Today, I needed to have a talk with one of my bosses. (I have three jobs, equalling three bosses, if I count myself as my self-employed boss, which I do.) Y’see, he’s a very smart, fairly nice guy (and I use the words “nice guy” with reason, as will be explained later) who has been laboring under the impression that since I am female; my job includes, and I quote, “taking care of him”.

He advertised for a graphic designer. He got a graphic designer. He also got a web designer, office assistant, errand runner, receptionist, courier, press operator, tutor, and amature hardware support person. Sadly, no where in that list was the term “nanny” included.

But, because I’m female, he often tells clients that I (along with his wife) am in charge of keeping him “in line”. I have also been encouraged to blame any character defects he may have (so not going there right now) on both his wife and his mother. As far as I can tell, women exist in his universe to take care of him. I’ve never seen him away from work, so I’m not sure if he considerers that to be their only role, but considering how often he makes reference to his need for an outside caretaker, I’d say it’s a strong maybe.

So this morning we had a little talk, where certain things were outlined.

1. I am here to make graphics, not to take care of you.
2. I have a boyfriend, family, friends, and two cats. I take care of them.
3. Referring to me as the person in charge of keeping you “in line” is unprofessional.
4. Doing it in front of clients is worse.

He apologized. I believed him. I don’t think it will be happening again.

But then, he had to justify himself. (Remember when I mentioned the Nice Guy thing? this is where it kicks in.) He started to explain how he “was one of the first people to stick up for women…” which was right where I cut him off.

Because, I explained, his previous sterling behaviour with any and all other women had no bearing whatsoever on the current situation. It was neither 1978, 1985, or 1990. It was the year 2003, and I was the woman he was dealing with right now.

The rest of the day proceeded with admirable efficiency, and no annying comments. To me or anyone else. If the job were in a proper office and not a loud, chilly, warehouse, I might even have started to enjoy myself. Sigh.

Like I tell myself at the end of every day, at least it pays the bills.

Well, it didn’t completely suck. Visually beautiful, great cast… I love John Rhys-Davies in just about anything, and Sienna Guillory is the first woman who I could actually call a golden beauty with a straight face. (And I’d love to see her do Richard Adam’s Maia… but that’s another entry.)

Well, that was a recounting of the good. On to the bad, the ugly, and the just plain cheesy.

Way too many modern sensibilities get interjected into a story which is anything but modern in it’s morals, sensibilities, or anything else. It’s a story about order versus chaos, gods versus gods with humanity as both the playing board and the pieces, and love merely another way for fate to move us all over to where it wants us to be. Remolding this epic into a bronze age Romeo and Juliet makes me want to spit.

No mention of Brisis or Achilles sulking, no Patroclus… (that whole big gay thing too complicated? Though other than that I did like the crazy angle they went with on him.) Odysseus gets a few good lines but I want to know how in *hell* he knew about the suitors and the weaving gambit. (Let’s not forget, it will be another ten years before *he* gets home.)

Another seriously off point - far as I can tell, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon while he’s still in Troy. Did the book manage to fall in a blender while I wasn’t looking? Did she hop a ship sometime in year nine? Bleah.

At the end of the four hours, I’ve seen a lot of eye candy, some decent acting, and an adaption so pedestrian that I’m tempted to run away to an ivory tower, stick my fingers in my ears, and give a rousing chorus of “la la la I can’t hear you”

Bitstream’s just released the Vera font family as a cross platform replacement for the now removed MS core web fonts. JD Welch has a page up promoting them and their use online.

Lot’s of folks are jumping up and down about this, and it’s a good thing they’re now out and available, especially for the Unix/Linux/Open Source/Etc. crowd but they’re just not doing it for me. I have added the family as a second choice in my style sheets ’cause they don’t suck, and I think they will get picked up by a good percentage of viewers in the future.

Y’know, when a client sends something “on disk”, you’d think by now it would be a simple affair. Especially when it’s a client you’ve worked with for several years and have trained assiduously in the arcane science of “how to send your developer files she can use”.

