While the global economic meltdown has caused immense problems, it might have dealt a major jump ahead to my plan to have my own island nation:
The Greek state must sell stakes in companies and also assets such as, for example, unpopulated islands,” Frank Schäffler, a member of parliament for the pro-business Free Democrats, told the Bild daily.
Marco Wanderwitz, an MP for Merkel’s own conservative Christian Democrats, said Athens should provide collateral for any money it receives from the European Union to help it out of its debt crisis.
“In this case, certain Greek islands also come into question,” added Wanderwitz.
“We give you cash, you give us Corfu,” the Bild commented.
Greece has around 6,000 islands off its coast, of which only 227 are inhabited, according to the country’s National Tourism Office website.
The Kingdom of Berg, at the corner of the Adriatic and the Med. Of course, we’d have to import snow, but that’s a small price to pay for being my own potentate.
Now I just have to get someone to pay me a ton of money.
The Problem:While daytime temps are well above freezing, clearing off the streets fairly nicely, the morning temps are still a little chilly; the lows are going to be out of the teens, at least, but still plenty below freezing. It’s not too cold to ride – that’s why we have caps and gloves, of course. But it does mean all that melt-off freezes which, along with the big ridges of never-plowed snow left over from earlier in the season, should make the morning ride kinda treacherous.
But afternoons? Hmmmm.
The Solution: I’m pondering throwing my bike on the bus tomorrow morning and teeing up the season a ride home through the unseasonably warm afternoon rush hour.
I’ve been patrolling the bike lanes on my main routes to get to work – Summit and/or Minnehaha Avenues – to see if the ice is anywhere close to receding far enough to make biking to work tenable.
Not yet. And I’ll cop to it; whatever motivation a zero-degree morning doesn’t sap, my cold-weather-averse kids do.
But next week? A couple of days above thirty-five should do to the ice what a couple of “get on the bus on time, see-ya!”‘s should do for the kids.
It’s a strange time of year in Minnesota, weather-wise. There’s enough sun high enough in the sky to warm things up pretty well during the mid-day. But there’s enough snow cover to reflect all that sunlight back into space, so nights still get pretty chilly – and it’s still a bit brisk when we get ready for work in the morning.
So for the next ten days or so we’ll be having highs pushing 30 during the day, but lows in the single-digits to barely over ten.
Which means that in the afternoon, I’m overwhelmed with the desire to start biking – and get bludgeoned in the morning by the idea that it’s probably be a really dumb idea for the time being.
That, and the roads in Saint Paul are atrocious this year. The city got behind the eight ball from the beginning; the Christmas ice/snow storm left most of the side streets as rutted and filling-jarring as andean goat paths.
Anyway. Soon. The goal for the year is to be back on the road by mid-March, to make up for the lousy biking last year, when a family commitment left me driving around the metro every morning all summer. While I did manage to bike a bit from September through November, and even squoze in a ride in early December, I never really got a rhythm going. The other goal? Get somewhere close to my 100-mile-a-week pace from 2008.
As soon as these freakin’ mornings warm up.
(NOTE: While this blog’s policy is to generally leave comments alone, all anti-biking comments will be mutilated for my own febrile amusement. There will be no further warnings).
I”m not going to engage in much navel-gazing here, except to note that I’ve had this blog going far longer than any given job I’ve ever held. I’ve been doing it since before my kids were teenagers.
It’s been hugely fun, of course; it’s given me a social life, it led me back into tak radio (the first big love of my life) and it’s given me something constant, every day, in a life that usually gravitates toward chaos.
The only real change in eight years (besides a sweeping change in “look and feel” almost seven years ago, long overdue for an update) has been adding my friends Johnny Roosh, Bogus Doug and First Ringer over the past year and a half. And that, too, has been fun.
Anyway, thanks for reading all this time. I’m always amazed at how this blog has gone over, over the years. For almost the first year, my daily visitors went from single digits to maybe 40 a day. From there, it’s grown to over 2,000 unique visitors a day. Some someone’s having fun!
Last Saturday was the first-ever Shot In The Dark “Staff Meeting”. This blog’s staff – which has doubled in the past year to four – met at “Hell’s Kitchen” in Minneapolis (the nearly-liquid scrambled eggs take some getting used to, but the wild-rice hash browns are proof God loves us).
There was no agenda, nobody took minutes, and nothing was decided. But it was fun getting the whole crew together for, as far as I can recall, the first time ever.
