Someone out there, and you know who you are, has linked to my site from the Data Lounge. Whether you linked to a shoe photo or to something I wrote, I cannot tell from backtracking my logs.

I know that the link came out of the Gossip forum, but sweeties, I am just stumped as to what it was that ya'll found amusing. Well, of course, everything, I'm sure. But.

Was it my lame list of things about myself where I tell about the time my girlfriend and I were mistaken for drag queens at White Party? Granted it was dark, and the gentleman who asked was old, but we still think that women being mistaken for drag queens is a fantastic compliment. I mean, how fabulous DID we look?

Was it my photo essay from Dining by Design?

Please, just tell me.

New stuff! I got the "one hundred things" bug and started with books, which led to movies, which led to another hundred movies. Then I started on the list of live music I've been to see (not counting symphony orchestras, plays and operas) and from there I've started up the hundred totally lame and random things you'd probably rather not know about me. That list isn't live and probably won't be for some time.

But go on, click the links. You know you want to.

That's me. I'm a book whore. If its got ink, I'll read it. Here's the summer reading list. It's incomplete, and some of them are already finished, but for the bookworms among you (and you know who you are) this is what's on the current stack.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)
Fluke (Christopher Moore)
The Sweet Potato Queens' Big Ass Cookbook and Financial Planner (Jill Conner Browne)
Gramercy Park (Paula Cohen)
Absolutely American (David Lipsky)
Benjamin Franklin (Walter Isaacson)
Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd (Richard Zacks)
The South Beach Diet (Arthur Agatston)
Designing Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen)
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Hands On Training
ColdFusion MX with Dreamweaver MX
Dreamweaver MX Killer Tips

In the case of the Sweet Potato Queens, I've already read all of the others. Ditto for all of Christopher Moore's books. Brilliant, spew coffee from your nose funny work.

The South Beach Diet is working for me, so I recommend it for anyone else who hates the concept of dieting but still needs to lower their cholesterol or drop a few pounds.

I am converting from Adobe GoLive to Dreamweaver/ColdFusion MX at the office, that explains the pile of code warrior texts.

But as you can see, my tastes are eclectic. Got any suggestions?

Hey! Check this out. The lovely Jodi sent me this link. Another person who thinks in Dylanese and takes pictures of other women's feet. Too scary to contemplate, but in an infinite universe, where anything CAN happen, everything MUST happen.

My little corner of the web has been noticed. Shucks, gee, I'd like to thank the academy. Or for the movie buffs out there, "You like me, you really like me."

Yesterday I was the Day Trip du jour (is that redundant?) over at WomanChild's blog. I didn't even know until I received a fan e-mail. I just can't wait to see the web stats on Monday when the reports get run. Gosh, I might be up over 6 visitors a day!

Speaking of movie buffs, my husband, my father and I caught the last half of the AFI special, the 100 top villains and heroes. It says something about the family that between the three of us, we could A) Identify almost every clip before the title was announced and B) Deliver the line that was the "famous" line before or concurrent with the actor and C) Make some off the cuff, sarcastic, yet brilliantly humorous mot for each.

I went to film school (yeah, right. I minored in film at the liberal arts college I attended. But many famous filmmakers and actors also attended that same school, so in my book that makes it film school. In any event, I can still format a script correctly and I still remember the differences between pan, dolly, tilt, zoom.) but my father and husband have no excuse for this aberrant behavior. Needless to say, we had a wonderful time.

"I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody. Instead of a bum. Which is what I am."

He sure is, says dad. Amen, says I.

Oh, come on, people, I know you're out there. I know you're reading this blog: I can read the WebTrends reports as well as anybody. Some of you even make comments. So why won't you sign my cheesy guest map? Please? It'll make me happy. You want me to be happy, don't you?

Right. Didn't think so. How could I be this bitter, sarcastic and generally snarky if I were happy? Well, there's only one way to find out. Sign the freakin' map.

