Oh. That.

It's apparently Google's 15th birthday. This required some research, since whoever designed today's Doodle didn't bother to do a little bit of Javascripting to include mouseover text. So as an actual Web guy, let me just say this:

Fuck You, Google. It is your good fortune to be only slightly less evil than Apple, and about precisely as evil as Microsoft. Comparative analysis aside, Fuck You, Google.

Why Blogging Sucks; or, You Kids Get Off My Web

BFF's recent experience and the accompanying performance art have inspired me to explain things to all of you in the most condescending manner possible. So here we go.

Actually, no we don't. I need to explain the condescension. I am, as the tag says, an actual communications professional. Now, what I really am is a corporate management tool. But my background is in databases and Web, and one of the jobs I do, amid other toolish professional behavior, is manage a group that operates a passel of Web sites for your local Federal government. The other toolish professional behavior consumes a nontrivial amount of my time, because small businesses that suck at the teat of your local Federal government take people like me and stretch us out over a ridiculous number of businesses and people and groups and teams, and make us manage them, and then stick ice picks in our kidneys until we accumulate more businesses and people and groups under our personal aegis, except that's a lie because they never stop fucking sticking ice picks in our kidneys.

But I digress. The point here is that Web is my home. It's my yard. And you fucking bloggers are taking a shit on it. I'm a modern and sensitive guy, and I'm going to try to be kind about this. And I'm going to try not to be too condescending and to keep this shit simple, because who has time for me taking a dump all over the Internets? To the extent that simplicity, in your personal case, is condescending, I apologize.

There are a number of ways to produce a Web page. One is to just take your text, fit the appropriate HTML (or XHTML or XML or some other Markup Language) around it so that it looks like a Web page and not a ransom note, and slap that puppy up on whatever part of the Web you happen to control (your domain). You absolutely must view everything that follows this paragraph through this filter: I am a fucking dinosaur, and producing Web pages any way other than this is newfangled horseshit that leads to deviant behavior, alternative religions, hippies fucking in the streets, the fiery, painful, screaming downfall of all that is decent and pure, the utter defilement of sainted mothers everywhere, and hemorrhoids. I would cheerfully scoop up all of you fucking bloggers into my giant, dripping, gaping, blood-stained maw, and devour you whole, ignoring your pathetic and inconsequential screams. But I can't, because my little Trex arms are too fucking short.

Your HTML may just create the way the page looks--this is like using the Bold or Italic or font commands in Word--or it may use a style sheet (CSS), which is like using Word styles to mark a block of text as Heading, or Body, or something else. HTML or CSS code, wrapped around your content (text) and presented to a Web browser through the holy mystery that is Internet telecommunications, governs how a page looks when you call up that page in your browser.

Another way to produce a Web page is to use software to do it. These methods usually rely on the Web content (your text) being stored in a database, and being served up to browsers through the holy mystery, & c. At the popular level--i.e., blogging--these methods are called Web Content Management Systems (WCMS). Blogger and WordPress, for instance, are populist WCMS writ large. A populist sort of WCMS is how you deliver blogging functionality outside of an organizational setting (a WCMS that is less populist is still necessary to deliver blogging functionality inside an organization, the implication here being that organizations have well-developed IT, software, and Web content development/delivery processes and systems that may not need to be as friendly as Blogger or WordPress or BlogFrog or OhFuckMeInTheAssItsMoreFuckingBlogware).

Did I spit enough when I said "populist?" Because I meant to.

In a WCMS, populist or otherwise the CSS that governs how your blog pages look is usually called a template. And that template is what you choose when you set up your blog, or in the case of my beloved BFF, every 20 minutes when you get bored and decide you need a change (which is the Web equivalent of dying your hair pink). The template is designed for the WCMS in which it operates; it is a package of code--mostly CSS, but some other stuff too, depending on functionality--that takes your content and pretties it up in the way that you specify. All the bells and whistles that you want on your fucking blog--blogrolls, sidebars, lists, calendars, labels, and whathefuckeverelse--have to fit into that template. A user interface between you and the template--in Blogger, it's your dashboard--lets you make those selections, and writes code to fit all that shit into your customized version of the basic template.

