Blackmoor Vituperative

Hey, I won something from that silly out-of-sync video I made back in May. Pretty cool, eh?

You may be surprised to know that I have not always loved my job. Yes, it’s true. There have been days when I feel unappreciated, overworked, underpaid, disrespected… days when I just want to chuck my keyboard in a trash bin and go apply at the closest Starbucks.

Today is not one of those days. I am actually feeling pretty good about what I do for a living, and I am optimistic about the future. However, burnout is a real danger in IT, and it can have real effects on one’s health, happiness, and relationships. Tech Republic has an article about it. Why not read it, and take the burnout assessment quiz? It couldn’t hurt.

I currently am owed about $4000 from two clients that haven’t paid. One paid half up front for a web site, and I have been trying for a month to turn the web site over to them and get the other half of my payment, and they keep putting me off. The other client, for whom I did some programming work, bounced a check for $2000 three weeks ago, has promised to pay that and the rest of what they owe, but hasn’t paid yet, and never answers their phone or email.

I am pretty close to shutting down the first client’s web site, and turning over the second client to a collection agency. I think I will wait until Monday and try to get somewhere with each of them one more time before I do that.

Why won’t people honor their agreements?

I got my start in computers by writing small applications in Basic, and then Visual Basic. In the late 1980s, I wrote a program that backed up selected directories by copying them, zipping them up, and writing them to floppy disks. In the early 1990s, I wrote macros to integrate PGP and Microsoft Word. I also wrote a reasonably popular dice-rolling program (I was one of the first few thousand people to do so). However, I got my start working in IT by doing web design. My friend Nathan told me about NCSA Mosaic in early 1993, and within two months of the release of Mosaic, I was creating web pages. (It still amazes me that the web took off like it did — I just thought it was a neat toy.)

I eventually migrated from what I call “front end” work (the part of a web site people can see), to “back end” work (the stuff behind the scenes that actually makes a web site work — setting up databases, writing scripts, managing servers, and so on). One reason for this is that I am not a graphic designer — I am simply not an artist. Another reason is that as more people learned how to do “web design”, I could maintain my value by doing something more difficult (difficult for other people; not necessarily difficult for me).

However, the number one reason I moved away from web design and toward back end work is because I had too many web clients who made my job difficult. Not all of them. Perhaps not even most of them. But a lot of them. What do I mean by “difficult”? I mean this.

I had a little bit of free time today, so I whipped up a couple of dynamic affiliate links for DriveThruRPG, a very cool source of gaming PDFs.

The script can be called one of three ways. One way creates an affiliate link to one of the five newest items added to DriveThruRPG, the second creates an affiliate link to one of the five best-selling items, and the third creates a random link to an item on either list. I considered animating the affiliate links, so that a different item would appear every few seconds, but to be frank, animated advertisements annoy me. Actually, I do not care for advertisements at all — I hide them, as a matter of fact.

Does this make me a hypocrite? Maybe. However, these are not just advertisements — they are also news. For that reason, I think they are useful, even to people like me who routinely hide ads.

It’s my intention to add these to this blog and to RPG Library, the gaming community site I maintain, but I do not really expect to see much revenue from these. I mainly created them as a service to the gaming community. For that reason, I added a variable so that other people can replace my affiliate ID with their own, if they would like to use these on their own web site.

So check it out. If you have any questions, let me know, and I will try to answer them.

Update 2010-05-25: I added some error-checking in case the description field in DriveThruRPG’s RSS feed contains some bad tags. It doesn’t actually do anything with the errors, but it keeps the script from failing.

Update 2010-05-25, part 2: I expanded the script to be able to handle any of OneBookShelf’s sites.

Not too long ago, I made the observation that anarchists and mad bombers aren’t new, that spies and subversives are not new. We have laws that deal with these offenses, and we should be using them, rather than looking for opportunities to deprive people (even criminals and terrorists, gasp, shudder!) of their civil rights, or even of their citizenship.

Well, greed and stupidity are not new, either, and there is no finer example of greed and stupidity than the endless battle of the media robber barons (the MPAA, the RIAA, and the rest of the Digital Rights Mafia) against the people who create and enjoy media (you and me, for example). With that long-winded preface out of the way, here are five examples of “file sharing” hysteria which predate the Internet.

HP and Slashgear are having a contest for some computer equipment. So I figured, what the heck, and created this video for the contest.

It irks me that the sound sync is off. It’s 2010, and on a brand new laptop, I can’t even record a silly little video and have the sound in sync?

I am wrapping up my current web project, Perfect Pets. It’s not the most complex or difficult project I have ever worked on, but I think it may be the prettiest. I like this kind of project: Perfect Pets is a small, family owned store, and in my own modest way, I am helping them stay relevant in an era of heartless corporate monoliths and brutal international competition. I wish I could work on projects like this one more often.

It’s 21:00. My cat is asleep on the couch, and my sweetheart is asleep in the bedroom. I would be in there, but I am working on a web project for a pet store. Still, there are much worse ways to spend a Sunday evening.

We saw the movie Kick-Ass today. It was not a perfect movie, but I enjoyed it. I prefer to think it takes place in a universe much closer to the one where Peter Parker lives than the one where I live. It would be a little too sad to think it takes place in my world. I mean, either Hit Girl is a sociopath or she’s been so mentally traumatized by her father that she may as well be. Think Dexter, but a whole lot more enthusiastically blood-thirsty (and acrobatic).

Kick-Ass reminded me of another semi-realistic superhero movie we saw recently. We didn’t see this one at a movie theatre: I bought it for two dollars at the thrift store. I’d never heard of it, and it piqued my interest. The movie is called Special. Check it out. Put it in your Netflix queue. It’s a low budget indie movie, but it’s worth watching. Be warned: the DVD cover slobber makes it sound like a comedy. The phrase “laugh out loud funny” is used prominently. This is not a comedy. There are no jokes. I would go so far as to say that not a single “laugh out loud funny” thing happens in the entire movie. It is not a comedy, and in my opinion, it was not intended to be.