jeffpollard.net

Crap crap crap!

Well, I feel like crap today. Yesterday's Final Cut Pro training was exhausting, not to mention the rest of the free world decided to blow up throughout the course of the day, so I was in and out of the training session. I'm not sure if I really learned anything or not. I did enjoy drooling over the guy's Cinema Display, though.

We had our first XMUG website committee meeting last night. Also exhausting. And then a 5-block run through the pouring rain to the ghetto deck finished me off. As I floated the Taco boat home up the I-95 River, I could feel it coming on. Headache, stuffy head, soreness, sinuses going crazy. By the time I went to bed last night, I could hardly move..and it hasn't reallly gotten any better. You know that sore-all-over feeling that you get right before you're really sick? You know when your joints are all stiff and you can't move? Yeh, that's me today.

Which is interesting, because I honestly can't remember when the last time I was sick. Certainly not in the last 2 years while I've been here in Richmond, because I've never called in sick. Perhaps I should have today. Maybe I will tomorrow. Luckily, we get Friday off so that I can recuperate. Ugg. I hope this isn't what it feels like to get old.

What's the deal with THAT?

I got finally got a chance on Sunday to use the products that Lane of Fast Lane's Professional Car Products sent me. You see, he'd like to do some advertising on CustomTacos.com, but it's unlikely that many people will be interested in his products if they're unsure of their quality/relaibility. So, he sent me some samples that I used to wash/wax/detail my truck. The result? Amazing. Really. I'll be posting a review with lots of photos on the site in a few days. It's absolutely the cleanest my truck has been since I purchased it in 1999. I'm not looking forward to writing the review..I'm just not in a creative writing mood lately.

So, when I was washing my truck, I also cleaned off the (apparent) sign on the back of my truck that says: "Please drive like an asshole around me" I guess it had gotten dirty and people weren't able to see it. However, after cleaning the truck (and the sign), Olivia and I drove up to Dairy Queen to pick up an ice cream cake for her birthday. As we drove down Glenside Avenue, we pulled along side two dudes in an older (hot rod looking) car. The guy slowed a bit, and then gassed it and pulled ahead of us. He then slowed again, waiting for me to catch up. Right as I got along side him again, he hit the gas and took off again. This was an abvious attempt to provoke me to race him. Little did he know, I'm not an idiot. I made the comment that this is one of the differences between most import car enthusiasts and truck enthusiasts. I'm going to bet that 80% of the Honda rice boys in the world would have tried to race that guy. That's what the guy in the older car was expecting. No satisfaction for him.

On a related note, I've started seeing more and more custom trucks (and cars) now that it's starting to get warmer. For a few days, I was seeing at least one truck per day. But here's the best part: when they passed me (or I passed them), there was no engine revving, there was no speeding up and slowing down, and there was no provocation. A simple wave and a head nod and we parted our seperate ways. And that, folks, is why I love being a mini trucker. It doesn't matter whether you drive a slammed dually or a little customized Toyota, (most) everyone in the truck scene has a special respect for each other.

Moving on...A guy is coming to Martin tomorrow to give a day of Final Cut Pro training. It should be fun. I'm looking forward to learning how this complicated program works.

I hate being misled...

I really wanted to write about this last night because I was so fired up about it, but I guess I'll have to do it now that I have some free time.

Last week, Olivia and I were in Best Buy at Short Pump buying a birthday gift or two for Brian. We were browsing the DVDs when a guy approached us and asked if I knew anything about DVD players:

Dude: Do you know anything about DVD players?

Me: Well, sorta.

Dude: What kind do you have?

Me: a Sony 5-disc changer

Dude: Cool. So, what do you guys do? Where do you work? Are you married? Where are you from? What are your names?

The guy seemed very nice and we stood there chatting with him for a few minutes. He seemed around the same age as us and just seemed very nice. When we finally walked off, I mentioned to Olivia that I thought it was kinda strange that a random guy would just come up and strike up a conversation like that. Ah well, whatever. Maybe society isn't so bad, I thought.

