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

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.

There comes a time when you can no longer pluck the gray hairs from your beard without causing it to look like you shaved really, really badly.

New piercings have this deLIGHTful way of reminding you they’re there, mainly by catching on clothes, bedsheets, shower accoutrements, etc. Ouch. Though they’re doing quite well this time around, all things considered.

Email outage at work may be cyber attack from a foreign gubmint, not that the CIO’s staff is saying much about it right now.

The older guy wants a new agency to deal with the financial crisis. And his is supposed to be the party of small government? How about we just empower the ones we have now to actually to their jobs instead?

Dinner “date” tonight (though not sure how much of a date it is, hence the quotes). Someone I’ve known, off and on, for years now, but our contact is usually fairly sporadic.

Limited email today. My inbox at work hasn’t looked that good since, oh, early February 2004 (i.e., right after I started there)? Evidently we had a “catastrophic cascading hardware failure” in our network stuff which killed off all email access. Whee! Still feel sorry for the CIO types. Explaining this all to management will not be fun. Especially since as of now we still have no crackberry service.

The peanut thing in the slow-cooker worked pretty well. I added water, thinking there wasn’t enough liquid, but it seems there actually was, after the veggies sweat out and shrunk down. So it was “stewier” than expected, but still good. It’s definitely been worth it to have dinner waiting for me when I get home. Now I have a bunch in the freezer for later, again, easier than trying to come up with fresh food every evening, and better than processed stuff as well.

Otherwise more splicer killing in Bioshock, and now it’s zombie movie time, before I crash.

I will say this about the economic news: at least it’s stopped people from commenting on the other inanities which the two campaigns keep spitting out. Though I’d not wish this nonsense on us any day of the week. Re-regulate the markets, tax the hell out of the salaries these fuckers made while screwing the rest of us over and bringing ‘value’ to their companies (which are now defaulting on everything they did), and to the extent necessary, let the market ‘correct’ their actions without bailing their asses out. They so love the market, then live by its rules and don’t expect the rest of us to bail out your poor choices.

Quote of the day, from a column by Mark Moford, talking about static media versus interactive media (specifically TV versus Web 2.0):

See, I still want immersion. I want to feel the full expression of the artist, the filmmaker, the writer, the journalist, the individual. I don’t want to walk into an art gallery and have the ability to change a painting’s colors on a silly whim. I don’t want to read a book and be able to change a character’s name or even pick a particular cover design to match my couch. I don’t want to click the remote and choose which characters die or select an alternate ending. If I want to interact with my DVD, I’ll just buy porn, you know?

Dear Postal Service,

The point of having a self-serve kiosk is so that customers who cannot make it to the post office during regular hours can help themselves and still pay you money. Closing the outer doors so that customers cannot use said kiosk defeats the entire point of having it in the first place. Thanks for nothing.

No love,

A Frustrated Customer

PS: That $0.17 upcharge for cards? Totally a rough fuck without lube. Bastards.

(This was typed on my Treo earlier this evening – just getting home to post it)

Spring is here, even if it’s not.

The temperatures outside have been hovering in the 30s to 50s for the past week. Snow was seen the Saturday before Easter. Flowers are having problems staying up and in bloom. However, despite all this, I know it’s Spring. Because my default fall-back waiting-for-someone-after-I’ve-just-gotten-my-hair-cut 17th Street bar, 30 Degrees, is busy on a Wednesday at 7:30.

The gays are out in force, they’re chatting away, looking stylish in either work drag (suit) or gay boy drag (jeans, sporty shirt), and drinking like the fish we are. If there were a clearer sign that warmer weather is on its way and that bad swimsuits and tank tops are just around the corner, I’m not sure what it would be.

The array of obsure yet terribly fashionable jeans alone is staggering. Patterns on pockets and pants legs which are hardly ever on display outside of you-have-to-be-introduced-by-someone-in-the-know dark shops are peeking out from under belts which betray the designer hopes of their wearers only in the subtle (or not so subtle) buckles. Boys are comparing power phone Blackberry and/or Treo cases and the latest models, and discussuons of who’s going where for which holidays and the summer months when DC decamps to Delaware in such numbers that Rehoboth and Dewey might as well be referred to as Washington in exile echo off the walls. The social pecking order is being established, and men are found desirable or lacking in the flash of a device or the dropping of a name.

Fancy drinks flow freely, like sap rising in the cherry trees around the Mall, and the definitive sign of Spring has come: the gay boys are out to mate.

I swear, they need to licence people to wear cologne or perfume. So few people wear it properly (i.e., subtly). Came into my office this morning and rode up in the elevator with a guy who’s going to be leaving his favorite signature scent all over the building today. It certainly lingered in the elevator long after he’d left. Probably got it for Christmas or something.

Been swimming a lot the past week. My skin has been exuding chlorine like mad, even after a post-swim shower. Up to today it’s been random stuff, just doing the occasional 100 repeat or a skill drill or the like. Tonight I hauled out my “Swim Workouts ina Binder” and did an actual form drills workout. Was nice to have some order, and I think I definitely benefitted from doing more organized drill work.

I wanted to note this article from the Washington Post this week – it’s about teens who go vegetarian, so as a veggie it caught my eye, but the opening paragraph was what really caught my eye:

When Leslie Calman’s 16-year-old son, Ben, came home from school one day last year and announced he was going vegetarian, Calman and her partner, Jane Gruenebaum, did what few families do when a child decides to stop eating animals: They immediately supported his decision.

Now, this was just a run of the mill article about families dealing with a teen going veggie, but I had to stop and re-read the paragraph a couple times to make sure I didn’t miss that they had just named this woman and her partner in such a matter of fact, normal presentation. How Freakin’ Cool. It’ll be better once it’s “Calman and her wife,” if they choose to get married, but I was just so happy to see an article in the paper that just presented this type of family portrait without any real fanfare, and as exactly what it is – normal.

Did a short run this morning, less than 2 miles, and no knee pain. The stretching and what not has helped. Have to figure out my gym schedule for weights now, to strengthen the joints and what not, but I’m confident that it’ll work out (no pun intended).
I’m hearing now that the half iron race I was looking at for next fall puts the run on gravel and not pavement, and I’m thinking 13.1 miles on gravel isn’t such a fun idea for me. So I’m back to looking for another one. I’ve also managed to get a bunch of the attorneys at work all psyched about running the Lawyers Have Heart 10k race in June. Should be fun, and I’m hoping we’ll get some of the non-runners hooked on it, too.

Had to take a break from the more serious stuff I’ve been reading lately, and picked up a fantasy novel I’d picked up at some point to use to fill time, and even to my mostly-non-critical eye the author is beating us over the head with the central story – Camelot. Ugh. Subtlety seems to be lost on this guy, and his Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot characters are exactly playing to type. It’s a bit disappointing, I prefer if someone’s going to tell a story over that they do it a tad less obviously, or at least with a better or more interesting retelling. Might have to dump it in favor of some more modern Chinese fiction in translation if this keeps up.

And there goes “tattoo” at the Fort, so it’s time to shut down for bed.