A few days ago I made a prediction that I’d be able to catch up on sales stuff soon. That hasn’t happened. Support stuff just keeps trickling in, and then today I had a couple phone calls right off the bat about about creating or redesigning sites. I was planning on meeting with Tim Henrich at The Connection (where I heard an Old 97’s song today, by the way) to discuss the meeting I had yesterday, but that turned into something bigger as we had to plot out and price these other two too. I am by no means complaining about it- I’ve really enjoyed working on the sales more, but it seems best to take care of our existing clients first, then worry about new ones. A week or two ago I was put back in charge of smaller “maintenance” projects, and thinking about it now, I believe that’s part of the reason I’m getting backed up again. That, and we have had a pretty heavy support load lately.
I worked pretty late tonight. Around 4:30 a good client of ours started having trouble sending a newsletter. For about an hour Josh Gitlin, our server admin and one of our programmers, and was looking into possible server issues but couldn’t find out anything other than the fact that he server was at about twice the normal load. At some point Scott Hendrix, my boss, who was on his way out to eat with his wife and two little girls, had the idea of trying to send the newsletter out using a different URL. That worked, so we decided there was something wrong with the page that was trying to be sent. We couldn’t immediately find anything with the code, but eventually I ran it (again at Scott’s suggestion) through a code cleaner built into Dreamweaver. That did the trick, and by the it was about 7:00.
In that time Amanda had called. I was already frustrated and when she told me I shouldn’t be working I said something or other that she took as me being angry at her, which I totally wasn’t. I think I was just frustrated that this issue I was working on needed to be fixed and I thought she was telling me to work when it was a pretty important issue for this client of ours. Anyway, whatever I said came out wrong and she was a little annoyed, but it blew over pretty quickly when she got home. She went back out to get a salad (for her) and a baked potato (for me- they’re huge) from McAllister’s. I’d just been finished for a few minutes by the time she got back.
When she did get back I was talking to my old friend (whom I used to date back in high school) Autumn Belk on MySpace’s instant messenger service. She and her fiancee, John Pearson, and possibly Chris Reeves are coming down to Wilmington tomorrow, so they wanted to see about meeting up and grabbing a bite to eat or something.
It was the first time I’d ever used MySpace’s instant messenger service, which I mentioned to Autumn. She made some comment about how she hadn’t either, which I said was special. She said something to the effect of me not only having been her first kiss, but now also her first MySpace IM. Ain’t I something?
After that Amanda and I watched some TV. At a few minutes after 9:00 I flipped around the HBO stations and saw that Broken Flowers by Jim Jarmusch starring Bill Murray was on. I’d wanted to catch that, so we watched it. As often happens when watching TV on Friday night I dozed off a little, but only for a few minutes. I liked it. Amanda wasn’t a fan of its non-answer ending.
I just read that Jack Palance has died of natural causes at the age of 87. In reading that, I learned that he went to UNC on a football scholarship before he left, disgusted at the commercialization of the sport. He went to Stanford on the GI Bill after being on a B-24 in World War II. Of course everyone remembers when he did one-handed push-ups during his Academy Award acceptance for Best Supporting Actor for City Slickers, but when I think of Jack Palance I think of him in Batman and Young Guns. Yeah yeah, let the disdain flow. What can I say- those were formative movies for me.
Zach Dotsey
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