January 2003

The year was 1990. At the time, I was just barely beginning to understand the concepts of mating, dating, and the time-honored ritual of Going To The Movies With A Boy. Little did I know that I was aimed, full speed ahead, for a dating misstep the likes of which are generally only shown in the worst of romantic comedies.

The Dekalog (or 'Decalogue', in English): widely considered to be Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterwork, and also one of the most fiendishly difficult sets of films to actually see. Ten films, each an hour long, one for each of the Ten Commandments. Screenings are rare, and the DVDs are out of print and hideously expensive.

There’s a special place in hell reserved for people who believe they have Rightful Parking Inheritance.

You know them well. I saw one today and resisted the urge to take my lovely, smart Jetta and jam one of my headlights into the driver’s side door. I managed to reason myself out of that rather suicidal urge through two reasons:

1. I could get lunch quickly if I just ran my errand and went back home; smashing into her car, being arrested and booked, and then having to have a nice long guilty chat with my insurance agent would likely delay lunch by several hours, thereby making me cranky
   
   
2. Jeff would kill me.

Hunger pangs won the day. (They tend to do that.)

Day two, Quarto coding extravaganza.  We are coming to you live from the same chair that 98% of most cat.net entries are typed from; the only difference is that today I’ve spent most of my waking hours in this chair and not doing actually productive things.

Jeff wins the Write Amy An Import Script So She’ll Shut Up™ award; we tested it tonight against the entries of geek-chick.net and guess what?  It worked.  No complaints, no quibbles - once I remembered to tell it the correct server paths to grab the files from, it imported in less than twenty seconds.I’m just…flabbergasted.

Tomorrow begins the Great Big Odyssey.  I can import the entries as I feel like it, but that’s just the backend.  I can dump as much info into the db as I want, but no one is going to be able to see any of it until I work on the display pages that actually pull the information out, format it, and make it available for reading.

This was my world, supposedly; but as I looked around me I realized that suddenly my long reddish hair and casual jeans marked me as the outsider.

I called it “Shopping With The Muslims.”

Jeff would laugh every time I mentioned it, with that rich, cackling, my-crazy-spouse-cracks-me-up laugh that means both “I love you” and “You’re insane.” It’s a laugh that reminds me of why I like my occasional flashes of eccentricity; while there is one kind of satisfaction to be found in living up to the expectations of others, there’s another kind to be found in occasionally turning those expectations on their collective ears.What’s the fun in living when, from day to day, you do nothing but exactly what your friends, spouse, and family expect you to do?

Nevertheless. The story, Amy, the story.

It's always frustrating to try to write entries for cat.net when my mind's more occupied by the code of Quarto. It's difficult to come up with interesting things to say when your mind's current definition of 'interesting' is "oooooh! Now a quarto siteadmin can edit the general text message that's shown on the main Quarto admin screen!"

See? This sort of thing is vastly uninteresting to the general populace. Suffice it to say that over the course of the weekend, I scrawled down sixteen things that qualified as outstanding issues in Quarto. Nine of those sixteen things have squiggly lines through them now.

The process of making lists is frighteningly addictive. The 'low' comes from the daunting feeling of being overwhelmed. The making of the list is the 'fix' - a way to excise worries from the mind by committing them to paper. Once written, they are solvable, manageable.

Few things on this planet can make me say “huh?” faster than code. However, as I’ve discovered, if I sit in my chair and only say “huh?” or “bwah?” only after testing out some new snippet of code, I eventually manage to turn “huh?” into “aha!”

Notation #1: Quarto is now at version 0.8. Prior to their mass genocide at the hands of their dictatorial (and stylishly jackbooted) leadership, the peasants rejoiced.

Possibly the most exquisitely funny part of creating one’s own CMS (content management system) is the joy of writing one’s own tooltips - a long, tedious, and generally loathsome process that provides endless opportunities to slide in examples of one’s highly warped sense of humor.

See also today’s attempt to explain to Joe Unknown User on the purposes of a ‘blurb’:

Hi. My name is Amy, and I’m watching Joe Millionaire, and yes, I know I suck.

I realize that there’s a special place in hell for people like me, and that there’s no such thing as pleading “But it’s the only ‘reality show’ I’ve ever watched! Ever!” Claiming that exception has more in common with “But I didn’t inhale!” than it does with any semblance of truth, and it gets you no free ride into any of the slightly cooler circles of hell.