Thanks, and have a nice day. (Insert wretched little smiley face icon here)

I really, truly do. I hate what they have done to my profession. I hate what they have done to human discourse. Most of all, I hate that they have become so insidiously necessary to all aspects of human endevour, and when they fail, they take with it all ability to function. Case(s) in point: last night I attempted to order groceries on line. It took two and a half hours to do something that, had I gotten out of my bathrobe and into the car, I could have accomplished in 45 minutes with much less aggrevation. But it was 9 at night, I'd worked a full day and then endured a homeowner's association meeting that would have driven a sober man to drink, much less a lush like me, and there was no way I was going to drive to the nearest Publix and roll a wobbly-wheeled cart through the Muzak-filled aisles as I searched for a decent head of lettuce.

Instead, I spent two frustrating hours having my laptop time out and refuse to accept input, only to discover as I attempted to check out that I had 5 heads of lettuce and other mistaken multiples. Which I then could not edit out of my basket. It took so long to navigate through this morass that I lost my original delivery time. And ground about a quarter of an inch of enamel off my back molars.

Today, my e-mail has disappeared from register.com. But so has Register.com, it would seem. No matter what you type in, no matter what you click you get the same frustrating screen of this domain has just been registered, and information will be coming soon. As fucking if. I have tried to link to their help page, their manage my account page, their search for a domain name page, and two separate e-mail accounts. All I get is this lame "soon come" crap.

I don't have much more enamel on those back teeth. Can something get fixed? Anything?

Think about this. You are with a couple hundred of your computing peers. At a conference about a single product. In this instance, Adobe Acrobat. This is two full days of all about PDFs. There are many men in shorts and sandals. And t-shirts. There are presenters talking in depth about form fields. There are more computer nerds from schools and government agencies than any other conference I've ever been to. At the opening night mixer there was more beer drunk than wine. People hung out at the nosh bar and didn't mingle. Of course they didn't mingle. They are computer nerds.

And so am I. I must be, I'm here, aren't I? And scarily enough, learning things that will be useful at my job.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Fortunately we are at a Disney resort hotel and they have a wonderful theme bar. The resort is the "Coronado Springs" so the swimming pool has a forced perspective Mayan temple (with water slide). The theme is "Mexican Fiesta" so they have terrific frozen margaritas. And that's where this little conference attendee is headed right now. To the bar. Arriba! Vamanos!

An open letter to the fine, intelligent members of the illustrious art forum known as EatPoo.com.

Fine. You win. Take what you want. I really don't care. I never did care. It was all about the attitude. Clearly you have me on attitude as well as talent, intelligence, wit, and what ever else it is at which you desire to win.

You want to come to my site and rag on me, fine. You want to continually miss the point of my writings and the humor I display? It is your right to do so. You wish to remain anonymous and post bogus sites and e-mail addresses? Knock yourselves out.

You win. You are all, collectively and individually, better human beings than I. I was a fool not to see it from the very first post. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea fucking culpa.

Now, can we all just get on with our lives and forget about each other? I didn't think so. But this is MY last post on the subject.

A while back I posted about band width poachers, and how they suck. I told the story of how I found out that I had some, and where they seemed to be coming from. A couple of folks offered sugestions on how to stop it. I let it pass.

Recent trolling through my stats showed that it wasn't just the photo of my glamorous red shoes (the ones in the comment window) that was being poached, but my masthead, other photos of shoes, even a photo of my dear, dead grandfather. That one was accompanied by snotty remarks about his "hotness" or lack thereof. Which, in all honesty, since the picture was taken around the turn of the last century, were probably justified.

That isn't what's got my knickers in a twist, though. It is the glee with which the poachers announced that I had discovered the theft and bitched about it. They encouraged each other to steal more images. They ridiculed me for caring. They thought they should "force" me to join their chat group.

And that's another thing. Their chat group, as far as I can figure, is comprised of teenage boys with penis size issues, an average IQ in the mere double digits, and an awful lot of time on their hands, which they use to post lame photos, make even lamer jokes, and beg and plead for someone of the opposite sex to fall into their site and stay. They come from all over the world, which makes me sad for women.

And then there is this: even though they are detestable little creatures, they are driving the stats up on my site. When you open your doors to the public, you can't complain when the public walks in.

