Now a story about the first ammendement, censorship, friendship, and art.

I love Rye Rotgut, but he is a pernicious muse. I mean, of my closest friends, I live in the most conventional style. And I should tell you that the range of unconventional styles that I'm putting this in the context of is really, really wide. In fact, I have this other friend, Daak, who is an artist, and who happens to devote a lot of time to erotic art. I mention this only because it's relevant, believe me. So as I develop the web site, I find myself staring face-to-face with the personal choice of editing (or censuring) the text or even inclusion of links to sites or works by these folks, because I work in a profession where it might reflect badly on me.

Here's the rub, you can call me a spineless wimp, but like many things in life, it really does matter. Hang with me, this is going somewhere. I am a senior manager at an Internet company, and my personal site is linked to from that site. I believe that if my site contains content or links to content that might be judged inappropriate, it would be a liability to my career. The important distinction here, though, is that this is not a reflection of the management of Trellix. I don't know how they would react, or where they weigh in on first ammendment issues. The important point is that because of my immersion in a specific culture, I place these restrictions upon myself. I'm not sure quite what that culture is, except it's probably the pieces of mainstream mom and pop and apple pie 'merikan' culture that most of us could identify with on some level.

So Rye puts one passage in his review of Fortress 2 that I just don't feel I can publish, and I ask him to change it, knowing he's going to be royally pissed off. You should know that Rye is not only a pernicious muse, he lives his life completely on those terms. He understands many things about conventional culture, but does not conform to them. So I don't believe he is used to being censored. I think it troubles him that as much as he hates that aspect, he also hates the fact that he had developed a really colorful (I mean, really, colorful -- that's why I censored it) simile, and the muse could not see how to make it effective without the specific language that I objected to.

So anyway, he's mad, but not angry. I think that's his way of telling me that it really pisses him off that I have to do this to him, and that he has to do it, but he's angry at the situation, and at the culture that makes me feel like I have to do it, and maybe even at me for sucumbing to that, but he's still my friend.

Hopefully it will all blow over by the time we sit down to watch Incubus.

OK. I finally got all the web site stuff in shape. I cleared up all the links, I added a guestbook, movie review form, and counter. Whew. That's finally over for now. Tomorrow is my third wedding anniversary, and I'm not quite sure what to do. The traditional present is leather, so maybe I'll work with that. I have some other stuff in mind, but I really can't talk about it because I have a feeling my wife will be checking out the site tomorrow, and I can't have her seeing my stuff in my blog, can I?

I've mostly got the first revision of the web site up. DellHost was a bit flakey last night. I publish the main site, owczarek.com, and two subdirectory sites (movienight and family). Because I worked on DellHost, and have been involved with Trellix for some time (both at Interliant and at Trellix), I know exactly what was broken. I ftp'd into my site to create the subdirectory for movienight, but I couldn't publish with Trellix. I'm pretty sure it's because the Trellix publish log was down. Trellix actually writes a log file to the DellHost platform with a POST operation before it launches the ftp. Well ftp worked perfectly. It's wierd, because the sites did publish an hour or so later when I tried just for the hell of it. But then when I went to look at the site afterwards, I got mostly through it, and then it went dead. I couldn't ping the IP address either. So it looked like the DellHost shared platform I was on went down. Ah, these are the trials and tribulations of web publishing. It's not that big a deal, except that as I look through the site this morning, the movie night link is broken, which is a drag, 'cause that's really easy to fix. It will just have to wait until tonight.

Can I rant about something really stupid? I mean, I don't particularly like the fact that I watch a fair amount of TV, but the wife's pregnant, and it's the end of the season and so forth. So we sit down to watch the hour-long season-ending Frasier episode, and it turns out to be, actually, two separate half-hour shows. I swear there were more commercials too. But worse than that, the first of the episodes was NOT FUNNY. It was a serious plot. What's up with that? This is a sit-com, which I used to think meant comedy. It's bad enough that this show jumped the shark after Niles and Daphne got together (IMHO), but to actually attempt to produce an episode that addresses serious ethical and moral issues is too much. It kinda makes you wish the screenwriters had gone out on strike.

OK, I'm better now.

Bought a scanner yesterday. That ought to spice up the family section of the web site. It was really easy to install, but the Adobe folks really pissed me off. I mean, they ship this stupid photo album tool with the thing, and it has some basic functions like cropping and color adjustment, and then it has a tab that says "more tools". And you click it, and it basically tells you to go out and buy Adobe Photoshop. Cripes. Thanks A LOT Adobe. Good thing I picked up a copy of the MicroGraphix suite last week, which includes a photo editor that allows me to resize, which is the one tool I really needed but didn't want to buy PhotoShop to get.

Arg. Kara and I watched most of "What Women Want". It was mildly entertaining for awhile, then just plain boring. Even Kara didn't want to finish it, which is really unusual for her, especially since it's kindof a chick-flick.

Hey, my Sunday Globe didn't arrive yesterday morning for the second week in a row. So Kara calls up the service, and they say they'll drop one off in 90 minutes or less. Three hours later, no paper. So I call up (it's around 1 in the afternoon now.) The automated system asks me if I would like to speak to an agent about a missed delivery. I press 1, for yes. Then a recorded message says, "I'm sorry, agents are only available during our normal business hours, which are blah blah blah, and Sunday morning, 7AM to noon." CLICK. It hung up on me!