Noise Between Stations

Month: February 2000

  • “I work really hard but it doesn’t feel like a sweatshop, I love it,” I told a co-worker the other day. Just recording that as a barometer reading so I can look back on it.

  • Just tried to upgrade the memory in my step-father’s Performa and he only had one SIMM slot. One. I realize it’s a consumer machine and people don’t expand them much, but only one slot? I wonder if they reasoned that, when it came time to upgrade, memory prices would have fallen and it wouldn’t cost that much to replace the stock memory instead of adding to it, or at least less than the extra engineering cost of squeezing another slot in there.


    Let’s see, checking CDW the 8MB of his we’ll have to toss is worth $40 now and the 32MB I recommended is about $70, making a net cost of $30, if he has someone like me install it for free. Not too bad I guess. I wonder if, at those prices, anyone bothers with 8MB modules anymore?

  • Descending the stairs to the subway last night I heard ethereal sounds from a tenor sax, beautiful slow lines from familiar, unnamed jazz standards. The subway platform perfectly compliments the sax, adding long, gentle reverberation. As I leaned over to drop some money in his hat there was a split second in between phrases when he quickly pulled his mouth away to inhale and took the time to say, “thank you.” Amazed me that he could play so well and fit a thank you in there.

  • Hmmmm, we just received a message from our COO, but it was sent from his assistant’s email account and titled, “Announcement from [COO’s name]”. Is this guy too busy to type his own emails, even the once-in-a-blue-moon emails to the entire company?

  • Mark at Creative Good sent me $25 worth of Flooz (thanks Mark!) and I spent it all on Godiva Chocolate for myself. I even sent myself a gift card:


    Because you work

    so fucking hard

    eat some damn

    chocolate!

  • Last Christmas my girlfriend and I gave my grandmother a jar of homemade grape jam. My grandmother recently celebrated a birthday, she’s about 88 years old now. She said, “I’ve never liked peanut butter and jelly, but these days sometimes I make myself half a sandwich to have with my medicine.” This makes me very happy to think of her eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the first time.

  • Michael “Lance” Newby writes regarding my comment on Austria below:



    >>We pull our guys from Austria in a show of unsupport for a very “far right

    >>wing”, yet freely elected govt, then we coddle, schmooze, and placate an

    >>authoritarian, communistic, oppressive (enough adjectives), and THREATENING

    >>China?

    >>

    >>99% of the United States has absolutely no idea of how incompetent our

    >>foreign policy has become.


    Funny, I’ve never thought of our foreign policy as really being a policy, because it’s never been consistent in my eyes. Rather, it seems like a bunch of tiny, unrelated agreements. I guess it was around the time other countries demonstrated nuclear arms capabilities that America started treating countries on a case by case basis.


  • Date:
    Sun, 20 Feb 2000 20:59:29 -0800 (PST)

    From:
    Victor Lombardi

    Subject:
    great ad!

    To:
    feedback@match.com

    I had to laugh at (and I mean at) your ad (enclosed).
    It seems to imply (by using a pull-down menu and not
    check boxes) that people who want children are neither
    intelligent nor financially secure. Are you trying to
    tell us something ;-)


  • I was in a meeting recently with just people on my project team. We were talking about the redesign of a client’s homepage. There were 12 of us. 12, to talk about one page. Granted, it’s the one people see most and the client is huge, but 12 people? That’s just way too many.

  • Cool – web-based way to test for open ports on your computer.

  • Working like a madman the past couple weeks, and just managing to keep the stress in check – no time to take time off. Note to self to expect proper compensation come review time!

  • Wow, I was in a meeting with a client recently going over the usual tactical stuff, when their senior manager came in to observe. At one point someone asked his opinion on the big picture, and he talked for about 15 minutes, blowing our minds. The coolest idea was doing for employees what Epinions does for products, compensating the best work and raising it to the top of the heap.

  • We used to bitch when our company was called a “web design shop,” since we’re much more than that. But it’s scarier to be called a management consultancy. Our struggle is to take Anderson Consulting’s business without becoming Anderson, which of course would be yuckie.

  • Whew, just when I thought I’d never make it to the end.


  • The Word of the Day for February 5 is:


    susurrous \soo-SURR-uss\ (adjective)

    : full of whispering sounds