Background: In 1992, I was working a temp job in downtown Minneapolis. I had two kids, with another one on the way fairly shortly. I was making $6.50 an hour. I can’t complain, of course; it beat having nothing, and I got it through the good graces of a friend of mine whom I’m sure I never thanked nearly enough; I re-learned how to use computers (I’d never worked with a PC before), which enabled me to get my first technical writing jobs…
…the next year.
But it was still 1992. And things were tight.
Anyway – downstairs from the temp job, a new bar/restaurant opened. And I walked by it every day on the way to/from the bus. And the smell coming from the place was fantastic; I fantasized about the hamburgers the place must have had for months. Years, really; to me, that smell reminded me of hope for years; to this day, I associate the smell of frying hamburger on the street with being broke, stressed out and hopeful.
And back in 1992 I told myself; someday, when I have enough money, I’m going to splurge on a burger and a beer for lunch at that very downtown Minneapolis joint.
And while things got better – I got my first good job as a technical writer in 1993 – I somehow neglected that pledge. For 17 years.
But recently, on a well-deserved day off, while meandering around downtown Minneapolis, I saw the place – it’s still there – and thought “I really should do this”.
So I walked in, and ordered a Summit and a burger.
It’s not like I’m going to completely stop the proceedings like an MPR pledge drive…
But every April, I usually pass the hat. I figured that tax day was an inauspicious time to do this, so I figured I’d jump the gun a tad this year.
Now, as everyone knows, I’d do this for free; I don’t even want to calculate the hourly rate of return over the past eight years, between the rare blog-ads check and the occasional raid on the tip jar. And that’s fine – the rewards from blogging are never financial.
But as always, I much appreciate any spare electronic change that might drop through the cracks.
This is a closed-circuit message for the readers of this site who graduated from Jamestown (ND) High School in 1981. The rest of you can rejoin this blog with the next post. Thanks.
’81 people – the artist formerly known as Ruth Newman is starting work on the 30 year reunion.
If you’re a classmate, there’s a Facebook group, and/or an email address if you’d prefer. I won’t post ’em here, but send me an email at “feedbackinthedark” which is at Yahoo dot com, and I’ll get you the info.
In it, all of the smart, ethical, enlightened, mannered, intelligent people of the world confronted all of the dumb, depraved, rude, stupid, bigoted idiots…
I have a final installment of “Unintended Consequences, Predictable Responses” – my response to the Strib’s piece on charter school bond financing. I’d originally plotted it to run today, but between family stuff, work, and being sick yesterday, I never got to finish it.
The third, and possibly a fourth, installment should run next week.
You know who you are. You’re a twentysomething hYpStR. You ride one of those trendy retro three-speed bikes with the cargo racks, in which you’d stuffed your backpack, some books, and (I have no doubt) your IPhone.
You were riding up Wabasha last night.
Now, I’m sympathetic; I usually ride up Wabasha at the end of the day, when I’m biking home. It’s that existential near-death experience that kicks off my ride home by making me appreciate life so much more.
But there’s a difference, here. I ride on the street.
I first saw you as I was walking up the sidewalk to the bus stop, as the cold was settling in. I heard a voice behind me, curtly demanding “excuse me”. I turned around; you were whisking past someone walking on the sidewalk behind me. You sailed past me, crowding me toward the wall just a little bit. You pedalled up the sidewalk, brushing a lady who was carrying a baby, as you tried to thread the needle between people getting on the 3 bus. You seemed – by your speed, as well as your “arrogant enough to have been a Loring Cafe waiter during their heyday” – to think it was our job to get out of your way.
Just saying; next time you try that, make sure Dadders is still paying your dental insurance.
With yesterday’s “blizzard”, and today’s relative chill, I think it’s time to declare 2009 biking season closed. (*)
As I mentioned earlier, it was a rough year for biking; much of my summer got eaten up with family business that kept me off the road for most of July and August. Biking in the fall, at least for me, takes a certain amount of momentum – and I had none.
Still, I managed to bike through much of September, a good chunk of October, a bit of November, and I even squeezed in one rare, chilly December ride.
And it was a good year in political metabiking, too; the case the biking is more conservative than not biking was proven pretty conclusively.
But I think I’m gonna call it for the year. But I’ll be shooting for a March start date in 2010.
See you then!
