dieter

I remember when I first got into web design.  I and somewhere around 5 billion other wannabe new media moguls shut off Aldus PageMaker for the last time, opened HTML for Dummies, and set out to change the world while at the same time secretly making lists of who we'd tell to kiss our asses once the bucks started rolling in.

And our web pages all looked like they were designed in PageMaker.  Baroque tables within tables.  Spacer .gifs.  What are standards?  Great evils were committed in the attempt to make Netscape Navigator behave like a sheet of paper, and I'm sure I'll be smoking a turd in hell to pay off my karmic debts.

We did get smarter, though.  As we learned to hate Internet Explorer, we also realized how important things like standards and accessibility were (and are), and began to realize that there's nothing wrong with embracing a new medium.  There are things you can do on the web that you can't do in a magazine, and we began to exploit them. 

Fresh Styles for Web Designers kicked my ass, incidentally. 

As we began to see the value, and even beauty, of this unique new playground, I think we started to regard our print-centric brethren with the same pity and contempt that they have for folks who use glue and x-acto knives to do layout.  After all, how much sense does it REALLY make to constrain one medium by another, increasingly different one?

So why the hell am I spending my day cutting up a PhotoShop file that some gradient loving, rounded corner humping, gluestick smelling designer sent me?  Somebody's getting kicked in the junk.

When I was in college, the convention was that if the instructor was ten minutes late for a class, we could take off without penalty.  I can't tell you how many times I looked at a classroom clock and tried my best to work a reverse-Hiro to make the time pass.  But we outgrow these things.

On the other hand, right now I'm on-hold for a conference call.  It's been about nine minutes.  I'm getting excited.

You're going to have more luck finding me at http://dieter.tumblr.com/ -- I'll keep posting to vox from time to time, but tumblr is the new hotness.

That is all.

When my Nine-Year-Old was Seven, he begged and pleaded for a pair of Heelys, and Santa caved in and dropped off a pair.  This was against my better judgment --I'm a former extreme junkie with more broken bones and injuries than an entire season of Jackass-- but what could I do?

After all, I own a pair.

The day after Christmas we all went out to the park; the son, the daughter, and their father in Heelys, and the mother in shoes not designed to cause injury.  I hadn't been on mine in a while, but I managed to pull off a hectic move or two.  The daughter, ever careful and conservative, made slow and steady progress down the trail.

The son busted his ass.

Once was all it took.  The shoes came off, the tears came down, and it was all over.  We all knew there was a strong chance that Santa would need to look for his receipt.  But the boy has always been like that.  Here's a guy who expects, genuinely KNOWS, that things are going to go well the first time he tries them.  And I'll be damned if that doesn't pay off Nine times out of Ten.  He leads a charmed life, and tends to go from victory to victory without questioning it.  But when he does fail, it's always a fight to get him to give it another shot.

Some folks might say good parenting would be for me to prepare my son for disappointment so that he can be ready for the real world or what-have-you.  I can't bring myself to do it.  It wouldn't work anyway, but I can't do it because I refuse to harsh his joyful vibe.  And besides, I happen to believe that you tend to receive what you make yourself ready for.  This is bourne out by the fact that things tend to work out for him.  I bet you know somebody like that, too.  Would you rather be right or happy?  The truth is that maybe you can be both.

So I try not to discourage him.  I DO try and may sure that I'm there on those rare occasions when he does fall.  I hope I'm always ready with band-aids and encouragement to learn, get up, and try again.  That's what we did with the Heelys.  It took a few days, but he went back out there.  And he sucked, but slightly less than before.

And then he didn't.  As if by magic, or perhaps by force of will, he did not fall.  And hasn't since, to my knowledge.  Now we can't get the damned things off of him.  Not that I'm trying very hard.

I wish I could be more like that.

I'm about a month into a new job.  It's a GREAT job.  Really smart people, really interesting technology, the cause is a good one, and I genuinely like everyone involved.  Any one of those things is a rarity; getting all four is like hitting the lottery.  But it's been a hell of a year for me.  In general, things are quite good, but there have been some amazing challenges and so many situations where there was no solid ground that I'm left pretty frazzled.  Honestly, my self-esteem is at an all-time low, and it takes almost nothing to freak me out.  There are a lot of reasons why, but basically I'm in a situation where I'm so scared of messing up that my stress is keeping me from making good decisions.  So I mess up a lot.

So guess what happened today?

I messed up.  On a stupendous scale.  It's really bad.

It's not entirely my fault, I suppose -- the problem was caused by something that I had nothing to do with, and nobody else was around when things blew up.  But instead of letting the system fail and calling for help, I kept bringing it back to life.  I'll spare you the details, but in essence every time I brought it back something VERY bad happened for our clients and their users.  It was a dumbass newbie mistake, and I should've known better.  I panicked, and my desire to NOT screw up got the better of me.  And this comes at the end of a long month.  I've really been struggling to prove myself, and while nothing really bad has happened before today, I don't think I've done anything particularly remarkable. 

This is a new feeling for me; in past situations I've not had much of a problem finding a niche for myself.  I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I'm often the most passionate, and I always work as hard as I can.  It tends to pay off.  But this time, for some reason, it's been very tricky.  Maybe it's because this job actually means something to me.  Maybe the lack of solid ground under my feet, combined with the stress I'm under, the fact that this year has kicked my ass, that I have a family to support, and so on is messing me up.  Maybe I'm finally genuinely challenged by something and it's knocked me for a loop.  Or maybe I've just bitten off more than I can chew.

But right now I'm ready to hang it up and go make lattes at Starbucks.  I'm completely embarassed, freaked out, sad, angry, you name it.  I finally understand how my son felt.  I've been telling myself that MY problems are somehow more important because of the money, my dependents, my age, and so on, but the truth is there's no way his problem felt less real to him than mine does to me.  And, just as with his problem, the only thing for it is to get off my ass and try again.  I know that intellectually, but right now the trick is to get myself there emotionally.  The truth is that it's not the end of the world, even though it feels like it right now.

I may be out of a job.  I don't know yet.  I may get another chance.  But either way, the only thing I can do is get my act together.  Maybe this had to happen.  I've been so freaked out for so long about problems that didn't really come up.  Maybe I needed to experience a genuine meltdown in order to get over it.  I don't know.  This is hard stuff.

But one way or another, this job or a different one, I'll try harder to get over myself.  I know I can do this.  It's all good.

So I ditched my farty Sidekick, and decided not to get an iPhone because of the ball of evil shenanigans that is AT&T. Instead, I decided to go with a low-end phone (a Samsung Stripe, if you must know), spring for an unlimited messaging plan, and see how far I could get.

Pretty far, as it turns out. More to come soon. In the meantime, dig the following:

-Google SMS
-Jott
-GrandCentral
-twitter
-AIM Moblie

And then some. Stay tuned.

• Leopard
• iPod Touch
• Sonic Screwdriver
• TextMate
• Settlers of Cataan
• RAM
  
• iTunes gift certificates
• Apple Store gift certificates
• a bad-ass compact tool set (such as this or that)
  
• a scanner and a shredder (real men go paperless)
• please Jebus no more zany novelty t-shirts
  

What is the best beer on planet Earth? 
Submitted by Remmy Van Hornie.

Negra Modelo may be one of the finest achievements of human civilization.