We have a cheap client (CC). Everybody has had one of these - the kind who disputes every charge and tries to find the cheapest way of doing anything, regardless of quality. CC was out of the country for several months and let his domain and shopping cart account lapse. When he gets home he finds that he can’t get to his website, so he calls me asking why it’s broken. (Of course, he doesn’t mention that he hasn’t paid any of his net bills)

Insert half an hour of me checking the server (running fine), his ip address (working), and pinging his domain (working fine). So, unable to figure why the domain itself won’t work, I check NSI’s Whois database. And lo and behold, the damn domain expired.

Over the course of the next day, CC gets in touch with NSI and gets everything turned back on. (He’s got a pretty unique domain name, so no one had snapped it up in the interim.) Then he calls and wants to know if he can avoid dealing with the shopping cart people entirely and just take orders via email.

Hmmm…. you want people to send you their address and credit card info over unsecure email?! His response - “but I’ve heard that nothing on the net is really secure anyway”. Of course, he doesn’t even know what a privacy policy is or why he might need/want one. As my brain threatened to explode, I tried to explain that customer trust was very important when dealing with ecommerce. No, nothing is 100% secure, but one still needed to take, erm, basic precautions. But I did give him the price breakdown for a new page with a mail form ’cause, hey - there’s only so far you can go to save someone from their own ignorance, and billable work is still billable work.

CC said he’d think about it.

Finally bought the scanner yesterday. After staying up way too late playing with it, I am sucking down coffee trying to wake up and deal intelligently with the morning. Gah.

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$.

If you have been able to find the new site, congratulations! We’ve officially switched over all the sites at work from the temp Win200 box to the new and souped up linux server. That is to say, we switched over everything except Stresspopper, since it’s a personal project and will eventually have a new home on the old NT server. I realized this morning that this means that all my lovely redirect pages have taken a momentary trip into the ether. Grrr…. And here I thought switching to Pair would end these woes. Silly me.

Almost everything I want to watch is in rerun hell. Or worse, gone until new eps happen. But I’ve still got The Shield, and what yummy goodness it is. Good people doing bad things, bad people doing bad things, and tiny little shreds of noble-ness that you want to hang on to even when you know there is more nastiness to come. I want to find out more about all the characters, from the gay, very closeted, and very christian rookie, to the self serving aspiring politician. And I want some good fic to happen. Hell, if Oz can inspire great fic, this will too.

Finally sat down and began converting Past Sins from a screenplay into a novella. This is not going to be a quick project. Doug, I swear I haven’t forgotten about it - life just keeps getting in the way.

Will today be the day I finally break down and buy a scanner for home? At a touch over a hundred dollars, there is no reason why I can’t afford it *now*, but I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t splurge like this until after I got my refund check. Next year, I’m e-filing.

I’m in a list making mood for some reason, and I’ve been thinking about different series and how their final episodes were handled. So here’s a best/worst multi-fandom final ep list.

Best
Quantum Leap - Sam never got home, but he made sure Al got a chance at happiness.
Babylon 5 - Gut wrenching squared. I cried like a baby. And I was smiling at the same time.
Mash - I can’t even watch this ep anymore. I was too young to understand it all when it first aired, but once I figured it out…. good god.

Worst
Dark Shadows (Second version) - I know they *filmed* an ending episode, but they never aired it. No closure whatsoever. Still grumpy about that.
Deep Space 9 - They were getting stronger towards the end, but I’d stopped caring by then.
Voyager - See above.

Well, I still feel like crap, but I’m at work. And, being bored and feeling lousy, I finally look at my site stats. I have come to the suprised conclusion that other people actually read this thing. Damm.