Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   phone call web crunch
Friday, October 8 2010
It was another hectic day of web work, the kind of work that happens late in a project when nearly all of the real work is done and it's down to little bug fixes, the kind that can be dispensed in seconds. This is the phase of the project when I am at my most dazzling. Nobody really understands the hard work of wholesale web development, when whole sites are created from scratch over the course of weeks or months. It's all magic and it's the kind of magic that seems like it really should be happening faster. But little tweaks take no time, particularly for the kind of sites I build, which are designed from the start to be easily-tweaked. And when I can tweak sites so quickly to better conform to a mental image of how things should be, I tend more often than not to amaze. This is especially true when I can tweak in real time (which often happens when the tweaks are requested by phone). I'm no fan of phone calls, but on days like today, when web site development can actually be a very satisfying occupation, they're not so bad.
I took a break at some point from the phone calls to first wash the dishes and then vacuum various parts of the house. Gretchen's friend Marissa would be coming up from the City to spend the weekend. Some months back I'd bought some noise-canceling earbuds, which make it possible to listen to podcasts while vacuuming, particularly if I cover them with my shop ear protection.
Gretchen made an especially good lasagna for dinner (the key was using lots of oven-roasted homegrown tomatoes and no vegan cheese whatsoever), and (as usual) we ate it while watching Jeopardy, It's been a bad Jeopardy week, because the skinny bartender who has been winning introduced himself as having once acted as a matador in a bullfight on a whim. There are lots of interesting things to do on a whim, but for us, being a matador on a whim is a little like being a child molester on a whim.

At some point Gretchen picked up Marissa from the Kingston bus station and then we all sat around chatting in front of our woodstove, where I'd stoked up a fire. Marissa is the kind of Gretchen friend who drinks tea on a Friday night. She's funny and interesting, but, really? Tea on a Friday night?


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