Well yesterday, I get back to my desk to find a voice mail on my desk phone. It was someone named Derrick Smith. I had no idea who THAT was, so I called the number back to find out what the deal was. I figured he probably got my name from someone else or had something to do with CustomTacos perhaps. The conversation went as follows:

Derrick: Don't you remember me?

Me: No. Where would I know you from?

Derrick: We met in Best Buy last week.

Me: Oh yeh. How's it going?

Derrick: Not bad. I know you work at the Martin Agency and everything, but I figured I'd give you a call and see if you were interested in trying to make some money on the side with an Internet company.

Me: Well, you know man, I'm REALLY swamped with extra work right now. I've way too many web responsibilities so I'm going to have to turn you down. But you know what? I have a buddy who's an excellent Flash developer and is looking for side work. Why don't you give him a call and see if he's interested. Here's his number: .

Derrick: Cool. Thanks, Jeff.

I felt pretty good. I know Mike is always looking for freelance work, so I figured this could possibly bring him in some extra income.

A little while later, Mike called and said that a guy (named Derrick) had left him a voice mail earlier in the day about an "Internet Opportunity" Mike and I talked about it and the more I thought about it, the weirder it seemed. Looking back on the conversation I had with Derrick earlier in the day, the more this "Internet Opportunity" seemed more like one of those pyramid scam schemes (like Amway). Derrick used big buzz words like "E-commerce" and talked about ambition, etc. Now Mike had my curiousity up. So, I told Mike I'd call him back and that I needed to find out what the real deal with this guy was.

So, I called the guy back, pretty sure that this was some kind of Amway pyramid sales scheme. If it was, I was going to be PISSED. So, when I got him on the phone, I told him that I wanted more details about his "Opportunity". It was really funny to talk to him because he didn't want to give any kind of concrete details about this "Opportunity", just basics..and buzzwords. So, I told him to put it all out on the table; that I wanted to know what this was all about. The more he told me, the more I realized that it WAS, indeed, a pyramid scam that he was trying to lure me into. Here's what happened next:

Me: Look man, when you introduced youself to us last week in Best Buy, I thought you were a really nice guy. It's really sad that all along you had no real intentions of being friendly, but rather just make money for yourself. I'm really not interested at all in your pyramid SCAM and you know what? My friend that I told you about earlier isn't either. I gave you his phone number because I thought this was a legitimate business deal.

Derrick: Well, this is a legitimate business. I've been doing this for 5 years and I don't apppreciate you calling what I do for a living a "scam". You know I thought you were a nice guy, too.

(the yelling and cursing continued back and forth for about another 15 seconds and then he hung up on me)

I hung up the phone and laughed. Victory was mine. That was exactly what he deserved. I was feeling pissed. I had been misled. He wasn't interested in being genuinely friendly at all..he just wanted to draw us into his scheme. I felt used, almost.

So, I called Mike back and told him what happened and told him that he should call this guy, too and throw a few jabs in. So he did. He wasn't quite as brutal and his conversation with him wasn't quite as hateful as our's, but it was still satisfying to me.

This is why people don't trust anyone anymore. This is why the next time someone comes up to me in a store and asks how I'm doing today, I'll probably tell them to go to hell. This is what causes people not to trust other random people in the world.

I urge EACH AND EVERY one of you to call the following person and tell him how much you appreciate misleading people like himself:

In fact, I urge you to call him often. Even if you don't have anything to say. Especially if it's late late at night. Even if you only do it once, do it for me. Immature? Perhaps. But at this point, it's about the only thing that can make me feel any better about this situation.

By the way..

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO OLIVIA TODAY!

Overage..again!!

As heard tonight on the ether:

Hello,

Our systems have detected that your domain customtacos.com might exceed the allotted

traffic/bandwidth limits for your account type.

The domain customtacos.com is over pace for web/ftp traffic in the

month of Mar.

The total traffic for the month so far is: 5.268 GB.

The traffic projection for this month is: 9.877 GB.

Your account type has a limit of: 8 GB.

Thank you for your attention,

OLM.net

DOH!