(*) And yes, I know people are still on the road. That’s hardcore. More power to ’em, but it’s not for me.
If you’ve been reading this blog any length of time, you’ll know that I tend to bite off…well, not “more than I can chew”, but occasionally I’ll tackle some big, involved projects. My “Losing My State Religion” series – on my journey from public school supporter to fierce critic – was nine parts; my “What The Hell Is Wrong With The MNGOP” and “What The Hell Do We Do About The MNGOP” series are almost a dozen parts between ’em. And the big daddy of ’em all, “Twenty Years Ago Today“, is somewhere north of 120 episodes (and four years plus) long.
What makes it interesting is that I do pretty much all of the writing for this blog between 5:30 and 7AM, every morning, along with the odd scraps of time when things settle down in the evening or when there’s nothing going on on the weekend. If I’m trying to do any reporting – calling sources, interviewing people – I squeeze that into breaks during my day job. Until all those Scaifenet rumors come true, and some conservative sugardaddy whisks this blog away to full-time gig status, them’s the breaks.
Anyway – my megalomania has led me into a situation where I’ve got two of those series – “De Godenfar – The Norwegian Mob in America” and “Unintended Consequences, Predictable Responses” – going simultaneously. Both of ’em take some work – “Investigative Fiction” and reporting are different, but neither of ’em grows on trees, time-wise.
And I promised new installments of both today. And it just ain’t gonna happen.
So here’s the schedule for the rest of the week:
“Unintended Consequences, Predictable Responses” – my series taking apart the Strib’s latest smear job on charter schools – will continue today, Wednesday and Friday.
“De Godenfar – The Norwegian Mob in America” – will continue Tuesday, Thursday, and on into next week.
My urge to keep everyone informed and to manage expectations is exceeded only by my knowledge that nobody actuall gives a crap. But while you can take a guy out of a “producer” job, you can’t take the producer out of the guy.
A program director at a radio station I used to work at let me in on the great secret of music radio – which let me in on an even greater secret of psychology.
People tend to be most attached to whatever music they were listening to when they were going through or immediately after puberty. Chalk it up to hormones; the same motivation that makes every little slight or setback into a dramatic battle royale also gives music – the most emotionally-direct of the arts – a special place in most peoples’ perceptions. It’s why for any given generation, “Oldies” music tends to focus on the music that was current when the listener was between 12 and 21 years old; the part of their life when lifelong emotional buttons get put in place, ready for the pushing.
And if you do the math, it was about thirty years ago that a slew of music came out that, thirty years later, fits that bill for yours truly. I think there’s a fair case to be made that each of them is an extraordinary record. A few of the records are on the list because they are extraordinary, whether I cared for them much at the time or not. But most of them are there because they stuck a flag in my psyche thirty years ago, and I can still see why today.
It was thirty years ago today that Tom Petty’s Damn The Torpedoes was released.
We’ll come back to that.
———-
It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there exactly what music was like in the late seventies. There was great music, to be sure; and a lot of the music I turned my nose up at at the time, I’ve softened on over the years; Fleetwood Mac doesn’t bore me as stiff as it used to; bits and pieces of the treacly corporate pop of the era have grown on me since I was a pissed-off teenager. And the bits and pieces of pop genius that leaked back out to me after years of sleeping on ’em have occasionally made me shake my head and wonder what I was thinking.
But still, with all that, the mainstream in 1979 was a dismal place. Linda Ronstadt was the mainstream. Billy Joel was edgy stuff. A generation of nebbishy California singer-songwriters – Robert John, Sammy John, Roger Voudouris, Alan O’Day, Rupert Holmes and a slew of other pre-MTV fodder – sold millions upon millions.
But most of it was dreary stuff; formulaic, mechanical pop treacle. “Rock is dead”, sang The Who, and it kinda showed; and while rock may have lived on via the dinosaurian touring machines that dominated the industry of the day, rock and roll – the danceable, three-minute song you could dance to or sing along with or pump your fist to – was on the ropes.
Oh, sure – there was Springsteen – who had roared back from three years’ legal limbo the previous year with Darkness on the Edge of Town, the second installment in “The Holy Trinity” that started with Born to Run and would end with The River in 1980 – but he didn’t exactly light up the Top 40 singles charts. Bob Seger was hitting on all cylinders – Night Moves was a huge smash as an album and as a single, but Seger was a palpable outlier.