Over time, Blogger or WordPress or FuckYouBlogware needs to make changes to the underlying WCMS. Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're total overhauls. Google seems to overhaul Blogger about once a year. Every time there's a major overhaul, God kills a kitten. No, wait, that's not quite right. God kills some templates. The underlying WCMS can still render pages in the coded template, but it becomes much harder to customize the old template by automatically writing code from the user interface. And it's not worth it to Google to update the old template, because it's fucking free, so why the fuck should they, when you, and not just you beloved BFF, but all vanity Web presences, are so fucking fickle? Easier, and more cool-sounding, to give you new choices.

And that's how BFF's blog got fucked. He is not particularly comically inept, from my jaded and tiresome perspective. He does have somewhat unrealistic expectations, but excuse me? Are you new here? Have you met my friend? Fucking English majors.

Maybe more later on browsers and their peculiarities, or on domain management. Or maybe not. Right now, I have to go dump my older kid at a transportation terminal and tell him to follow the guys in the furry hats.

BFF

BFF has managed to lose his free domain name associated with his free blog management software. I have never heard of anyone having a whit of trouble with Blogger, but apparently he feels he has been exiled (and assures me that there is an army of Blogger-disenfranchised out there beyond my horizon).

Now, the President himself landed a black helicopter in my yard and promised me that this difficulty--which I say in all seriousness as an actual Web professional, no one in the entire human universe could possibly deliberately replicate--is because dogma-N (and yes, this kind of stuff is exactly how he got that name, lo these 30 or so years ago) likes Brad Manning and Ed Snowden. Then he fired a drone at my neighbor. So I guess it's real.

Anyway, he's here for now. I've whacked him from the rolls until he settles, because I'm not going to change it every other day while he gets it resolved, and because I'm not sending you to the fuckware site at which his domain name presently resides.

Update: BFF correctly corrects me in comments. He paid for the domain name. So like his theorizing, my mockery is misplaced. Fine metaphors, as someone says, abound.

This is not to say that Google should offer domain names through cheapass nobody low bidders. And trust me on this: I know from cheapass nobody low bidders. But it's not uncommon or unique to Google. I just had a similar, much lower-profile experience with another IT leviathan whose productivity software you are forced to use--a black hole between a big name and some schlubs to whom they outsourced a chunk of human interface, in this case their e-store.

Which cycles us back to this: trust no one. Which is a highly synthesized, overly simplified, and completely useless version of BFF's point.

A Birthday Wish

Alan Turing was born 100 years ago today, and here's my birthday wish for him: I wish he hadn't been hounded quite literally to death by small-minded idiots. If you know anything about Alan Turing, congratulations; you're not a complete fucking waste of protoplasm. If you worship Alan Turing...uhm, hi Sasha.

Turing was a brilliant scientist, a pioneer in computer science (those who are into such labels call him computer science's daddy) and information theory. He was a critical figure in British cryptanalysis during World War II. He was so fucking brilliant, so creative, and so important to the war effort that cracking the famous Enigma code used by the Germans may have been the least of his major accomplishments during the war.

Turing was responsible for two key (and related) concepts in information theory and computer science: the Turing Test and the Turing Machine. Oversimplified, the Turing Test is an experiment in which an interrogator attempts to determine, using natural written language only, whether he is conversing with a human or a machine. The classic definition of artificial intelligence refers to a machine that can fool the interrogator. Also oversimplified, a Turing Machine is a formal description of what we would think of as a simple computer, except it's gussied up with a whole lot of math and modeling that Alan Turing could master and command, in his head, while simultaneously making his grocery list, taking a dump, and deducing the location of the Bismarck at 7:52 AM British War Time on February 18, 1941 based on an abstract imaginary mathematical representation of Admiral Lutjens' hair color, three grains of sand on Brighton Beach, and the position of a randomly chosen link on his bicycle chain.

