Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

Finally hauled out Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World and made the basic vanilla cupcake with the fluffy “buttercreme” frosting.

More pictures available on my photostream.

Never schedule a podiatrist appointment on your birthday.

He poked some at the foot. It’s a good sign that there’s no sharp pains, just dull ones that fluctuate. That said, it could be another 2-3 months before I’m fully healed. Ugh.

Got my (expired today) drivers license renewed for another eight years. Good new pic.

My local yarn shop had: a) a sale; b) a full selection of Addi turbos; and b) guy-colored hand-dyed merinos. Heaven.

Dropped off 2/3 of my shirts at the dry cleaners.

After the poking of the heel to determine the level of pain, it started to really, really throb, so the dry cleaners were by bike, and the yarn shop was by car. Otherwise I stayed in and rested the foot.

This past year was not what I thought it was going to be. Between the breakup and the foot injury pretty much nothing that I’d planned has gone right. But, as Dad likes to say, “You drive ’em, you ding ’em.” Or, to quote the Princess Bride, “Life is pain, Highness; anyone who says otherwise is selling something.” I’ll recover, eventually. But for now, I’m just biding my time. And enjoying a nice, quite birthday.

This was one of those days. Got up late, got ready, was going to be a few minutes late, but was zipping out the door to make our 10 am staff meeting (I report at 9:30 normally). Checked the work blackberry as I was packing my bag, only to find out it had been changed to 9, not 10 (they’re always at 10!!!), and I was now late for it. Horribly embarrassed I biked in as quickly as I could. Everyone was already back from the meeting (oy), and I apologized all over the place to my supervisors. They were laughing about it, but it pretty much set the mood for the day. At least the presentation I gave to our field counsel over the phone went well.

Thankfully I’m off tomorrow so I can run errands (podiatrist, new drivers license, dry cleaning, etc.), but man did that blow.

Let me preface my remarks here by saying that I use gay.com (and other chat programs) a lot to keep up with friends online. I’m on regularly 4-6 nights a week, and I happily pay gay.com for full access to their site. But I am incredibly displeased with this new implementation they’ve brought up this week. Unhappy enough to consider dumping the subscription if they don’t get it fixed.

I think I spent a grand total of 40 minutes on “the new gay.com” this evening in two different installments, after it seemed like I spent about the same amount of time trying to convince the web site that no, really, I didn’t have a pop-up blocker stopping their wretched pop-ups from popping up. Verdict: It sucks elephant butt.

Let’s catalog the deficiencies:

• It runs too slow (to be expected with a new system).
• There’s no way to ignore bots in the chat room now.
• There’s no way to turn off the entrance and exit alerts, so you frequently end up with a screen full of “so-and-so entered,” “so and so left” crap that you don’t need.
• You can’t zip through the list to find folks easily by hitting the first letter of their screen name – you’re forced to scroll through the entire thing.
• It takes forever to bring up a screen name when you want to click on their profile or view their photos.
• No clicking through to links in chat, you’re forced to cut & paste.
• Because it’s run through the browser, if someone sends you a link in another program (AIM/Yahoo/MSN/etc.), chat ends up getting shut down if you click on the link in the other program because the new page opens in your chat browser window (or whatever window you have open).
• There’s too much wasted space in the windows – they take up too much screen real estate.
• Even after full disabling the pop-up blocker and getting their pop-ups to work, Every Single Window that popped up continued to display the “you need to turn your pop-up blocker off” message, blocking the screen that I was trying to see until I could hunt down the tiny little “X” that would turn the message off.

In other words, the thing sucks elephant butt.

I’ve left feedback with them, and will continue to do so. The stand-alone chat program worked so, so much better than any browser based crap they could throw up there. I can understand that perhaps they wanted more ad revenue by bringing users back onto their site, but there are ways to do that (force users to go to the profile page on their site to see pictures – more ad revenue/hits right there, without breaking up the other features that made the program work so much better) and still make the experience user-friendly. I realize the company is (probably still) losing money like mad, but driving away core, long-time users by making the site unusable is not the way to fix that.

A little early (or late) for this color set, but hey, the next hat’s done.

To all my fellow federal workers, happy new (fiscal) year.