And then, thirty years ago today, came Damn the Torpedoes.
I hadn’t personally had much of an opinion of Tom Petty; I only knew of him through a lukewarm review of his second album, You’re Gonna Get It, a sophomore slump that shamed many artists’ debuts.
So, truth be told, the Halloween release date passed without my noticing.
But a little less than two weeks after the album’s release, on November 10, 1979, the band appeared on Saturday Night Live. Buck Henry hosted that night, and he introduced “Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers!”, and I watched as a scruffy, Strat-slinging Petty counted Stan Lynch into the opening drum kick to “Refugee”. by four counts into the song, as Ben Tench’s howling Hammond B3 led the band through a dark, edgy reading of the soon-to-be classic, I muttered to myself “Damn. I love this”. In as many words. Mike Campbell played the interlacing lead guitar parts like God and Chuck Berry and Keith Richard had created them to be played; sparely, economically, not a wasted note or a dropped impact. And Petty bit off every word, every teeth-clenched yelp, like it was now or never.
Or that’s how I remembered it.
Via the miracle of YouTube, I actually found that performance; it’s the first time I’ve seen it since that chilly night thirty years ago:
(NBC Universal, curses opon them, blocked the video)
(Update 2 – someone else posted it)
Youtube has the potential to deflate an awful lot of adolescent memories; things that seemed so amazing back then often ring a little duller today.
Not this one. Oh, Petty sounds a little hoarse; he has a little trouble hitting the high notes. The band drops a note or two here and there. The drums are badly miked; it sounds like Stan Lynch is playing on empty Cap’n Crunch boxes. I watched it, and thought “this ran into me like a runaway supertanker thirty years ago”.
But I can see why I reacted the way I did. I still do – thirty years and a whole lot of music and not a little jading later. It was raw – like one of the garage bands I was playing in – yet it sounded polished. Beyond that? It had an emotional “snap” to it that, up to then, I just didn’t year on the radio.
The next morning, between Sunday School and church, I took $7 from my paycheck at the station, ran over to the record section at White Drug and grabbed the only copy in stock off the rack. And four or five of us – Mike Aylmer and Matt Anderson and Keri Kleingartner, I think – sat in one of the classrooms and skipped church and listened to the whole thing on a cheap turntable, all the way through.
And it blew me away – but I didn’t know why until maybe ten years ago.
For many Americans educated in the public school system, Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers were the first real explanations of why Americans fought in World War II, and what they did. And it served that purpose because they were among the first vehicles to make history accessible to people.
Damn the Torpedoes was similar. It was a 37 minute and 36 second trip through the best of American rock and roll since the Beatles had come and gone, without filtering it through all the baggage of the concept of the Rock Star.
Refugee sounded like The Band with the twang beaten out and the grit pounded in. “Here Comes My Girl” was the Byrds via the bayou. “Louisiana Rain” sounded like an outtake from Exile on Main Street, replacing Mick Jagger’s verbal posturing with Petty’s laconic backwater drawl. “Don’t Do Me Like That“, with its pulsing piano/organ attack, and “You Tell Me” with its dark, slinky refrain, both sounded like Stax/Volt songs that had gotten lost on a Gainesville backroad on a muggy night, wandered into a redneck roadhouse, grabbed a guitar and a bottleneck slide and a Budweiser, and stayed for the after-hours party. (The simile is even better than I thought when I first wrote that last passage; Stax’ house bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn sat in on “You Tell Me”. Can I call ’em or what?)
As to “Shadow of a Doubt (A Complex Kid)”, “Century City”,and “What Are You Doin’ in My Life?” – well, they’re all Petty; little bits of every nook and cranny in the history of rock and roll, from Chuck Berry through the Stones, jumbled into Petty’s own supercharged pop-via-Memphis sensibility. And unlike just about every other “album” of the era, there was not one second of “filler”.
The highlight, of course, was Even the Losers – long since my favorite song on the album, and in fact one of my favorite songs ever.
Is it possible that there was an American teenage boy of that era that couldn’t not only relate to the song, but know what it was about without needing to know the lyrics?
Well, it was nearly all summer we sat on your roof.
Yeah, we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon.
And I’d show you stars you never could see.
Baby, it couldn’t have been that easy to forget about me.
Damn. That was me. Well, if I smoked. And had a girlfriend. One that’d let me take her up on the roof. Otherwise, just like that. Someday.
