Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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If I’m the only one to survive, they should triple my pay.

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Good lord.

If I call technology support with a simple question – say, that my QuickLaunch bar disappeared and I can’t get it back because I’m not an administrator on my machine – why don’t I have it back after three days and seven phones calls? Why? Why is it that they can’t figure out what to do even after calling in their co-workers on conference for assistance? Why, after I research the answer and subsequently TELL THEM HOW TO DO IT because I know more about computers than they do, can’t they can’t figure it out still? What am I supposed to do?

Maybe if I were to unplug my network connection after they remotely logged into my machine I could surreptitiously fix my settings and then plug back in before they’re any the wiser? Hmm.

(I’ll never understand why IT people make so much money. Good IT people deserve it, but the only good ones I’ve ever met have been my friends at Drexel.)

In other news, it seems as though Blogger altered the longstanding variable “BlogItemUrl” to display a full domain url rather than just a file name with a target attached, thus breaking every single permalink from the past four years. That’s 2500+ permalinks. I had to have an emergency template-editing session in the middle of the day so that you can obsessively link all of my highly entertaining writing from your own pages. So, yeah.

Meanwhile, my department is dropping like flies. One of my coworkers left the office in the middle of the day yesterday so suddenly sick that she literally had to bring a trash bag for her cab ride home. Then, this morning, two more people had to go home before our morning meeting was even underway, with a third turned a color so yellow that I think he may have developed jaundice overnight.

That’s a fifth of our entire department! I refuse to catch their sickness; I haven’t involuntarily thrown up for a reason other than alcohol consumption since middle school. Rest assured, my OCD is in high gear today – I typically treat every surface in the office as if it was thinly coated in poop anyhow, but today I have expanded that distinction to include fellow associates and added the additional precaution of wearing an imaginary fencing mask, so that I am unable to touch my hands or any office supply to any area near me face. And I still feel queasy; damn placebo effect.

Maybe it’s ebola or something, and I’ll prove to be resistant due to my iron-clad stomach, and after everyone dies I can sneak down to tech support and fix my damned Start bar.

Two & 1/2

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New Jersey, as much as I claim to detest it, always makes me think. I think in the mall, of the impact of prominent stores and brands on suburban buying patterns. I think on the roads, of the effect of weakly distributed mass transit on social networks in teens under the legal age to drive. I think at the concert, of the development of garage bands in a vacuum of live performances by national acts.

I think in New Jersey because there is not much else for me to do. I bring up their Governor repeatedly, hoping for some intriguing revelation, but I seem to know more about the story than anyone I talk to. Just wait, I said on Friday, until more news about Cipel breaks. He was imported from Isreal. You’ll see.

In the car driving down some street I still don’t recognize, even though I’ve been there with Elise dozens of times now, these thoughts are hurtling through my head. I palm my cell phone, nervously flicking the antenna up and down. Should I make a phone post? What if these thoughts escape, evaporate, never to be heard from again? I should call, call up and talk them out, but then we are at the bakery, getting out, and I am reveling in the .75$ muffins and how we can buy a heaping breakfast of pastries for four for less than $10.

I think in the parking lot, of cost of living and if it correlates at all to population density.

There was a point in time when all I did was sit at the computer, and back then every thought I had made it onto the page. I thought about q-tips. I thought about music. I thought about love. Eventually, I got out of the house more. Saw more. Did more. Wrote less. Looking back over those weeks and months, I feel disconnected from my life, so easy to chart from those earlier, more frequent entries. I chime in about class or work, but what was I feeling? What was I thinking?

Last night I think in the living room, of what I am doing with myself, and how I will remember it.

I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

After These Messages….

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Aaaaaand, we’re back!

When Lisa emailed me at work on Monday to tell me Crushing Krisis was down, I thought that my host might just be having a server hiccup (as all hosts are wont to do, from time to time). However, navigating to the domain informed me that my site registration was up, and that I needed to shell out to continue to live at this virtual address.

I always forget that this happens at the beginning of August because CK.com officially launched on August 26, 2001, the first birthday of Crushing Krisis as blog. And, forgettfullness or not, I went into a cold sweat when I saw the Dotster screen come up. My registration had expired? Could someone else register it?

We are our identities, and so the things that we identify with are almost more important to our sense of self than what other’s perceive about us. This is me.

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Senior Project First draft is nearing completion. Ironically, i loaded Blogger.com to see if they were featuring any current articles i could cite in my project only to discover their first complete redesign in Blogger history.

It is terrible. The new Blogger.com interface is completely AOL-ized in its rounded-corner graphics and utter uselessness to the established user. What amuses me the most about this is that, in writing the academic portion of my project, it became increasingly apparent that Blogger’s ubiquity was the main reason it could compete with the simpler and more communal Live Journal and the the more complex high-end Moveable Type. This new template capitalizes on moving towards the LJ model of compartmentalized simplicity rather than the MT one of specified power, and i think it signals the death-knell of serious bloggers using the Blogger service to do anything.


I wouldn’t be surprised to see a mass-exodus of big names in coming weeks. It seems as though Alison agrees.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2004/05/2566/

Questioning My RSS

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I am attempting to learn more about the intricacies of RSS, as Philly Future has picked up the feed that i created as a lark. However, for the moment forget intricacy … this is a Blogger.com nuts’n’bolts question.

My RSS feed currently publishes hyperlinks to where Bloggers thinks my posts live (example [Ed Note: This example no longer works]), but in reality they ought to point to the posts’ home in the archive, where my permalinks point (example [Ed. Note: This example no longer works]). I cannot find anywhere in Blogger’s settings to alter this code. Can it be done? Any helpful comments are greatly appreciated.

In fact, if any knowledgeable bloggers out there would like to point me to your daily neighborhood RSS faq, that would score you major bonus points.