Ignorance is no excuse

You know what I find more aggrivating than a lot of things in the world? Having an argument with someone over something that they (admitedly) know nothing about. I'll give two examples:

During the design process of this new site we're working on, there was a huge dispute over what the new site would look like. The higher-ups and people who (admited) they had no graphic design taste demanded that we use a certain design. However, I argued that this was NOT a very good design and we'd be much better off with something more professional looking. And guess what? I got shot down. Now, I don't claim to be any kind of god of web sites, but for heaven's sake, I've been building web sites for 6 years now and I know in my heart that they were making a wrong decision. No voice. They were the experts and nothing I (or other web experts in the company) could say would convince them to change their minds.

Today, I emailed one of our managers the basic template file for this project that I'm working on. You see, there's another component of the site that a freelancer is working on and he needed a template to work with. So, I made a template (and this is where I'll lose all of my non-geek friends): The template included 3 things: A header include statement, a comment tag that says "Content goes below here", and then a footer include statement. Using that template, this guy can make an infinite number of pages and they'll all look the same. This manager wrote back and said, "I don't understand that file. It doesn't work in my browser." Duh. It's not ON the server. You're looking at a local copy on YOUR computer that i emailed you. You're supposed to forward that email to the freelance person so that he can use it to create his portion of the site. She argued that he didn't need the template files, but rather that he needed the actual include files. Wait. What? Why would need the actual include files? There's absolutely NO need for this guy to go in and edit my include files that I spent hours to line up just right. He's got all he needs in having the include statements. She continued to argue that he needed the include files. I tried explaining what an include file was and how it worked and she seemed to understand, so she went away. 15 minutes later, the freelancer guy came and asked for the actual include files. Fine. So, I sent them to him with a message that if he makes any changes to the actual include files that he needs to send me back a copy of them. We'll see what happens.

I'm officially burnt out on doing web stuff for now.

Can you at least slow down to 55?

Here's an update from the last few days. It seems that everyone lately isn't updating their website svery often because they are so busy. Eric, Olivia, Bria - oh wait. Brian still updates his site everyday. I wonder why is it that everyone is so busy right now. Or maybe I started a trend of only updating my website every few days. I think most of my problem is a lack of energy lately. And this goes back to a previous post I made about the vicious circle or life, energy, and time. I just did a search back through my site to try to find that entry where I talked about there not being enough hours in the day. And ya know what I found? A BUNCH of entries with me complaining about there not being enough time to get done what I want (and need) to get done. Jeez, I feel like a whinner now. But, seriously, it's a vicious circle because you stay up late so that you can get your work done, then you wake up late, have no energy, don't get much accomplished during the day until late at night you finally have energy to do get things done at which point it's late again. *sigh*

On another note, we finally got Olivia's car back Wednesday night. The final damage report? $8000. Folks, I highly doubt her car is worth much more than $8000 (no offense to her car, because it drives really nicely). Everything seemed fine as she was driving it home, until she rounded a corner and the "Check Engine" and traction control lights came on in her gauge cluster. She immeadiately called and I immeadiately called the body shop (probably even before she got home). They told us to bring it back in today that they'd get it correct. I also called her insurance company and requested that the insurance pay for us to take it to a Chevrolet dealership and get Chevrolet EXPERTS to look over the car and make sure everything is correct. The insurance guy was really nice and said that they have a policy for this. It states that we must give the body shop at least one more shot at getting the car correct and then if something is still wrong, we can take it to a dealership and either insurance or the body shop will pay for it. (I meant to post all of this LAST night, but ran out of time..and energy. Ever fallen asleep while waiting for Windows 2000 to install Sevice Pack 2?)

We picked up the car this evening and everything seems to be fixed. I just hope they didn't take the easy road and jjust remove the two bulbs from inside the dash. The body shop guy said that they replaced a sensor that had come unhooked and replaced the entire sensor, just to make sure. He seems honest and sincere, so I suppose I have no reason not to believe him.