Baby, time means nothing, anything seemed real.
Yeah, you could kiss like fire and you made me feel
Like every word you said was meant to be.
No, it couldn’t have been that easy to forget about me.
Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes.
Even the losers keep a little bit of pride.
They get lucky sometimes.
And amid Ben Tench’s howling B3 and Stan Lynch’s muscular, aggressive beat and Petty’s hard-chewed delivery, you could only pray to yourself “good Lord, yes – maybe we will get lucky sometime”.
It all led up to the bridge; Tench drops the Hammond to a lower register, and Lynch switches to the highhat:
Two cars parked on the overpass,
Rocks hit the water like broken glass.
I should have known right then it was too good to last.
God, it’s such a drag when you’re livin’ in the past.
It’s the kind of passage Springsteen wrote all the time. But he wrote it through the lens of his crew of characters; Zero and Blind Terry, Mary with the waving dress, Crazy Janey and the Mission Man, Puerto Rican Jane, the visionaries in the parking lot underneath the Exxon sign – the whole cast of wild-eyed misfits with their ’69 Novas and their boardwalks. And damn, it was good.
Seger? Yeah, him too; “I woke last night to the sound of thunder/how far off, I sat and wondered. Started humming a song from 1962…”. Of course, I was born with two weeks left in 1962. It wasn’t about me. It was about a guy, Seger, who wrote a lot of great music, and it’s only resonated more as I’ve gotten older.
But Tom Petty’s secret? He wrote that bridge about Mitch Berg, age 16, of Jamestown North Dakota.
And about you, fella, whoever you are.
And as I sat in that church classroom on November 11, 1979, as the chill fell outside and the congregation sang in the background, I thought it was a pretty neat trick.
For the past couple of years, from whenever the snow’s been off the roads until I just can’t manage it anymore, I’ve been biking to work.
Or trying to.
2007 was a good year. After about 15 years of virtually no biking at all, I commuted pretty much daily from June through August. And I did it without dying of a heart attack.
2008 was even better. I managed to bike pretty much daily, from late April ’til late September. It was a hard fall, and getting the kids to school ate up a lot of time and effort, but it was a great season, all in all.
This year? Enh. I spent most of the summer dealing with a family situation every morning, which precluded most biking from mid-June until September. And between the cold, hard fall and the usual school schedule, it’s precluded a lot of biking; I’ve managed a couple of days on good weeks, less on others.
But this week, with temps up in the high fifties and brisk but temperate mornings? Yesterday felt good out on the road.
Yeah, I’m fixing to send the season off with a bang. Might even bike to the station on Saturday, with any luck.
This post is an expansion of a comment in a thread way down below. Partly because my monkeying with my code this morning put a crimp in my morning blogging schedule. Partly because the subject deserves it.
I oppose the death penalty, not because I break with most conservatives on the issue, but because I am a conservative.
Stay with me on this one.
Conservatism is about upholding time-honored truths.
One of those truths is that the individual – one of the “Free Association of Equals” that our society is supposed to be, in the conservative view of things – is of supreme importance, and should be protected from the excesses of government. It’s why we conservative natter on about things like the Tenth Amendment – because we uphold the worth of the individual; there are some things that, to protect the individual, the government should just stay out of.
This directly contradicts the notion that individuals are “eggs” to be broken in the interest of the state’s convenience to make a social “omelet”. Frequent liberal commenter “RickDFL”’s left a remark in the comment section yesterday, that actually sent me looking for a remark about eggs and omelets that I coulda sworn Lenin or Stalin or Mao or Hitler made. No dice – the closest I got was Stalin’s “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic” – but Rick (I puke in my mouth a little bit in writing this) is right; it’s something one of them would say.
Conservatives do believe that the pursuit of good requires sacrifice; the Americans who died at Omaha Beach and Gettysburg and Chosin Reservoir were also of incalculable value, and they did nothing to deserve what happened except serving their country, and their loss was a tragedy for all of us. But they died (most of us believe) for a greater good, in a time and a place and for a cause for which there was no alternative, and which helped bring immense good as a result.
Killing an innocent person to “deter” the guilty? It brings no good (the guilty party goes free forever!) (I mean, what DA is going to say “oops – killed the wrong guy the first time! Let’s try this again!”), there is an alternative, and, lest we forget, it kills an individual who did no wrong – which is exactly who this society is supposed to protect.
