It seems that some soon to be college graduates don't think that Mr. Rodgers is "elite" enough to give the commencement address at Dartmouth. Are you kidding? I can't even *remember* who gave my commencement address, (though I got to listen to Geraldine Ferraro at my sister's graduation, and that was a kicker.) but I'd have paid money to hear Mr. Rodgers speak. Really. He's up there on my list of officially cool adults.

And he's not *good enough* for these nose in the air soon to be grads? Ugh.

Today may be the day I brain a random co-worker. And on that note, the quote of the day...

When I'm old, I don't want them to say of me, "She's so charming." I want them to say, "Be careful, I think she's armed."
-G. Stoddart

Something I've noticed about people lately.... they come to me with something that needs to be done (turn a site on/off, fix an item that's "wrong", make minor copy changes, etc....) but don't have all the info I'll need in order to effect the change. Examples: What is the actual document name of the page with the error producing product, what *specific* domain am I supposed to be screwing with (when one client has multiple domains, telling me to turn off/on "two of them" is not very helpful)

When the specific information I need is not provided, and I cannot immediately call to mind the details of the account (we've got over 100 clients and I do not have an eidetic memory - you do the math) I will ask questions. These questions serve two purposes. 1.) Maybe the person with the request really does know what I need, and just doesn't understand that they have to tell me. 2.) Failing number one, maybe the answerers they do provide will jog *my* memory enough that I can complete the request. Both of these things have, at different points, happened.

However, sometimes people just do not like being questioned. The want me to snap my fingers and produce their desired results out of the ether through the magic of technology. After all, don't I work on this stuff every day? What do you mean you can't remember all the domains registered to a client you haven't worked on for three months?

Hey, I'll admit - tact and diplomacy are not my best things. I'll make a stab at being nice and understanding, but if you aren't going to work with me, if you do not at least try to help me do what you want me to do, then I have no use for you, and you can bugger off. I'll attempt to complete your request anyway, and if it's not perfect, then use your brain and give me the correct info to work with. No one is paying me money to think for you.

Here's a perfect summation of why word produced code blows, stated way better than I could put it, from CodeBitch:

Word's Export to HTML function is pretty much a joke. Microsoft Word 97 and 98 can't even generate HTML tags that nest properly, and they don't recognize the standard Heading 1 and Heading 2 Word styles as things that should be marked up with H1 and H2 tags. Word 2000 and its Office counterparts spew out so much weird XML-inspired crud, even using the Compact HTML option, that you would think Microsoft is trying to give XML a bad name.

Today's annoying project: stripping out all the crap code that word inserts into it's so-called "saved as html" pages. I have actually found a program that produces worse code than Fusion. Predictably, it's from M$.

It can't handle CSS. Period. I mean, it shouldn't be too hard to make a WYSIWYG program that can handle a simple SPAN tag, should it? Everyone else has been able to do it. But not, apparently, Fusion. People complain about having to hack dreamweaver so it'll produce compliant code, but you have to hack fusion just so it'll produce code that looks like it was written in the year 2000.

The only thing it's decent at is producing absolutely positioned pages that work without a hitch everywhere. It's a combination of CSS-P divs and LAYER tags on top of one another that I haven't been able to reliably reproduce by hand.

And it's fast. It lets me crank shit out way faster than anything else. Because of the speed and ease, my boss is in love with it. So much so that even though the company got de-listed from NASDAQ, we have no plans to even train on any other software, much less migrate any sites. But it produces code that's so god awful embarrassing that I don't even want to own up to producing most of it.

End rant. I feel better now.

Neighbor A has a horse stable and spreads manure on their field. Neighbor B dislikes the scent and wants it to stop, regardless of how this would affect neighbor A's life, buisness, and livelihood.

Why does this interest me? Well, the story is from my old hometown newspaper, which I check up on online now and then 'cause I miss living there. Why am I writing this? 'Cause I lived for 13 years next to a field that had manure spread on it every spring and you know what? If you wanna live out in the country, there are some things you just gotta deal with. You can't have all the happy, picturesque, lovin' the nature vibes without dealing with the reality that you live near actual, functional, down and dirty *farms*.

Personally, I think farms are wonderfull and beautiful. They are also a lot of hard work and yup - they got odors. If neighbor B is unwilling to deal wih this, they should look around for a place which is more picturesque and less real. Why am I so upset? Because in the last 20 years real, functional farms in Sussex county have been going the way of the dodo. Farmers die and the kids don't want to continue the buisness, bad economy forces some to fold, selling off acerage for subdivisions is more profitable... etc....

I have watched fields and pastures turned into surburban tracts and it shreds my heart every time I go home. And then the middle class twanks who move in want their nature *sanitized*?

Angry now.

Jesus Christ - as if there wasn't enough rampant stupidity in the universe. Man goes out hunting one early morning. he takes his young kid with him. The kid wanders out of the truck to find dad, gets lost, and freezes to death. Father is brought up on charges of negligence. The day after he appears in court, the brain damaged sperm donor commits suicide. But that's not the kicker.

The family of the dad and kid are now *SUING* the people who searched the mountain for six days before finding the kid.

Stop the planet everyone. I need to get off.

Huge crock of shit essay Here about how men are the ones truly fit to write software, work with computers, and determine the future of the tech world. Dori Smith and Megnut both counter the argument effectively. However, I have to take execption with one line.

"Until a few hundred years ago (maybe just a few decades, maybe no time at all), men fought and hunted and gathered, while women built civilization. Men are the artists of our species, women are the infrastructure. Art and war are almost the same thing, btw."

Excuse me? Every frelling female in my whole damm family is an artist! All but two earn their *livngs* that way. This guy needs to go out and actually *meet* some people in the artistic community.

Driving into work this morning, I could see the smoke that still lies over Manhatthan. There's a squad car barring the entrance to Teterboro airport. Rt 46 is closed a few miles before it hits the George Washington Bridge.

Ok, that's the quite reflection. As for all of you wankers who were clogging up 46 eastbound yesterday afternoon on the assumption that all the radio alerts that the GWB was CLOSED just didn't apply to you and that somehow, in spite of everything, you were special enough to get into the city when evryone else couldn't.... WTF? The radios were going on and *on* about how no one could get onto the city, that the only entrance that was open was the Tappan Zee Bridge, and yet the roads were clogged with drivers trying to get to the GWB. Mass hysteria?

CBS is still transmitting. No one else is up. I can't even get NPR. Everyone at Slashdot and Google are my heroes. They were getting info out yesterday when no one else could. Google was caching copies of the news sites so people could get to them. Net traffic has never seen anything like this.