Wednesday, November 27, 2002 at 17:10:44 (EST)
In which I suffer like the rest of you Dear God, who still uses dial-up for internet access? I'm at my mom's in Indiana and I'm trying to get some work done (otherwise I don't get paid for today and Friday), and this town is limited to a whopping 28K! Just waiting for this blog to come up is torture. Not only that but I ended up not sleeping at all last night so I am starting to get loopy. The good news is that when you do that it's much easier to fall asleep in the shitty uncomfortable middle seats on the plane. I can't remember a thing about the flights! So now I'm struggling to stay conscious, but I should probably just give up. It's not like I'm missing anything here. What a wasteland. And although I appreciated speaking to B on the phone earlier, her acknowledgement of my mash blog to her goes ultimately unnoticed as she did not submit a formal mention on the new blog comments feature. Sure I know she likes me, but for me this sentiment can't exist unless it is displayed in a public forum for the judgmental eyes of others. Hey it sounds a lot like marriage! Posted By Jimmy Legs
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	Wednesday, November 27, 2002 at 00:23:46 (EST)
Getting close ... Thanks to Sean Kelly for the link, helping to realize my dream for an all-in-one device that also makes coffee. Follow the link below for an invention I admire. I wish I could give my respect to its creator, but I can't help thinking that as much as I like it, this guy really needs to get a girlfriend. Posted By Jimmy Legs
	Introducing The Caffeine Machine
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	Tuesday, November 26, 2002 at 23:50:26 (EST)
In which a real job turns into self-righteous entitlement So my boss wanted to ask me about 'expanding' my role with the company. I thought I had expanded about as much as an untrained web designer can, but apparently I'm flush with potential in other areas. Namely, areas my boss doesn't want to deal with. My job so far has been built on this very notion, but this time my acceptance of new responsibility is for my own survival. That's right folks, even a big American company like mine (the name of the company even uses the word 'American') is not immune from the lure of cheap web labor in Asia. As my boss put it, "The web industry is in the same place now as the manufacturing industry in the 80's." Damn those low-wage earners in India! But I knew this was coming. Most of my job is simple web maintenance, nothing that any shmoe off the street couldn't learn to do in a few weeks. But so far the real security of my job was that nobody else wanted to do it. Now even this is in jeopardy. So my new responsibilities will include working directly with other departments who are developing new websites. Up until now, I had been involved with such projects only after the main people exhausted their limited supply of brains and were stumped. This has started to happen so often that it makes sense that I should just be in on it at the ground floor. Maybe I can stem the tide of really stupid people that tends to drench every project in this company. My main concern is that it's pretty clear this will mean far more office visits and conference calls; and now I'll have to pay attention. After my boss gave his spiel, I pointed out that this sort of work is a bit too deep into the lifeblood of the company to be handled by a contractor (me). He said he had also thought of this and is trying to get me hired on permanently. It was actually pretty cool, the guy is basically going out of his way to save my job. He said he wanted to surround himself with as many 'reliable' people as possible; that's nice to hear. He's probably dictating from some management class he took, but it works. So maybe soon I'll have the job package I once only dared dream of. I better get some kind of raise to begin with, plus those damn benefits. And I had better get credit for all the time I have worked there. I can see them trying to screw me out of vacation time because my official status won't start for a while. Screw dat. I'm gonna bleed 'em! So much for the grateful employee. Posted By Jimmy Legs
	See if you're getting paid anywhere near what you're worth
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	Tuesday, November 26, 2002 at 23:43:04 (EST)
In which I get blubbery B is in Akron by now, visiting her family for Thanksgiving. And tomorrow, at 6 in the friggin' morning, I will journey to scenic Indiana to visit my mom (and no, I'm not from Indiana, *shudder*). We felt it necessary to get in some face time with the Moms, since we're spending Christmas in PARIS! Sans relatives, of course. The apartment is deserted. Even our oft-annoying roommate has departed. I realize now that she's gone that she's not so bad after all. Having two floors in an apartment really helps in lessening the blows of living with other people. If she was here now, I'd only know she was here by the occassional outbursts of hysterical laughter during "Friends" reruns. That's not so bad, I guess. And of course B is gone. I shan't see her again until Sunday. When you live with somebody for a while, you often forget how much their presence plays a part in your life. Pretty obvious, I guess, but it bears mentioning. I've been wondering around the house, deciding what to eat and such. It's just not as much fun coming to decisions by yourself. Well, sometimes it is, but not now so much. So this one goes out to the woman in my life: Dear B, the new issue of The New Yorker arrived and I took it and read the funny thing on the back page first. But it isn't any fun if you're not here to get pissed that I'm hogging the magazines. xoxo Posted By Jimmy Legs