Turing killed himself in 1954, some time after being chemically castrated by the British judicial system following his conviction for homosexual acts. There have been some attempts at forensic revisionism, suggesting that his death by cyanide poisoning was the result of a scientific experiment gone wrong. The man was found dead of cyanide poisoning with a half-eaten apple in his hand. Grow up, revanchists.

In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for the state's treatment of Turing; two years later, the British Minister for Justice declined to pardon Turing, contending that Turing was a big faggot who deserved what he got.

Turing is a fascinating figure, a man of incredible allure for information science junkies, engineers, and the formerly great writer Neal Stephenson, back before Neal was tragically lost to humanity while spelunking in his own ass for epistemological complexity. Turing was an instructional fable to Princess Nell in the still-amazing The Diamond Age, teaching Nell how to program computers by using an increasingly complex series of...yes, Turing Machines. Duh. Turing was also an active character in Stephenson's less ageworthy but still very fine Cryptonomicon, a colleague and mentor to one of the most central characters, Lawrence Waterhouse. For all I know Turing was also in The Baroque Cycle, to the extent that that pile of vocabulary drenched in Neal's ass was decipherable as literature--I honestly don't remember because I'm pretty sure I was either asleep or being tortured on a waterboard while I was reading it. I didn't read Anathem, because I heard he invented a language to write it, as if Klingon isn't good enough, and I decided I'd rather be rimmed by beavers than read that. I have heard that it's possible that his latest, whatever the fuck it's called, is something we might actually consider a book.

Wait, was I discussing something? Right, Alan Turing. Sorry, my bad. The point, of course, is that you should take a moment from whatever you're thinking about today, or tomorrow, or whenever you read this, to thank whatever you fucking consider holy that you got a chance to walk the same fucking planet as Alan Mathison Turing. Because, seriously? You're not fucking worthy.

I'd have missed Turing's birthday, if not for Slate, which clued me to this Vimeo gem by some Dutch guy calling himself Ecalpemos:

LEGO Turing Machine from ecalpemos on Vimeo.

It's Like This

Lazy stream-of-consciousness blogging on a few issues of the day:

Work: I've mentioned my work before, and I won't do so with any level of specificity right now, but here's the essence: I am a mid-level tyrant for a government contractor, holding sway over several petty fiefdoms, one of which is concerned with making a Federal agency's Web site go. Once upon a time, in the course of discussing something else, I wrote this about part of what I do:

One of my adorable little gifts--or not, depending on your perspective and the given value of "adorable" and "gifts"--is that I speak fluent Web, understand how things should work, know something about the place of the Web in communications strategies, sort through hours of technical blahrg from actual Webheads, and then distill the whole mess into something that actual Webheads can run with, rather than getting endlessly trapped inside their engineer-like minds.

The other part of that is that I'm really very good--and I sincerely don't mean to be immodest here--at helping nontechnical peeps to understand what technology can and can't do.

This is why it's pretty fucking galling when the buttheads don't even fucking bother to ask. Or worse, when they try to tell me what technology should do. Y'know what? I don't fucking tell you how to cure cancer or prevent heart attacks or whatever the fuck it is you do or research. Don't fucking tell me how to do with the Web what you just told me you wanted the fucking Web to do for you.

#Occupy: I'm terribly sorry you got arrested. I'm really, really glad that BFF didn't. In return for this overwhelming show of empathy, don't fucking tell me you weren't trying to get arrested when you did a fucking barn-raising in McPherson Square. For my part, I won't piss on your leg and tell you it's raining.

Tino: Santino Quaranta retires. Aiyee. Well, I've certainly had plenty to say about old Tino over the years, much of it unkind. To his eternal credit, Tino hasn't sought me out in 232 and beat the shit out of me. Hell, he even had a chance to finish me off in a Popeyes on I-95 one night, and didn't do it. That's gotta be worth something.

