September 30, 2004

I just decided that to all intents and purposes my working day is finished, which means I have spent my allotted time in front of the moniter and am now allowed to move through my apartment free of any sense of guilt or nagging responsability.

The weird thing is that when I went to close my browser I had this immediate panic of "oh no! wait! don't shut that down yet, you might need it later.. for other stuff.. " and then when I realized I hadn't completely hit control q I felt better.

what does that mean, is having a browser window open like maintaining a pulse??

ps: to all you people who are going to tell me about firefox and how great it is.. firefox is like a sports car and mozilla is like my trusty corolla I don't need all that power most of the time. So I leave the sportscar in the garage unless I want to impress someone with how I am like, a webdeveloper and I need web developer tools.

September 29, 2004

My dad is being slowly grudged out of his job.

He says his work is phasing out the rehab engineers and since his qualifications are less then the other guys that he feels threatened.

This makes me feel really awful, since he's worked there for about 30 years. he says he feels very much like all the work he has done has pretty much gone un-remarked. he says he will prbably accept the golden handshake and start polishing up his cv but he's almost 60 so that last remark is probably more to show that he is still in the game.

My mother also took and early retirement package, quite by choice, she was sick of teaching, but I wonder what the connection is between people telling me I will never have job security and the fact that my parents who enjoyed good rrsp packages and insurance through their supposedly secure jobs are being told that their skills are no longer valuable.

I am thinking of buying a house in the next year though, so I think if my dad retires I will invite him and my step-mom up here to help me renovate it as a long-term working vacation, that's the only plus I can see in all this. It's really not fair for them to be treating him like this.

It feels like everyone is going through difficult things lately, I wonder what's up with fate.

Not that I am that superstitious - it's just a feeling.

September 28, 2004

and now it's fine... thanks to some timely advice from the new Phpwebsite forum I am back in the running.

Lately I am experiencing a tendency to spend many hours reading diverse forum posts on the different random scripts and web-apps I am trying to modify. I think this behaviour could be called searching for the holy grail of forums. What I am essentially doing is looking for someone who has decided to undertake exactly the same project as I, dealt with whatever glitches there are, and then posted the resulting bug -free customization - for me to use without having to scratch my head or get worry lines from approaching deadlines.

Worse yet I consider all this time to be working , if not billable hours than at least closer to being productive than staying in bed an extra hour this morning would have been - which is not neccesarily true or accurate.

Worse even than that, is the small pleasure I take in noticing that there are people out in forum land who ask *much* stupider questions than I do.
Which is just mean.

September 27, 2004

maybe not as cruel as working for a moody childish despot with a pet alligator pond. But close.

I am going to have a little personal whine kind of along the lines of all the calligraphers who were thrown out of work when Guggenhiem made the first press.

why do I spend so much time noodling with little tiny hidden h2's nowadays?

and,

why is that sometimes things work in one iteration and the second time you install them they don't work?????

and why is it that when I reach a state of the highest dander about both these problems that my itunes insists on playing some random accidentally added to my collection piece of country and western trash that makes me gnash my teeth in frustration?? Back in the day of html and image maps the hardest thing to deal with was broken tables and the hours of mindless updating that followed the creative process. The creative process itself was apretty straightforward thing akin to drawing a picture on your computer and adding text to it later.

Now the creative process itself involves hours of mindless tampering as one trolls through folders with cryptic titles trying to find the hidden mark-up tags or the broken variable that keeps a function from properly functioning.

Would someone please please write some proper documentation for something.... I am losing hope here.

Maybe that's what I'll do, I'll become a therapeutic technologist. People can come to me with technology related psychic angst for example :

Separation anxiety (ie : I can't believe they aren't going to make an upgrade for this software that will work in OS9..)

Pre-scocial immersion paranoia (Ie :when you've just spent 7 days in front of your computer and have to go for dinner somewhere with your aunt and uncle)

...and my particular brand of paranoia (Everyone else is smarter than me or else they would be having the same problem dealing with opensource web apps that have cruddy documentation)

don't pity me. just send chocolate and publish faqs that aren't stoopid.