And it echoes Andrea Dworkin (or Catherine McKinnon? Jeff Fecke? I get confused) who said it’d be “good” if men got falsely imprisoned for rape, to make all the real rapists a little more afraid. It’s an idea straight out of the worst of the French Revolution (which had no problem executing the innocent “pour l’encourager les autres“), carried on via Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot.
Hypothetically, if the system could be “perfected”, would I support it? Sure. But that’s another tenet of conservatism; mankind can never be perfected; the hypothetical is pointless. And to a conservative, protecting people from the problems that human imperfection brings to government drives what government is supposed to do – including impelling government to back out of big parts of our society.
So since…
Mankind – including prosecutors and the police – can never be perfected, and…
these imperfections kill the innocent, and…
killing the innocent is immeasurably evil, and…
since a foolproof alternative exists that surely and swiftly punishes the guilty (remember – life in supermax without parole begins at sentencing; death takes an average of 12 years) while protecting the innocent, and…
protecting the innocent is one of society’s supreme goods, then…
…abolishing the death penalty is supremely conservative.
To me, the logic of my stance depends on the five interconnected points above – all drawn from orthodox conservative beliefs to a finely-polished “t”. If you want to disagree, by all means do it in the comment section. But if you can’t successfully attack that five-point chain of logic, I’m not sure you’ll get a lot of traction with me.
An attempt to update the site display code ended pretty disastrously last night. We backed up the whole site – which brought back our old template.
(Shrugs).
Part of the problem is that I haven’t updated WordPress (the content manager, the program that does all the display-fu for the blog) since I installed it after the, um, 2006 elections. Since there’ve been, er, three or four major releases since then, and there’s been no maintenance on this particular version in well over a year, it’s high time I updated things.
Which usually means things are going to break.
But if it’s raining this weekend, I’ll be updating the code, and then getting to work on perhaps updating the site’s “look and feel” for the first time since, ahem, 2003.
Someone – frequent commenter BillC, if memory serves – sent this around on Facebook a while ago.
The idea? Pick an artist or band, and then answer the questions using nothing but song titles from their discography. The source album is included in italics (I add this mainly because if I don’t, one of the entries is going to look kinda weird…)
I chose…:
Pick Your Artist: The Who
Are you male or female? “I’m A Boy” [Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy]
Describe yourself: “The Punk meets the Godfather” [Quadrophenia]
How do you feel about yourself? “I Can See For Miles” [Who Sell Out]
Describe where you currently live: “Amenia, City In The Sky” [Who Sell Out]
If you could go anywhere, where would you go? “Tommy’s Holiday Camp” [Tommy]
Your best friend is: “Baba O’Riley” [Who’s Next]
Your favorite color is: “Red, Blue and Grey” [Who by Numbers]
You know that: “The Music Must Change” (Who Are You)
What’s the weather like: “Heat Wave” (yes, it’s a cover of Martha and the Vandellas, from A Quick One)
If your life was a tv show, what would it be called?: “Won’t Get Fooled Again” [Who’s Next]
What is life to you? “Faith In Something Bigger” [Odds ‘n Sods]
What is the best advice you have to give? “Bargain” [Who’s Next][used as a verb in the imperative, naturally]
If you could change your name, what would it be? “Doctor Jimmy and[/or] Mister Jim” [Quadrophenia]
Your favorite food is: “Heinz Baked Beans” [The Who Sell Out, and yes, I know, it’s not technically a song – it’s one of the fake ads from the album, which was in its entirety a face radio broadcast. But the game just says titles, not “songs”. I think]
Well, that was fifteen minutes I don’t have to figure out how to occupy…
Find a new design template for the blog. Check. Looks cool so far, fits my basic design requirements (I’m a usability guy), shouldn’t tax my limited CSS knowledge too badly and yet can be customized fairly easily.
Get my server password figured out so I can actually get onto my server to do the fix. Check. I’ve gotten to be on a first-name basis with tech support at my hosting provider, so that helps.
Get all the various collaterals I need – images, ads, etc – together in once place to get the job done – Incomplete. But that’s OK. It’s an iterative project, as we say in the IT business. However, unlike most “iterative projects”, it’ll get done…
Find four or five hours of free time to get the job done – Not Started. Epic fail there.
Soon, though. Very soon. It’s an “iterative project”, as we say in the IT racket.
Unlike most “iterative projects”, it’ll actually get done.