It's unfortunate that the competitive fires in Tino didn't drive more than anger, tightness, and 100-mph shots into the mezzanine. He managed moments of beauty during his time here, and I certainly wasn't unhappy to see him on the field this season, especially given the sheer loathsomeness of the options, but I don't want to damn him now with that kind of faint praise. Since his return to the team, he's been as black and red as anyone, and we will miss his energy.

Some selected Tino quotes:

(4/25/2011): Santino Quaranta I already dealt with. He's just a big sack of testosterone and anger. Heart is no longer a problem for him, but he doesn't seem to have any remaining talent to go with it, or at least the intelligence to harness his talent (and experience--it's incredible how long he's been in the league, for his age) in a useful direction. Props to him for getting his ass back on defense, and congratulations to him for being no worse than my fourth or fifth most hated player on my own fucking club.

No one loves like I do.

(3/17/2011) I myself am excited about Tino Quaranta, now that management has seen fit to pick up and retain players equally or more loathsome.

I do love a deathmask retrospective, don't you?

(8/15/2010) Here's what Goff doesn't tell you in his hack: about 90 seconds earlier, Dallas broke free on exactly the same play. They failed to score because Santino Quaranta--hailed as a hero by many in the commenting community, though I'm not sure why--grabbed the ball carrier's (I think it was Ferreira) jersey, dragging him back to prevent the 2-on-1 breakaway. It was a straight red-card professional foul that very clearly and very obviously prevented a goal. Abbey Okulaja ignored it (bless him).

I vividly remember this game and this sequence, which is unusual for me. It's a perfect example of why I'm loathe to kick Tino's slumped body. Well, that and the shabby treatment he got from the team on his way out.

(4/11/2010) The other item: you should never listen to me again, because it's true. I was 10 fucking feet from the unforgiven, but no longer discommodated, Santino Quaranta, and all I did was thank him for a nice goal and speak pleasantly, and briefly. No ranting. No attempt to disembowel him with my greasy Popeye's spork. Just politeness and smiles and thank yous. And that, beloved minions, is the only kind of self-complicity one should waste time whining about.

The aforementioned Popeyes incident, also covered recently by BFF.

(6/14/2008) Tino's discommodation is, of course reversed, with apologies (but not with forgiveness, because Minions has a pretty definite policy on that, too).

I mean, it took his courageous admission of a Vicodin addiction to spur that, but whatever, I manned up.

And the best for last:

(5/24/2008) You see, tonight's Man of the Match, in my book, would be none other than Tino. It was Tino who, through the glory of embellishment that he could only have learned while lapping hungrily at Landon Donovan's pussy, turned a very nice run into a well-earned penalty (in truth, there were two earlier occasions when DCU could easily have been awarded penalties; in this case, there was contact, and Tino was definitely going down, he just made it look better than it was). Minutes later, his run into space with the ball, coupled with a very nice feed to someone (I forgot who), set up the one moment this season when the ball has richocheted onto The New Mister Em's foot in the six-box.

And that last? That's your third problem. Things just haven't been falling for the offense. It doesn't much matter why Emilio isn't the same guy he was last season. Part of it is that some nontrivial number of his goals last season were poached, and he's been so innately lazy about getting into the box this season that his poaching opportunities have dwindled.

So, Tino for MOTM? Sure enough. Apparently Moreno won the text message voting, because he was the guy they flashed on the board at the end of the game. And Peralta had a really fun equalizer, stretching himself out to head a ball two feet off the ground into the net (bDr correctly noted that Peralta might could have just foot-tapped it, but it was a lot more fun the way it happened). Fred moved reasonably well off-ball, and Gallardo's touch and control (as long as he's not kicking a set piece) are a marvel. But Tino ran his ass off and earned it.

