Thursday, July 23, 1998

        I got a couple of emails this morning about error messages and, even worse, about my site crashing browsers. It turns out that although I thought I had fixed the problem, I had somehow overwritten my index file with the old version, the one with the problem, unknowingly. Stupid. It's apparently my cute javascript trick, the one where you put the javascript in a separate file so you can avoid having it clutter up the HTML, that's causing the problem in certain browsers. So all that careful updating that I did the other day will now have to be carefully un-updated. What a pain. Oh well. Live and learn.

        I think that I may have to just accept an error message here and there. I can't always design for every possible scenario, but I really don't want to cause crashes. That doesn't seem very friendly . . . Last night before I went to bed, I started to download Netscape 4.05, so that--if the moon and stars were in alignment and the computer didn't freeze up and die and I was able to sustain the telephone connection long enough--it would download while I was sleeping, hopefully quicker than it would if I was on the computer doing other things at the same time.

        It worked like a charm. It was ready to install when I came down this morning, and it all went fine except for the fact that it didn't pick up my bookmarks. It did pick them up when I installed it upstairs on the other computer, so I'm sure I could have figured it out, but I decided that maybe it would be a good idea just to start from scratch. I saved the old bookmarks as an HTML file that I can open in the browser if I want, but the actual bookmark file is pristine and empty.

Later . . .

        After I worked on the pages to, hopefully, take care of the problem, I wrote back to the people who had said they had had problems and asked if they'd check again and let me know if it was okay. I heard back from several people that the problems seemed to be fixed, thank goodness.

        Our next door neighbor came over this evening for a few minutes. Her alleged reason for coming over was to ask whether we had recently had our townhouse exterminated; she said she had suddenly started seeing a lot of big spiders and she wondered whether they might be escaping from our house . . . I think the real reason she came over was that she wanted Bob to come over and kill the current spider, the one that was lying, alive but not exactly lively, in her backtub. Her husband was out of town and she said she wanted it out of there, but she didn't want to kill it.

        Unfortunately, Bob was gone tonight, too, so I just told her that no, we hadn't recently exerminated, and I commiserated over the spider situation. My theory that she was looking for a knight to rescue her was confirmed a little later in the evening when I noticed her standing outside thanking a guy who lives a couple of doors down the street, who was standing out in the yard pulling off some sort of gardening gauntlets or something. He seems like a nice guy, he helped me once when my car was stuck in the snow. He's older; I think he's retired because when I was leaving the house early to go to work I'd see him out working in the yard.

        I just thought it was sort of funny. I would never (I don't think), go knocking on doors to find someone to handle that kind of thing for me. If it had to be done, I'd grit my teeth and do it. Another other reason that it was funny is because of an incident that happened soon after Bob and I started dating. I was following him somewhere in my car. I can't remember now where we were going or why we were in separate cars, but we were driving slowly out of my neighborhood when I looked up at the rearview mirror and saw the biggest spider I had ever seen crawling over the top of it.

        I immediately pulled off the road into a gas station parking lot and jumped out of the car. I remember this part. The rest of it is fuzzy. I can't remember whether I killed the spider or whether it disappeared, but Bob never saw it. He noticed that I was no longer behind him and came back to look for me. He found me in the parking lot, and laughed when I told him about the spider. To this day, more than twenty years later, he still remembers that story and talks sarcastically about the "spider the size of a small dog."

        I'm reading High Fidelity (Nick Hornby):

        Anyway. Here's how not to plan a career: (a) split up with girlfriend; (b) junk college; (c) go to work in record shop; (d) stay in record shops for rest of life. You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you'd just at that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (because I haven't let the grass grow under my feet the last fourteen years! About ten years ago I borrowed the money to start my own!), and at my regular Saturday punters, and I know exactly how those inhabitants of Pompeii must feel, if they could feel anything (although the fact that they can't is kind of the point of them). I'm stuck in this pose, this managing-shop pose, forever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while. It could be worse, I guess; I could have walked into an army recruiting office, or the nearest Slaughterhouse. But even so, I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

~ Nick Hornby, "High Fidelity"

Pyewacket and friend