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prefer being a wizard to being a huckster
Tuesday, July 30 2002
That pigeon we found in the house the other day must have been terminally ill, because this morning Gretchen's cousin Holly saw Edna the cat playing with its corpse in the living room. Edna cannot bring herself to leave anything fun out in the yard.
not quite liking what you do
This may sound like crazy talk, but I had my first customer today, the result of those signs I put up all over the neighborhood yesterday. In fact, I actually fielded phone calls from two different people, telling the first that it made no sense for me to attempt to fix his keyboard and that he should just buy another one. The second guy was a British ex-pat living right next door on President Street and he had an old model Vaio laptop. He came over and and I tried to get it working with him standing there, but it was completely dead. Then, a few minutes after he left, using little more than my magic touch, I had it working. The guy was a little shocked at my minimum price, and I felt kind of bad about it, but I didn't backpeddle. I was a businessman, and my rate is my rate. Nonetheless, I was conflicted: on the one hand I wanted to be a nice guy and not charge such ridiculous prices (even if they are still less than market rates), and on the other I wanted to be a hardnosed businessman just to prove to myself that I had it in me. Then I started thinking about the long term effects of being this way, living this way. What would happen to me over the long term if being a businessman maintained that sick feeling I had in my gut? I never felt that way back when I was working on programming projects for a salary and the hardnosed business side of things was somebody else's responsibility. I much prefer being a wizard to being a huckster, but to run a one man business I can see I have to be a little of both.
Today was Gretchen's first day of work as a temporary copy editor for a popular American periodical. She slogged into Midtown, received a crash course in Quark Xpress, and spent the day editing articles about such subjects as Howard Stern and American Idol. It's not exactly the kind of work that leaves one, at the end of the day, felling like one has done something positive for the world. Making matters worse, everyone around her seemed to be taking the work seriously. She much prefers a climate in which the employees know that what they're creating is idiotic pabulum, and can joke about it and distance themselves from it while still delivering it in a timely manner in the style-guide-dictated stinky piles. That was how Gretchen's work environment was back when she first contacted me a year and a half ago. At the time she was working for a sub-branch of Disney.com and her co-workers were a motley collection of gay and transgender weirdoes endowed with more than their fair share of irony. I don't remember whether or not they slipped subtle culture jams into the cookie recipes and house decoration tips they edited, but even if they didn't, they wanted to, and that was what was important.
memory lane
Tonight I decided to answer the question, "Whatever happened to Highschoolclub.com?" Highschoolclub.com is a classic example, a monument in fact, to what happened in the days of dotcom hubris when overfunded web companies tried to expand rapidly into ventures ill-suited to their expertise. In 1999, Michæl Pousti, CEO of Collegeclub.com, thought he had already conquered the college market and ordered his engineers to develop a copy called Highschoolclub.com. Age bracket by age bracket, he hoped to conquer the entire Universe. He said so proudly at every Monday morning meeting, and his idiotic stooges broke chairs in approval.
Looking on the web tonight, I see that Highschoolclub.com still exists, but it's a sad ghost of a site. Though in the front page's title tags we're told we're looking at "the coolest site for high school students!" the prominent links on the front page take you to pages on other websites, pages that have long since disappeared. Maybe I'm getting a little long in the tooth, but it doesn't seem to me as if there's anything particularly cool about that. Interestingly, I see the copy of my original messageboard system is still there (and still functioning), though parts of it are broken because of missing meta-information for the navbar. Just looking at an old URL that ends messaging.asp?i=7105&strip= brings back fond memories of the origins of my messageboard developing effort. That old system on Collegeclub circa 1999 was the basis for all my subsequent versions.
I see that on Collegeclub proper, the original ASP VBscript code was replaced, after my untimely firing, by pages written in JSP (I'm sure Poorbob knows more about this than I do). But many of the graphics and buttons are originals from the 1999 version.
Check this out: "I Like to Watch" - it's a hilariously blasphemous porno video remix of September 11th footage (found through Voidsong's weblog chronicle of his European adventure, which I in turn found through Bathtubgirl's journal). September 11th footage seems to be suffering from the same overexposure effects plaguing depictions of the crucifixion. It's starting to stop being horrible.
(For those of you who don't remember who Voidsong is: he's Julian, Linda's erstwhile boyfriend. Both of them were my former co-workers at Launch.com in Santa Monica, California.)
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