No, he did not earn my forgiveness. bDr's brother asked me a pertinent question when he wondered if, should Tino break Jay Heaps in half, spit on the body, and wipe his ass on a Duke t-shirt in front of 25,000 fans, I'd get around to forgiving. Actually, he phrased the question a lot less violently and my answer wasn't terribly affirming. Only when I embellished the violence and emphasis could I get to a place where the possibility of any sort of Tino-warmth could be forthcoming.

Emphasis added.

It's pretty clear that I've had a real complex relationship with Santino Quaranta, at least in my head, for a real long time now. Tino's name and number will never be up on the wall (though he could hardly shame it any worse than fucking Harkes does), but it'll be an oddly painful and incredibly strange thing to see a number 25 on someone else's United kit someday.

Best wishes for a happy and successful retirement, Tino.

It's The Most Stenchiful Time Of The Year

I hate autumn.

Yah, sure, I see the flaming quality of the leaves as they transform, the heartrending beauty of the cyclical river of nature as it flows relentlessly through death and rebirth, the majesty of 106,000 drunk crackers crammed into a stadium in Knoxville to puke on the visiting Florida Gators, the timeless and eternal suck of the Washington Redskins, and I am, of course, duly moved, in what I am sure is a very profound and spiritual way.

That's all cultural, even the nature parts (because we pile into the wilderness to go take in the flaming quality, poke dead things with sticks, etc.). I hate the reality of autumn.

It's death. It's decay. It's moist bleakness, which has additive properties to the death and decay. It's fungi and molds and spores and allergies that are, for me, as cavity-pressurizing as any spring produce of tree sex. It's cold, but not cold enough to inhibit the march of dank. It's wet, but in a persistent, clinging, stinking way that doesn't wash away sin and corruption, merely lets it fester and brood and molder.

And it fucking stinks. It smells like shit, because it is, in every sense that matters, shit. Every morning this week I have emerged from the house and encountered a different fucking stench of autumnal decay. Seriously, five different seasonal stenches, ranging from simple manure to baby poop to dog poop to something akin to what the pens under the fucking Colosseum must have smelt like.

No vaguely heart-twanging undertone of wood smoke, no piney holiday comfort, nothing reminiscent of food, at least in its pre-digested state. Just decay. Decay and poop.

For the scientifically inquisitive among you, I checked. It's not me. Nor is it Bam-Bam, who is almost always at my side when I emerge in the morning, because the reason we're emerging at fucking 7 AM every day (the boy is eleven; to get him a sufficient night's sleep, I have to chunk his ass into bed at 8:30 each night, and call him to colors at freaking 6:20 AM, which process involves a lot of squirming and stubborn burrowing/nuzzling, and, non-trivially, the eternal stench of morning breath) is to throw his ass on the bus. Nothing died in my garage, or on my driveway, or in the bushes we provide in front of the house for dirty hippies and other unsavory criminals to lurk in. It's just the smell of my fucking perfectly well-ordered suburban neighborhood and the surrounding minor woods on an autumn morning.

I hear you. "Fuck you, Landru," you say, "Fuck you and your whining, and your sinuses, and your allergies, and your magical sensitivity to odors that didn't originate in your own stupid colon, as if there are any other odors."

Yeah, I hear you, and I'm hard-pressed to disagree. But still.Whatever. Fuck autumn.

Hearkening back: I promised you here, right up top, that I'd report on the outcome of some science I did. I am pleased to report that the stimulus provoked the hoped-for response, eventually. In fact, the named individual told me that the very same staff member who forwarded him a link to that very post was the person who had done up the (allegedly) ball-sucking tags. Hans purported gratitude that he didn't have to be a meanie about the tags, that I had done his dirty work for him; sadly, his minion didn't get it, and Hans was lamenting that he'd have to be a meanie anyway.  Because, y'know, I'm an actual Web professional and shit, and when I say your tags suck balls, your tags suck balls.

Asserted without warranty for my own ball-sucking tags, mind you now.

Hans Riemer Ate My Baby

Eye-catching, huh? For the record, he didn't. It's science. I'll report back to you sometime on the results.