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	Tuesday, November 26, 2002 at 17:19:24 (EST)
In which I kill time in the office Okay, so the comments thingy ain't all that. Not yet, anyway. As soon as I got it working, I realized that my nifty little frame page under the jimmylegs.8m.com site was making the javascript not function correctly. I might figure it out and reinstate it soon, but until then, welcome to Frognet, where my blog actually resides. I'm killing time, waiting to talk to my boss. He asked me to come into the office today, to 'talk' to me. I had to come in anyway to change my login password, so here I am. I completed all my work before leaving the house so my presence here is sort of pointless. But I haven't been out of the house all week. Tomorrow I got to Indiana to visit me ailin' mudder. I'm spending four days at my mom's house, this time without the added protection of having B around, or my sister's family. It's just gonna be the two of us. If I can keep talking about how much I hate George Bush, I might be okay. My mom's not slick, but she's still a liberal underneath it all. Anyhow I should be concerned at this point with what my boss wants. I bet he's gonna reprimand me because I've been getty mouthy with people lately. Of course, he's mouthy with everyone. And I'm not mouthy, I just have to put my foot down when I see people trying to accomplish things in a dumbass way. And I do get a little volatile when people ask *me* to do stuff that is clearly outside of my job. So bring it on, bossy! Uh-oh, I hear him returning from lunch. Time to get my ass-kiss face ready (come on, do you think I'm stupid?) Posted By Jimmy Legs
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	Monday, November 25, 2002 at 23:43:58 (EST)
In which I throw down the Gauntlet So after much hand-wringing and screen-staring, I believe I have a working Comments feature on this site. Hooray. Avid followers of this blog will know that I have been stymied in my attempts to get the Comments module to work with my cobbled-together blog script. The problem was that the coments feature was looking for a tag used by third-party blog providers that gives each post its unique ID. My blog had no uniqe ID, apart from the date stamp. I tried just dropping that tag into the code, but it did not work. I really don't know enough about CGI to know what to do, but I figured somebody else out there would. After much searching, I found a simple command to add to the blog script which reads the time the blog was published and displays it in seconds (or something, I'm not really sure). This was good enough for the Comments thing, so it worked. My only fear is that the message IDs are not sequential, so there is a chance a number could repeat, which could cause confusion. But since I can't imagine I'll get much of a response, it probably won't be a problem. Now prove me wrong, kids! Prove me wrong. Posted By Jimmy Legs
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	Monday, November 25, 2002 at 02:15:44 (EST)
In which friendships are tested and friendships are ended The Anna encounter went off well. In general, the whole evening was pitched at a pretty amiable level, that is, until B and A got into it over the twin evils of objectifying women and disliking Victorian literature. In far weirder news, we just heard that our former roommate (whom I shall cleverly call That Guy, or TG), the guy who dumped us, is getting married (!), and is moving out of New York to Texas (??). This all seems so weird I don't even know what to say about it. I suppose this pretty much wraps up the saga of our trampled friendship with the guy. Now, if he had only moved off to Texas last year when he ditched our apartment without a word, that would have been something. But I suppose I should see the forest for the trees. Soon, we won't have to worry about running into him at festive social occasions. And B will get to see her old school chums more often as well, since they all hang around this guy constantly. This city wasn't big enough for all three of us; he is kindly retreating to ... *gulp* Texas. This has probably been coming for a long time. I had heard things from time to time about TG (not to mention what he'd write himself on his websites), so I knew he was disenchanted with the city, and has been looking for an excuse to leave. Some may say he's overdoing it by throwing himself into the bonds of holy matrimony to justify fleeing the City, but I'm sure his decision was born of the same kind well-researched choices he made when he lived with us. Like moving his manic-depressive girlfriend from suburban Connecticut into a small bedroom in a rough-edged neighborhood in Brooklyn. And should things go sour like it did with that woman, I'm sure he won't hesitate to come up with an exit strategy as brilliant as his last one: leave a letter on the bed and disappear, leaving the shitty job of dealing with rent and roommate issues to his innocent ex-roommates By this action, he managed to turn us into the Bad Guys, as we didn't want to get stuck paying extra rent because he flaked out. A very clever maneuver indeed! If he's smart, when it's time bail on the marriage, he'll wait til they have a couple of kids, so he can turn them into the Bad Guys. Equivocation means never having to say you're sorry. I've written up a longer treatment of the story, it's far too long to put into a regular blog entry, so you can wallow in my hurt feelings here. Posted By Jimmy Legs