked it) the year his car was made.  I know nothing of computerized dash lights that can tell when tires are low, but not when tires are full.    

"Where in North Dakota are you from?"  he asked.   Fargo, I said.  He was born in Grand Forks.   "Ah, way up north!"  I replied, which garnered a polite laugh, and a "have a nice trip!" from the gentleman before he mounted his car and drove off.   

I pulled forward to the air hose, with a comment from the wifey:  "Old men and handicapped kids," she said knowingly.    She's amused that I attract people who fit the least into our current society.  More than once, in our travels, when we've stopped at a fast-food restaurant, a mentally-afflicted teen has stopped to talk to me about choices in beverages.   Older people ask me for advice whenever they get the chance.   I must seem unthreatening but benevolent, which most who know me would agree with, and the rest laugh at how I have everybody fooled.   Not sure which is right, but I perform unthreatening and benevolent acts when approached by such people, and it makes me feel good. 

So, I must go to work soon,  so I know you're chomping at the bit to find out what else I've been writing...at Collector's Quest I talk about a variety of places collectibles and antiques are found and X-ray records from Russia.   At my blog I've been keeping up with Illustration Friday, I note how Twitter takes an idea I came up with 7 years ago and does it a little better, and I give a few little links on men watching crotches and modern Russian photographs of century-old subjects.  At the Infomercantile I've been expanding the entry on the Pioneer Mutual building, added one about the Big Spunk Rest Area, and added a couple more obscure musicians to the lot.  And -- wonder of wonders -- I even posted something at Kitschy-Kitschy-Coo about the horrors of regrettable foods. 

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Number Eight
Current mood: complacent

This has been the Week of Falling Apart.  Not me, thankfully, not my family, but a whole bunch of other things.

Last Thursday was the Day of Servers Falling Apart.   As you may know, all of our online businesses are self-hosted, on our own servers, that reside in a leased, high-security and high-reliability room.    That leased, high-everything room is quite expensive, so we're a little behind on our bills (2 months), but that means my electronic key has been turned off to prevent me from skipping out on the bill (not going to happen anyways).    Not a problem, generally;  I was excited when the server's uptime hit one year of uninterrupted service (seriously...one year, no reboots, no shutdowns).   The main webserver was in the low-400s last week, when I got up and found the websites unresponsive.   Server responded to ping, I could connect to it, but I couldn't log in or get any sort of data moved from here to there.  Something important had stopped running, and it needed a power switch flipped.   Can't do that, because my key was turned off.    After an hour and a half of talking to and waiting for returned calls from tech support, they agreed to supervise my rebooting.   It took two reboots, what with the disk-checking and all, and I got to hear all about the server room's improvements over the past 400+ days since I was last in there, and all was well.   I took the afternoon off to recoup from the stress.   It does give me a reference point for calculating 'the nines,' though:   along with four hours of downtime when the local backbone was down last fall, that's eight  hours of downtime in a year-and-a quarter works out to something like 99.93% uptime reliability.   How's that look, hosting customers of mine?

Oh, but that's not all.    Monday morning I was greeted by a flat tire.   The same tire that went flat a month ago for no obvious reason;   the thought back then was some damage to the rim causing a slow leak, but that slow leak has gotten more prominent.   Yesterday I had no time to swap out the spare, so my air compressor has been doing a pretty good job of keeping it full.    It's still not fun, though, because it means work to find someone who can fix it, and the expense of making that person do so.

Then, there's last night.    Smoke alarms went off at 1am, and I dashed from my bedroom to find flames rising from an electrical outlet in the hallway, the one with a space-heater plugged into it.   Yank of the cord to disconnect it, splash of water to keep the wall from burning (which tripped the breaker, saving me a fast, eyeglassless, footwearless trip to the far corner of the basement), and we were OK for the time being.  I called the fire department anyway.    They arrived, sirens blaring, pulled out their high-tech infrared gear and fire-detection skills, and examined the walls.    Thankfully, nothing was still burning deep inside the house.  That's all I needed.   They warned against turning the breaker back on until an electrician looks at it, in case the melting produced a new short, so that circuit is off until further notice.   Of course, it's the circuit that runs the master bedroom, alarm clock and all.   

Nothing's easy, you know.

But, I'm keeping my optimism.  Shit happens, and I have to deal with it.    Like going out and hooking up the air compressor in a few minutes, so the tire is full for the drive to work.    This morning I have to run the compressor without the engine idling because I'm low on gas.    I tried to fill up last night, but NONE of the gas pumps at the unmanned 24-hour gas station on my way home would read my debit card...not for lack of money, but for lack of a good magnetic stripe.   Should I have driven ten minutes out of my way to a different one?  Maybe.  Problems, problems, problems...and so it goes.

So, in the past couple weeks, I wrote about my most favorite building in all of Fargo at the reimagined Infomercantile, at Collector's Quest I talked about flaws in the new Washington dollars (along with some non-monetary coins)  and 50 years of The Cat In The Hat, and at my blog I've been doing Illustration Fridays as a creative act (along with reminders of Destiny's MIT connection, strangers on Match Game '75, and x-ray records).

I know, this blog is all about me, but I guess I can say I'm doing the webdesign, hosting, and maintenance for a brand-new book review website.   It just happens to be written by Miss Destiny, as a way for her to channel her favorite hobbies of reading and writing into something to share with the world.  And maybe make some advertising dollars.   Both are good for her to learn about.

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Seven
Current mood: bitchy

This week was one where limited work occurred.   I'm frustrated with myself for it, but most of it was clouded by a frantic schedule and sickness.   My illness was a weak cold -- one that produced a hoarse voice and much mucous, but otherwise didn't present as a full-blown illness.   In retrospect, however, it took a lot out of me:  I napped on two afternoons, and felt sleepy most days.   I am not sure where to place blame for the infection, as half of my coworkers were ill, both here and away.  I was also out and about more than usual, so I was near other humans far more than usual.  I guess I should stop licking my fingers after touching a  stranger's face, but old habits and all that.