So, not long after I posted a screed on Walmart Derangement Syndrome, which led to a very pleasant series of check-ins from bloggyfriends, I got a blast email from Councilmember Hans Riemer, of whom I have spoken variously in these pages, especially whenever I write about things local. That led me to Hans' blog, which is now linked off to the right somewhere, mostly so I remember to keep an eye on him. He's a recovering Californian, you know.

There are those of you who will disdain this personal involvement with the system. I do not begrudge your disdain any more than I begrudge Hans' energy for involving himself in the minutiae of government. Is he ambitious? Yeah, he is. Does he want to be one of our overlords? Hmm, yeah, he does, at least at some level of overlording--I've never asked him what he has in mind, and I've no idea if he knows what he has in mind, and if he does, he's sure not going to fucking tell the likes of me. Is he one of the 1 percent? Probably not. He's probably in about the same ballpark as I am, as far as that's concerned, and I really, really promise you that I'm not one of them. What makes him different?

Well, you're not going to like my answer to this, and I'm not going to contend that you should. The answer is: because I know him a little bit as a human. And I said so. So there.

Obviously, it would really be kinda seriously fucktarded for me to scorn any disagreement you might feel welling up at this point in the discourse.

The point? Right. Hans' blog. But first, also too: it turns out Hans is one of the five co-sponsors of the relatively pointless Walmart legislation. I should've figured that was the case. There's just no substantive political downside in MoCo to aligning yourself against Walmart. Duh on me.

So Hans' blog. I wrote him immediately when I saw it, expressing my hope that he was delegating blog production to some staffer. He replied quickly, telling me he does it himself. I believe him. The blog itself is pretty standard stuff, mostly diary, all designed to pump out Hans-centric stuff, as it should be. It's all Blooger-normal, and the tone is probably about right.

The links are local stuff, but...well, one of his links is Just Up The Pike, which I sometimes like and sometimes think is off its nut (as I did with the Walmart post, which started with a link to JUTP, which seems to think that Rockville Pike should be a walkable fake village from Route 28 to the Beltway; this idea is fucking silly). Another is Greater Greater Washington (both JUTP and GGW are linked from BFF's place, so I've never bothered). I've always read GGW respectfully, without necessarily agreeing with its POV, but I see that its most recent post (10/27/2011, and I'm not linking) is an affirmation of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Holy fucking shit. That's one of the most loathsome pieces of legislation ever. And the only thing GGW thinks is wrong with it is that it wasn't sufficiently funded. Holy fucking shit. GGW takes the farthest detour up its own ass when it talks about NCLB's teacher accountability provisions. Sure, it's good to be able to dismiss bad teachers, but NCLB links accountability to test scores. It has done more to dumb down education and water down critical thinking than any other measure since the advent of public education. It is the point source of teaching to the test. The GGW blogger refers to himself as an "educator," which means he's an administrator, not a teacher (if he were a teacher, he'd say so; if he were an administrator, he'd cloud it; bingo). Further, he weasels the issue by saying that he (as a "taxpayer," and like "lots of teachers") supports NCLB's goals for accountability. You might read that as softening his support for NCLB's approach; I read it as weasel shit, because if didn't support the approach, he wouldn't be sleeping with the enemy. Among the parts of NCLB he explicitly likes: allowing parents to pull their children from their local schools that don't meet AYP (average yearly progress, another loathsome and faux-metrics-driven feature of the law), and especially allowing parents to pull their children from "dangerous" high schools (he cites, stunningly, a high school in Prince Georges County--right, I see where we're going here).

I have never before seen a post this contemptible on GGW. It's so awful I won't link to it.

And I digress. Hans gets a cookie for blogging, and for taking the time to do it himself (it's his clock, what the fuck should I care?). The truth is that sources of information about our local locality are limited--even biased sources like GGW (yeah, okay, or me or BFF or JUTP or Your Fucking Washington Post) require some hunting. While I respect the perspectives of some of my bloggyfriends who have no use for government, I think it's okay for people to have some clue what their local overlords are thinking, and for my part, I trust that what Hans tells me in his blog is true, at least for a given value of truth unrelated to whether or not people vote for him.

