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April 18, 2005
Towards the East
Alex has been generally unhappy since she got an IUD on last Thursday. The doctor, this hairy, acne-laden hagdyke from another dimension, has a number of flaws, not the least of which are her appearance and demeanor. Anyway, she decided to take a time/pain tradeoff during the procedure which has left Alex with pain since it happened. To save about 10-15 minutes of wriggling time. I think it’s pathetic that this person spent nine or twelve or however many years getting trained to be a doctor, and won’t spend 10 minutes to do something the nice way for a patient. Telling.
Michael was telling me about this doctor in Albuquerque who doesn’t take insurance or medicare or medicaid, only money, and does house calls at any time of day. We both really like this idea. The doctors seem to like it too—more money, more personable customers, better life for everyone involved. And all because they factored out the things that make it inhumane: paperwork, waiting, rushed doctors, etc. This doctor had a quote which I’ll paraphrase: when doctors could do nothing but pat you on the hand and tell you when you might get better, they were revered. Now that they can treat more things than any other time in history, they are disliked and considered an inconvenience. Wish I had a link to this guy’s site or something.
Last week was go-live for Spamfire 2, though in reality we’d been selling it to existing customers for a while. It’s been really exhausting, very difficult to get or stay motivated for anything at home. I’ve been sleeping a lot. When I get to work I have 2 hours of tech support to look forward to, usually with nothing to say except wish you’d read the documentation and not freaked out, or wait for the next version, it’ll be out soon. It’s hard for me to imagine grown men getting so angry and mean about something, but not having the courage or the wisdom to read the fucking manual. But I guess this is true of anything. As Michael said, “even iShit will require customer service.” We often talk about iShit, a hypothetical program that does nothing but has a really nice UI and lots of people need for keeping track of their shit. In practice, it’s probably a lot like Delicious Library. This leads to the other thing we talk about a lot, the “it’s like XXX, but worse” phenomenon. A lot of people seem bent on poor imitation. A friend of mine is about to embark on a project to recreate Civ 2, but “with shorter games.” A guy at REALworld was talking about his RB Design Award contender, “it’s like Delicious Library, but written in REALbasic.”
I’m glad for all the time I spent not interacting with customers at Matterform prior to two weeks ago. I was even more glad at ARSC, because Jeff and Derek even hid from me that they were demoing the software. But now, we have people writing to us saying, drop the language you use, this is alpha, this is blah. You would say, they’re just users, it won’t affect you. But it does. And these people assume they’re going to get a sub-human who doesn’t care about the product, because the other companies they deal with are big and staffed with sub-humans who don’t care about the product, so they pick harsher words. Still, I’m surprised that grown men are so harsh. It’s just a program. Programs have bugs. They get fixed. It’s not the end of the world. $17.95 is not a fraud-worthy sum.
Anyway.
I’ve been somewhat programmatically impotent lately. By the time we get around to the coding, it’s in PHP for Nina or whatever, I’m distracted by what all these people have said. I get home, and I don’t have it in me to continue on any of the grandiose plans I’ve started. I’ve got four projects on the back burner. I start more all the time. Somedays I just wish I were really profoundly interested in just one of these old things, and could work on it all night. But I don’t have it in me these weeks. I’ve got nothing but exhaustion.
Last week, out of the blue, I got the MFbonus. :) I’m really happy about it. Then Michael insisted I take off some time this month, to recouperate, so I’ve got the next two Friday’s off. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the time. I’m thinking about just sleeping. I’ve got to go see Eric before he goes on his trip though. I blew off everyone in Socorro this weekend, mostly because of Alex not feeling well, and partly because of the exhaustion.
We blew the money this weekend on a new used washer and dryer. Alex has been pestering me about these for a long time. So now all we need is a sofa, a couple dressers and a new laptop for me, and our material questing will be essentially taken care of for a while. I’m content with what we have. The only things I feel like I need right now are a faster better Mac and a home in New Zealand. But those both seem incredibly distant right now.
We also got a wunder-crapper for the cats. Michael called it a shit palace. I guess the vulgarian is rubbing off on him, though I try and hold it in. I’ve been more captivated with wrecking people with blunt, G-rated sentences for while. There’s something really beautiful about saying something like “No, we only want to offend you” and watching someone get all pissed and hurt about it. “No, we just want to exclude you. Your kind.” Anyway, the litter box has basically got a filter on the side, and a collector above it. You rotate the box onto the side and the dirt slides into the filter side, then you rotate the other way and all the clumps fall into a removable container. I’m skeptical, but I’m willing to like it.
This has been the week of home improvements. Last Tuesday or whenever Faust came over, we installed my first set of CD holding shelves. We needed to get a stud finder. Now we’ve removed the door from the bathroom closet and removed a board to put the litterbox in there. It’s strange, working on the house.
Anyway, it’s 12:10 and this is long enough. Time to call it a night I think. I’m hanging out in the Io chatroom for a change. It’s kind of nice. I hope it doesn’t become a habit. :)
Posted by FusionGyro at April 18, 2005 10:29 PM
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Comments
regarding stud finders…
my father would just use a hammer, or something with some weight and a set hardness. then he would just tap along the wall, and listen for changes in sound. He’d have a 90% + sucess rate. i never got above 70%. now that there are stud finders, i think that it will become a lost skill, one that no one will ever miss until they find they are out of batteries.
-Tim
Posted by: Tim at May 25, 2005 03:10 AM