Work continues on the big Extranet project at work. I've secluded myself to a far-away corner of the building where it's nice and quiet with no phone. I've gotten a lot accomplished, but still have lots more work to do. I'm feeling a little burnt out on web work lately. Perhaps I'm just feeling burnt out in general. None of it really seems exciting right now. Maybe I'm just tired and need sleep.

Oh, can't forget: For those of you whom I didn't talk to today, CapitolMac announced that it went out of business today. Pretty abrupt. They will be having an inventory closeout sale this Saturday to clear out the store. Pretty sad. However, from the stories I've heard, there's more than meets the eye with this story. It's kinda scary to think that I almost worked there. I'm so incredibly glad I didn't, and not just for today's reason. It's funny how fate carries you along. Farewell, CapitolMac, and good luck to all of the Mac people who lost their jobs today. Read more over on MacNN...

..now, about that server...

This is what I did today. Actually, this what my computer did today. What you see above is the CPU load graph from today. What this represents is basically the stress level on my computer. As you can see, I ran the crap out of it today.

But the server still isn't fixed. You see, folks, Microsoft's web server software, Internet information Server (IIS) sucks. It has a funny weirdness that causes it to cache asp pages. So, I might edit an asp page and change some content on it, upload it and when I view that file in my web browser, it still the old version! Wait, now that I think about it, I think I bitched about thbis last night. It's really frustrating, though.

One good thing happened today: Glen finally allowed me to open one of our Mac versions of Adobe GoLive 6, which runs native on OS X. YAY! This fixes a number of VERY frustrating experiences with GoLive 5 running in the Classic environment. It was uploading 0K files to my servers, crashing Classic five and six times a day, and basically causing me to not opperate very efficiently. Praise god for GoLive 6. I don't think Glen really understands how much he helped me today by allowing me to install this software. Now..about that server...

Not in the closet yet

Gizmo is sitting over on the table glaring at me. He looks pissed. I'm not quite sure why, but he's looked pissed all night long. Sometimes I wonder what's going through his brain.

I didn't get to lock myself in a far-away place today. The biggest reason was because the server on which I'm going to be doing my work was still not configured properly with directory permissions, etc. Even more amazing than that, I kept uploading files and when I'd view them in my browser, they HADN'T CHANGED! I opened the file on the server just to make sure I had, indeed, uploaded the changed version. Sure enough, it was changed. But when I reloaded my browser, it was still the old version. It turns out that there's some weird IIS bug (or maybe M$ thinks it's a feature) that causes .asp files to remain cached on the server. Jack figured it out and hacked the registry on the server so that it would NOT cache the files. It's so amazing to me that it takes a registry hack to change settings in IIS. Just another reason why Apache rocks.

I have to confess. I've paid money for two shareware programs in the last two weeks. Those of you who know me know that I'm not normally the first one to fork over lots of cash for software. It's not because I don't think the 'ware is worth it, it's usually been the case that I just didn't have that kind of money to spend on a single software package. I mean, comon': $500 for Photoshop? Give me a break, Adobe. However, I did find two worthy causes in the last two weeks. The first is a little program called "Watson" and the second is called "XMonitor". Watson is an Internet search engine tool that allows you to track packages, check movie times/listings/reviews, look up phone numbers and zip codes, view television listings, track eBay auctions, exchange currency rates, check flight times, search for recipies based on type/region of food you desire, browse Yahoo categories,and get up-to-the-minute stock quotes. You know, it's funny. I was ready MacWorld's review of Watson tonight and their "Cons" of Watson was: "Limited Search tools" Give me a break! I absolutely love this software and was really happy to pay the programmers for their product.

The second software app I purchased recently is called XMonitor and itallows you to monitor CPU load, RAM usage, Disk Usage, NetworkTraffic..all in a cool-looking customizable window. Pretty nifty. I like to watch the CPU load rise and fall as I'm busy working on things. They allowed payments via Pay Pal, which made it a no-brainer for me. And, even cooler than that, they let YOU decide how much you're going to pay for the software..$1 or $100. Pretty cool.

Hopefully I can get to work on my extranet project tomorrow. By the way, the road crew is back out in action again tonight. They've been digging out there for hours and it looks like they're going be out there for the rest of the night. Man, I think I need to bring my webcam home and set it up on my deck!