Well, shit, all that took a left turn from where I started. Whatever. I think I started the post with the intent of picking out dumb shit Hans blogged and mocking it. Sorry, my assault on NCLB left me too winded to mock. My bad.

Update: Oh, shit, I forgot the actual professional criticism  (I'm an actual Web professional, you know): Hans, your labels suck balls. Get someone to go through them for you. You got librarians down there at the COB, I know you do.

Progress Through Jealousy

I am a Webhead. I don't mean to overclaim, because I'm not, really, not compared to Sasha or Elric or the folks who work for me, one of whom will check in to chide me despite my brutal honesty. But my day job involves a lot of knowing what's up with Web technologies and content and strategies. One of my adorable little gifts--or not, depending on your perspective and the given value of "adorable" and "gifts"--is that I speak fluent Web, understand how things should work, know something about the place of the Web in communications strategies, sort through hours of technical blahrg from actual Webheads, and then distill the whole mess into something that actual Webheads can run with, rather than getting endlessly trapped inside their engineer-like minds.

Wow, that got unnecessarily dense and self-serving. Anyway, the point is that I have reason to be jealous when my friends have cooler Web toys than I do. I commented sort of obliquely, sort of approvingly (but not recognizably enough) on BFF's dynamic blogroll toolio, back when I raped his aesthetic sensibilities. The thing has really grown on me. I like it at BFF's place, and I like it at other places whereat I've seen it. I am jealous that he has a toy that I do not.

Well, enough of that shit. I rearranged the furniture and now I'm dynamically blogrolling, because I didn't realize how easy it was. Sorta puts the lie to the whole first graf, huh?

So there are goodbyes; some friends haven't updated their blogs in months. If they tell me they're not done, I'll relist them (lest you think I'm a complete idiot, I kept the wife, who posts about three times a year, if that). I said goodbye to an insufferable celebrity prick (I'll bet you don't miss him). And because of the dynamic nature of the blogroll toolio, some people who don't have update feeds ended up in the "Just Links" section, which is not dynamic (I may revisit this--Elric doesn't look bad in BFF's dynamic buddies section). I think I might've dumped one or two other sites that I almost never visit.

There's also a hello. Jack is a decent enough fellow who's perfectly willing to trade gratuitous unkind suggestions in a spirit of theoretical discourse. Until very recently, I've sort of shied from him and his blog, engaging him in conversation once or twice at BFF's place. But I noticed a little while back that Minions was appearing in his dynamic toolio, and I've since been contemplating returning the kind. Jack frightens me a little, because he's one a them deep thinkers, and as I like to remind you, I ain't. I can cope with deep thought from BFF; it's the habit of years, and I don't find it threatening coming from that vector. On the other hand, Jack's been blogrolling me, so he is obviously a man of varied, and sometimes low, tastes. Recent events sealed the deal. Welcome Jack.

Another lil thing opened up the time to do this facelift; I'm stuck in rural Sucktucky. That's becoming a regular event--this is the second of three trips in four weeks, with, it appears, more to follow. Now, it's possible that good things will result from all this travel and sturm und drang and weeds-level management of a business line with which I am only familiar enough to blow some pretty decent smoke (not Web, FTR) and a contract type (fixed-price) that's way riskier than what I'm used to and a customer (I can't tell you, because I've already said more than enough for some folks to figure out who I am) that's way different from my usual comfort zone. Good things for me and mine, professionally, I mean, and like many of you, I do not have the luxury of doing what pleases me for a living--I work to be a materialist oinker (unlike, I suspect, some nontrivial number of you), which includes, of course, feeding Ilse, Databoy, and Bam-Bam. Anyway, rural Sucktucky breeds time, because I've been in planes and cars all day and working at this point in the day is beyond possibility. Hence: change! No hope advertised or promised. Ciao.