So, when I get the nice, hefty package with full notes and documentation telling me everything she wants done to her site, with all graphics already scanned and copy already typed, I think the day will be a smooth one. Right? Oh hell no.

It’s on a zip disk. Ok, say I - we can work with this. So I spend half an hour hooking up my old SCSI Zip drive to my WinXP system (a trip in and of itself). System and drive are talking? Check. I pop the disk in… and it gets spit right back out.

Oh look - it’s a Zip *250* disk. Which I can’t read. (30 minutes of my life I’m *never* getting back…).

Pondering my options, I decide it would just be simpler to upgrade my hardware rather than attempt to get the files on CD. So, off to CompUSA. (Where I find everything I need, one thing I don’t need but buy anyway, get to see the new Matrix trailer, and have not one but two sales guys try to sell me “service plans” that I don’t need. They get politely turned down.)

Back home, the box gets unpacked. (And I have to admit, the new drive is sleek and sexy - much nicer to look at than the old one.) I install the software. I reboot. I pop the drive into the *last* free USB port on the system. And then? Nothing. And more nothing.

After an hour and a half on the phone with a very nice guy at Iomega tech support, and I can finally access the stinking drive. (Somehow managed to hack an explorer shortcut - it still won’t show up in My Computer.) During that span of time, I pulled out every other USB device, popped them all back in, manually assigned a new drive letter, re-installed the zip drivers, upgraded the drivers for my USB card, upgraded the zip drivers, poked around in the admin tools a whole hell of a lot, uninstalled TweakUI, and came just this close to giving up and taking the whole thing back for store credit.

But at least now I have the files and can actually start working on the project.

Intersting article at The Guardian about how european textbooks are being re-written to reflect a more warm and fuzzy, cohesive, EU-centric view of european history. Heh. Someday, the way this is all going, the only folks who will have a good understanding of how europe became europe will be on this side of the Atlantic, and the only people who have a good understanding of *american* history will be anywhere but here.

That whole ignoring history and repeating it problem? Not just a theory.

Neil Gaiman has some interesting thoughts on it.

DragonFolk has just added e-commerce! Now it’s even easier to buy all those nifty things my mom makes. :)

So of course, Quark had to release a pretty vague PR statement about it. John Gruber offers the official statement and a great real world translation. I wanna see what he comes up with when Adobe starts issuing PR verbiage about PS8.

Today I got one monster freehand file (we’re talking roughly 100 inches tall and wide) that supposedly contained about four display panels to be tweaked, color matched, and printed. All well and good, but there were no guides or clues telling me how (or if) it should be cut apart. (And seeing as our printer has a max width of 60 some odd inches, it would have to get cut up *anyway*.)

So I’m on the phone with the boss, (at his home office, about an hour and a half away) trying to figure stuff out. The exchange that followed:

“I have no idea how this thing is supposed to get cut up”
“Well, I have a print out of the panels around here somewhere.”
“And that does me a lot of good, doesn’t it?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.”

He doan’ know me very well, do he? ‘Cause, I don’t think he’d have been so suprised if he took a look at this site once in a while. (It is on my business cards, after all.)

From yesterday’s WD-L. I was tempted to send a response on-list, but others had answered. (Sans flame and smart assed-ness) So, the question that was asked:

I intend to design a site using only css, but I’m not comfortable with the idea that anybody can copy it and make theirs look exactly like mine (yes, it happens!). So my question is: are there any ways to protect the css files (by renaming them, putting them in a password protected directory, using
a php script etc.) and if somebody else has done it (or thinks it’s useful).

My response *would* have been:
1. Boy, are you in the wrong profession.
2. Go read Lemur’s essay on hiding content.
3. You do know that people can steal/copy/plagiarize your table based layout just as easily as a css based one, right?
4. No, I mean it. You really are in the wrong line of work.

Microsoft wanting to own Google - that’s the bad part. I hope it doesn’t happen. Really.