A relaxing weekend..mostly

My weekend started off on a pretty crappy note. I went over to a co-worker's house to do some after hours work on his iMac. Install OS X on his iMac, install iTunes, iMovie, and a few other simple things. Simple, right? Three and a half hours later, I hadn't made much progress. And at the rate I was charging the guy, I flat-out felt bad about it. So, I offered to take his iMac with me for the weekend and get everything set correctly and bring it to him on Monday. There was no sense in me sitting there wasting his money and my time. So, I brought it home. And I've spent another 6 hours tinkering with it over the past couple days. Amazing. OS X did NOT want to install on it. Period. So, I tricked it. I hooked it up to my server via FireWire and ran the installer from off of my server. Pretty nifty. It worked like a charm.

For those of you still hanging in suspense, they finished playing with the road out there, thankfully.

The Ryan people finally got the sold sign up on the front of our dirt. We went over there Saturday and explored some of the surrounding area. We found where it looks like they're moving dirt around in preparation for one of the office buildings near our new house. A nice big dirt mound made for a funny photo shoot for me and the Taco.

I changed my oil, watched the race, and played some Quake over the Internet with some guys from work today. It's such an addicting game..especially when you're winning.

And finally, I'd like to congratulate my sister, Jennifer, on her recent acceptance of a position here in Richmond at Henrico Doctor's Hospital. WOO HOO!!!! She'll be moving back to Virginia in April. I think I speak for Mom and Dad in saying that we're all really excited about having her back in Virginia and I'm especially excited about having her here in Richmond. I guess we'll have to show her around. Let's see, where do we start?

I'm tired and I've got a long day of..well, I don't really know WHAT I have a long day doing tomorrow, but I'm sure it'll be exciting. I may just lock myself in a closet somewhere so that I can concentrate on getting some web work done. That seems to be the only way to escape the phone, and people in general. Wish me luck.

Tonight's Entertainment

The view from our deck tonight

This was tonight's entertainment. They're doing something to VA Center parkway. We're not exactly sure WHAT they're doing..but they've dug a huge hole in the road and they seem to be trying to bury a large metal frame under the ground. Weird.

Actually, the REAL entertainment for tonight was helping one of my neighbors work on his Acura. This isn't the first time I've helped him work on his car(s). You see, he has this nasty little habit of breaking stuff. Bumpers. Radiator supports. Wheel studs. And it's something different each week. Tonight, we were working on removing his wheel hub so that he could take it into work tomorrow so that he can press out his wheel bearings so that he can remove his studs so that he can replace the two broken ones. Did you get all of that? After a few hours of beating, banging, and straining, we finally popped all of the ball joints in order to remove the hub. What a pain. And tomorrow night? We'll be putting the fixed hub back on the car. Next week? Who knows what it will be. The guy is really nice, but I look forward to having my evenings to relax and not to have to do too much. Or help people as I do the other 8 hours of my day. And it's not that I dislike helping people because that's what I'm all about. I dunno. It's difficult to motivate myself to help this guy, knowing that he's probably going to break something else next week. And if it weren't so darned COLD outside lately...sheesh.

That's about it for tonight.

A blog Lull

I suppose I'm stuck in a sortof a blog lull lately. I don't really feel like I have a whole lot to talk about, and there's not too much interesting going on lately.

Work was busy as crap again today with Tommy being out again. I think he'll probably be back tomorrow...thank goodness.

I may have an advertiser prospect for CustomTacos. It seems that the owner of Alter Image is pretty interested in advertising on the site, and possibly even selling their products on the site eventually. Both could be really good way to recover from my current debt on the site. Just a couple months of them (or another advertiser) could easily turn this whole thing around, financially. Until then, the donations are really helping. :)

It looks like Olivia's car might be done in the next few days..we HOPE. She called late last week and they said that it was ready to be painted. It had better be right. I mean, how many times have you heard of a body shop taking 3 MONTHS to fix a car? Maybe they should have just totaled it. Then maybe she could've gotten a really exciting new car.