Despite the deep freeze, we've managed to go for walks almost every day this week -- at the mall, of course, and half of those were days I was a little under the weather, so now there's an entire race of bacteria thankful for allowing them to emigrate to greener pastures (I know I should stop other people from picking my nose for me, but, well,old habits...).   By passing on mild infections I'm building the public's immunities, thus preventing widespread outbreak of SARS or bird flu, so I suppose I deserve acknowledgement of my work towards the public good.    The walks were usually two times around the perimeter of the mall's walkways -- probably a mile-and-a-half, because we go a little off the regular path -- giving D and I plenty of time to talk about work, us, mall marketing aspects (Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister Co are too cool for windows), the creepiness of headless mannequins, and so forth. 

Besides walks, my time has been occupied by appointments.  My own, the kids', school, counselors, etc., etc.   Every day had something that required me to drive across town...that Liberty Tax guy must know my van by heart.  Since I drive past him at the corner of Main and 25th Street so often, I've made sure to wave every time, just to let him know that, yes, somebody does care that he's out there in the cold.    I'd link to a picture of him -- there's a great full-page photo on the front page of the Valley Midweek Marketplace -- but the idiotic newspaper up here doesn't even have a website for the Midweek.  In this day and age, you cannot ignore your reader's desire to email things to their friends, link to them in their blogs, bookmark it for another day, etc.   I can understand charging for the news when it has genuine value, requiring a log in when there's a genuine difference between a registered user and a casual reader, but making people log in for the news -- and then having less news on the website than in the actual paper -- has to be the stupidest plan ever.  But, well, that's just my opinion.

The ephemeral nature of newspapers must make it impossible for journalists to understand the idea of an article's lifespan lasting more than a few hours.   Newspaper editors squat like apes around a iMac in the middle of the floor, wondering how to delete all of yesterday's online updates so there'll be enough room for today's articles.    Another has their typesetting gauge against the screen, trying to calculate column-inches.   One or two grunt and hit each other, until the third one (a young journalism grad who seems to remember something about web design in an elective they took Freshman year) yanks the network connection out of the wall, successfully removing the news from that computer.   Screeches of thanks and congratulation resonate through the newsroom. I guess I'm expecting a lot from a company can't hire english-speaking people as proofreaders.  They also can't keep on top of press releases.   We faxed them one about our signing of Randall Radic almost two weeks ago.  In the past week, D has talked to a newspaper from Toronto, I've talked to the Modesto Bee and CNN, missed a call from an AP wire writer, it's been mentioned in nearly every article about Radic published since Wednesday, but as far as I can tell, the Fargo Forum hasn't had a peep about this local business' newsworthiness. Somehow, a new personal banker being hired gets priority over something worth money on the newswires.  On top of that, a large article about another writer of ours recently appeared in the Chicago Tribune, and still nothing.   I've checked the hardcopy of the business section each Saturday, I've searched the website, with no results.  Should I be emailing them links whenever they appear, to help them along?  And what do I do when they finally drop me a phone call to follow up on it?  Tell them that I'll take care of their questions in a couple weeks, whenever I get around to it?   No, I'm not quite that belligerent.  It's just frustrating to live in a town occupied by the biggest midwest newsprinter this side of the Trib and they can't seem to keep on top of things. 

Umm....maybe my comments about squatting like apes has something to do with being ignored by newspapers.  I'd hope a professional writer would understand my imagry as a tool in getting my point across, but, well...I'd say more, but I'd only make the journalists mad again.

I should talk, though:  for all my opinions, I'm not that great at keeping my own writing and publishing in as good an order as I'd like.   I've been slowly producing downloadable marketing materials for various books, making it available on the website for prospective customers, but I haven't had as much time as I would like.   I did accomplish a Ephemera Bound extranet site, though, allowing small retailers and bookstores to place wholesale orders online.    We're going to do a mailing on it soon, once we can pull together the funds, and hopefully that will expand our influence to retailers beyond the reach of Ingram and Baker & Taylor.  I suppose if I had a crew the size of even a small newspaper, I'd get more done.   Thing is, it's just me.

Which I'm supposed to remind myself:   I'm not superhuman.  Not that I think I can fly while invisibly shooting heat rays out of my retractable claws, but I tend to forget that I still have only two hands and one brain to spread across a number of tasks.   I get a surprising amount of work done, despite my unsuperness.    Heck, above I said this week I built an extranet and talked to the media several times...on top of working 30 hours at my dayjob, handling a half-dozen appointments, a number of minor tasks, sleeping when available, on Friday we spent the afternoon with the Girls because they're off of school -- and all while having a cold.    It's not that I attempt superhuman feats, it's that I think they are the bare threshhold minimum of activity.   If I can allow myself to accept that superhuman amounts of workload are fine peaks once in a while, but I can allow myself to have a regular-human workload on average, then I will probably feel better about how much I get done.    There are times I've built large website structures in a few days...when many web development companies take weeks with a team of programmers and designers.  Sure, I'm not building a killer-app (do kids still call it that?) but I do all right.  I shouldn't expect so much from some guy  in Fargo who works hard but doesn't quite have the talent to make it big.  

There's people down at the Forum who wish I'd extend that to them as well.

In other news, I wrote a little over at my blog, and introduced the new dollar at Collector's Quest.  What, you want more?   Do you think I'm Superman or something?   Geez, get a grip.

Currently listening : More of Other Worlds, Other Sounds By Esquivel Release date: 10 October, 1995

6:31 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment