My new job is very educating. I've learned that the hoi polloi have different size silverware for different meals.

There's the child/dessert size, the luncheon size, the place size, and the dinner size. Then for you hungry people, there are the European and Continental sizes.

There's the oval type soup spoon and the rounder cream soup spoon.

In dishes, they have a rim soup bowl, which looks like a shallow straw hat inverted. For my money, I'll use a cereal bowl.
Actually, there's the pasta/soup bowl for the shape I'm looking for.

During a late hour lull, I did what I often do, and pore through a catalog from one of the china manufacturers (this one was Royal Worcester / Spode), and ran into an item I'd never heard before: "crudite". They didn't have a lineart diagram for it, either. So, being at the PC station, I went to m-w.com and looked the word up. There was an entry for "crudites," which said they were raw vegetables. So I assumed this whatever-it-is was to hold things like celery and carrots for appetizer, as opposed to the pickle plate.

It didn't help much, because I still didn't know how it was shaped. So I asked them about the "CROOdites." Nobody there knew what I was talking about. I kept repeating it and then said I looked it up on the web and it's for raw vegetables. And they started laughing and explained it was pronounced "CROO di TAY"

Well jeez! Nobody told me it was a French word. We all started laughing real hard over my faux pas and I looked in other Spode catalogues and never found what the darned thing looked like. I felt like Curly from the Three Stooges. "Awww! CROOdites! nyuk nyuk nyuk!" and had to suppress some snickers while on the train home.

Spam, Spam, Go Away...

I just saw Nixon's classic moment on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. This Trio channel is cool. I ran into it by accident during my bimonthly "check the channels from 1 to 699" spree. They run the entire one hr of the shows. Today they're running the first ep of their second season. Buzzie's Gladys character is new, Alan Seuss debuts. Yesterday, they had Tiny Tim return to sing Tiptoe Through the Tulips. What a concept. The scary part about him is that near the end of his life, he was serious. Like his debut on their first show, they had Dick Martin standing next to him with a "what the hell is that?" look on his face. Ah ok I understand... they came up with the Gladys character to work off Hugh Hefner, who's on this episode. They just don't make 'em like they used to.

My first website doesn't count. A friend helped me with it, and damned if we didn't use that CompuServe Homepage Wizard to make it. Stupid thing. I went off on my own and bought this little CUE booklet of basic html tags, and I was on my way.

My first true website debuted in August 1996 on some ISP acct space for a chat channel. I thought it was the be all end all of websites. I had made it in Notepad, entirely from the tags I learned, and went to a friend's house in the next state to scan images for it. I was using a 386 by then, with Windows 3.1. I felt tough.

The point of this post of course pertains to my next site. It was on Geocities in the Hollywood section. Then you got a whopping 2mb to work with, and could qualify for a whopping 5mb if you submitted for Featured Site status. Your only obligation to being on Geocities at the time was some banner linked back to them on each page. Some people didn't understand - or just couldn't read - and put the banner/button on the main page only. Back then, getting a spot on free sites usually meant picking any number of button or banner designs, and linking back on each page.

I guess policing it became too much of a nuisance to these establishments. They had automatic things happen like watermarks and poppups. And lest we forget the annoying, space-hogging, perpetual frame. Those last two, as well as autoloading banners, are now the norm.

Geocities early on realized that making art was the point, and messing with aesthetics wasn't always beneficial to attracting visitors to a website -- to see their ads. So they came up with Geoguide. It was originally a java interface, which crashed half the browsers in use at the time. Links to other areas of Geocities, a guestbook, info, etc, garnished a banner ad. You added the code for it into your page script, selected the color which best complemented your site's theme, and no more poppups or watermarks. They were there because of term slacking anyway...

Then came Yahoo (insert thunder here)

Now, I happen to like many things Yahoo has to offer, and at some point, I really liked the changes Yahoo made to their assimilated Geocities collective. Even though I would miss that little graphical path with the homes in each virtual community. Didn't you love the way some of them had cobwebs all over them when a user didn't update his website? I digress... I like Yahoo Messenger, their Email is the best web-based service out there, and I think the companion is real cool.

But the day they terminated Geoguide was the day they defeated a purpose: to allow its users to Make Art. Not only is it some unsightly white blob in the corner of every page, IT OVERLAPS TEXT AND GRAPHICS.

Anyway, it sucks. A lot of people think it sucks. Geocities grew like crazy, became a force to reckon with in the Internet Community. Watch the disgruntled webusers leave Yahoo-Geocities in droves now. I know I will.

I forgot all about going to Radio City Music Hall to see the 40th Anniversary screening of West Side Story! I have these tickets I got from Time-Warner Cable...

I deliberately moved into this apartment because the rules were impressive in the particulars with regard to noise. And, being a co-op, I figured there would be swift action. A year on the board showed me that indeed they did address noise complaints. And once I did have to complain about the neighbors downstairs because their teen went bonkers a few times and had to blast the Backstreet Boys under my bedroom. The matter was resolved quickly enough.

But as of last month, there had been a distinct change. Blasting again, and some TV or something after hrs under the bedroom. (I should point out at this time that I live in a 1 bedroom apartment. Imagine a U-shape, with one end of the U the living room and the other end of the U the bedroom. The door is somewhere along the side if the U which has the living room. Being the room farthest corner from the door, it's a given where everybody sleeps.) It elevated two weeks ago to frequent blasting (ie shaking the floor) and stereo after hours. It's 11:54pm and they JUST started the stereo. Can you believe it? While I am writing...

So I sent letters by fax to the management, but I have a feeling that they won't act until I catch up on maintenance. Long story short: I have till now been doggedly trying to get work during a job recession for months, and I keep trailing by half a month. Fortunately, that will change; I start work tomorrow.

Last week I paid a visit to the tenants below the culprit. Very nice lady subletting from the owner. The tale she told was amazing. Yes, new people from Bolivia moved in about late August - a woman and her brother apparently. They had their AC badly installed and it flooded the floor and ruined the woman's ceiling. She PAID to have it removed. (jeez I think they're throwing a party downstairs. And it's MIDNIGHT!) Then had to have her ceiling done. And they don't have rugs on their floors. And trust me when I say I'm not the only one suffering.