February 4, 2000

I'm having a good morning at work. I have my coffee, and everything is good. I've even accomplished some stuff that I'm all proud of.

I'm going to tell you what I did, even though you probably don't care and will find it boring. I can do that, because this is my journal. Ha ha.

OK. So, the first thing this morning was that my boss (Tom) and the New Guy (Kurt) (he's been here for a week now) came into my office.

TOM
OK, let's ask the wizard!

MY BRAIN
I know he is not referring to me.

ME
Who?

TOM
(genially) Ha ha.

ME
Oh. Ha ha.

KURT
Ha ha.

TOM
So... Kurt, did you email her the thing?

MY BRAIN
Uh-oh.

KURT
Uh. I don't think so.

(Kurt goes back to his office to email me the thing.)

TOM
We have this question about the thing. See, we added those .. uh, the like, bracket things?

(He points to the >> and << keys on my keyboard.)

ME
OK?

TOM
We wanted to set off the text, and we didn't want to use bold or anything, because HTML wasn't showing up in the sent email.

ME
That's probably because you had "View messages as HTML" shut off.

TOM
Huh. OK, well, anyway, we added those little bracket things to set off the text instead of using bold or whatever.

(Kurt returns)

KURT
OK, it's sent.

TOM
OK, check your email.

(I check my email. Our weekly newsletter appears in my inbox.)

TOM
OK, see right there? Where we put the brackets on the side? That showed up in italics. Now, we're thinking if that could show up in italics, maybe there's some other commands we're not aware of that could turn it bold or whatever.

MY BRAIN
What the hell?

ME
OK, this is definitely not HTML. See, HTML tags are enclosed in brackets, and those are just open brackets, and it's really bizarre that those would make the text show up as italicized.

TOM
That's what we thought, too!

MY BRAIN
What the hell?

TOM
See, we tried to send it with HTML tags, and that didn't work, so we just highlighted it by putting those little brackets around it, and then it showed up as italicized after we sent it. Weird, huh? Do you have any ideas?

ME
I am mystififed. Because, that's not HTML.

TOM
Right.

ME
Huh.

TOM
OK, well, thanks, we'll just mess around with it some more and see what we can produce.

(Tom starts to leave)

ME
WAIT! I KNOW WHAT CAUSED IT!

TOM
Eh?

ME
See, you use a little bracket like that to indicate quoted text, and we have our machines set up to show quoted text as italicized, so your little brackets made it think it was quoted text!

TOM
Oh! That makes total sense. Wow, you even thought of that before you had any coffee. Impressive!

ME
(modestly) It was nothing.

The other thing I did this morning was that I figured out how to exactly replicate our headers and footers from Microsoft Word, in Adobe PageMaker. I mean, exactly. Like, if you print the page out in Word, and then you print the page out in PageMaker, and you hold them over each other and hold them up to a light, there's no overlap. I am very proud of myself for having done this. I am totally awesome. Watch me go. I mean, zero overlap. They are exactly the same. If you are not familiar with these programs, this may not sound like a big achievement, but dammit, IT IS. I am so awesome.

I listen to the radio too much. I usually leave the radio turned on all day while I'm working at my desk, because it keeps my mind occupied while I'm doing tedious work, which happens a fair amount, and also I just like listening to music in the background.

Anyway, I've been noticing that the radio station has been playing songs with swear words in it! Not that I'm terribly offended by this, but isn't that, like, illegal? Isn't that the whole point behind George Carlin's piece "Seven Little Words You Can't Say On Television"? Seriously, an Alanis song came on the radio the other day that had "chickenshit" in it, and I know I've heard "fuck" on there more than once.

I just don't get it. When I was a college DJ, we were only allowed to play songs with swear words in them during "Safe Harbor", which was between 10pm and 6am. I thought that was a hard-and-fast FCC rule, but apparently it was just WNUR policy, because KMTT has definitely been playing songs with swear words in them right in the middle of the afternoon. Bizarre. Also bizarre because KMTT isn't a hard rock station. It's like, middle of the road stuff. As Keith puts it, a station for "aging hippies." Not the kind of station you'd associate with playing The F-Word at 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

So why, you might ask, do I listen to a station that's aimed at "aging hippies"? Well, I like their "No Repeat Workday." This means that between 9am and 5pm, they don't play a song twice. I like this a lot. Back when I was listening to various other stations, I had to change the channel all the time, because I can't stand hearing the same song five times in one day. It drives me crazy. So, even though the musical selections on KMTT might not always be exactly what I want to hear, at least I'm not going to hear them four fricking thousand times a day.

Movie-related stuff. I'm hankerin' to go see a movie this weekend. I haven't decided what to go see yet, though. I saw Man on the Moon and Magnolia last week, so two of my "must-see" films were crossed off my list. (Both were excellent, and I highly recommend them to anyone, by the way.) So this weekend I could go see "Girl, Interrupted," which I heard was OK but not as good as the book, or I could see "The Green Mile," which I heard was good but very long, or.. well, I don't know. I'll figure something out.

THE FORUM: Becky wants to know what your favorite song is.

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