Or, in this instance, the machine.

Got an e-mail from an old client/acquaintance: Your recent e-mail contained a virus.

First, I didn't send her an e-mail. Second, I run Norton 24-7. Third, I NEVER open e-mail from people I don't know with subject lines like: "a good joke" and an executable file attached. For that matter, I routinely trash e-mail of a certain size: approximately 132K, because that seems like the standard size for the Klez virus.

But, being a responsible adult user of computer technology, I shut down all my programs and started a Norton scan. Well, it's been over an hour and a half, we are only half way through the scan, and not even to my second hard drive. But as I anticipated, there isn't so much as a hint of a virus.

Bah and humbug. No pun intended.

I hate to write code. I really, really hate to do it. However, in my job, such as it is, I am being forced to learn to write in Cold Fusion. It's a trial by fire, as well. Write a program, test it, send it live, and oh, yeah, do it by month end.

I am a fucking graphic designer. My training and experience allow me to take the visual equivalent of chicken shit and turn it into award-winning chicken salad. My life has not prepared me to write code, despite having been sent to Cold Fusion boot camp to learn to do so.

I hate computers. I hate what they did to my profession. I hate that the bogus class I took in high school (touch typing) has become one of my most valuable skills. I miss having ink-stained fingers. I miss the smell of photo chemicals. I miss the room-sized stat camera. I miss the leisurely deadlines (right). Well, compared to today's work schedule where you can get a hissy-gram from someone because you haven't changed their web page within 15 minutes of them e-mailing you the changes, they WERE leisurely.

Half the people I deal with have never heard my voice or seen my face. I am just an e-mail address.

Did I mention that I hate computers?

I find bandwidth poachers just the lowest. It's bad enough that they use one's images without credit and steal one's intellectual property, but to do so by using your own bandwidth is just beyond low. If you like the photo of my glamorous red shoes so much, then right click on your fucking mouse and download it to your own hard drive.

I'm checking my stats and I see a few hundred referrals from a page I can't identify, so I follow the electronic track backwards and find my girlyshoes stuck in the middle of a page of yapping, uh.... well I can't exactly figure out what this particular chat site is about. It may be a room full of yapping perverts, there certainly seems to be enough of them there, but then my shoes are dropped in among a ton of photos of fuzzy little kittens.

I can't tell if the kitten snaps are sarcasm, either, based on what else is on eatpoo.com

Ah well, why should I expect civility from the web any more than I expect it in the meat world.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I hate the living.

Yeah, right. Think "Gotta Sing!" Who was that, Gene Kelly?

Anyway, the spouse and I had a lovely new year's eve, thanks for asking. We ate meat, and drank champagne and watched a marathon of Monster Garage. I think I like it more than he does. Is it a good thing to be such a gear head? I so want the PT Cruiser to get a hot paint job. The guy who does all the paint on Monster Garage. That's who I want to paint flip-flop flames on my car. And tons of chrome. Yeah. Big Daddy Roth, you ruled.

We spent new year's day in full cocoon watching our own marathon: All of the Evil Dead, Army of Darkness movies. I say that Evil Dead II was really just a remake of the original Evil Dead, and Marc says that it was a sequel. All of my arguments as to why it's NOT a sequel make sense if you allow that there is a plot in any of these movies. If you don't think there's a plot, then my well-reasoned debate is just crap.

Won't be the first time.

I'm in the sky tower, watching the buzzards circle. No, really. Capistrano has swallows, Miami has turkey buzzards. Not as romantic an image, perhaps, but they have a certain poetry to them, as they like to circle the Court House. Get it? Buzzards, lawyers... It's humor.

Well, they also hang out around here at the towers. Hopefully nobody sees the irony in their loitering around a hospital.

That's all I'm doing today. Loitering. Banging away at the old keyboard, working on my personal website and waiting until I've put in enough hours to leave on this Friday after a mid-week Christmas. In my head I sound like a Simpson's talking watch. "Are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet?"

Hey. At least I did something when I wrote this: you, on the other hand, are merely reading. Go back to work.