Michael R. Barrick

There was more to this weekend that just throwing my back out. There were moments of sublime absurdity, like a girl in the group of people I was chatting with outside the club at the "7 Deadly Sins" party going to pitch a can of Red Bull over her shoulder and over the construction hoarding behind her and not succeeding. The can hit the wood just shy of the top and ricocheted back to bounce off the top of the top-hat of my greed costume. Also in the realm of the sublimely absurd was being approached by someone in the film industry about making some fake money for a TV show because they were impressed with the quality of the fake money on my costume. I'm waiting to hear back about the price I quoted, which may be more than they were expecting, but designing a realistic series of fake banknotes is going to be a fair bit of work (albeit bizarrely fun). Just being asked is fun enough considering the only reason I made my own fake money was I didn't want to use money that looked American like most play money does.

And in other weird news, I was contacted this weekend by a technology columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald doing an article on steampunk. He asked me about my keyboard mod and requested some good high-res photos. I'm not sure when the article is going to run, but hey, I'm getting press in Australia!

Experienced used-car shoppers know to look for rusty areas repaired with Bondo and painted over. The car may look great but is really rotten and rusting to pieces. I've seen unscrupulous sellers do things like mix iron filings into the Bondo to subvert buyers checking with a magnet. I've even seen a rust hole patched with an ingeniously superficial application of duct-tape, Bondo and paint.

I am very glad my new job starts tomorrow, because the freelance web work I am doing has descended to the web equivalent of painting over duct-tape and Bondo. Beyond the shiny new paint, the vehicles are spectacularly decrepit. I wish I could say this is a unique problem with a particular client, but it is, in fact, epidemic and the unifying theme of just about all the work I have done for the past three years. 

I'm done with clients who point to $50,000 websites and say "I want that, but I only have $500." You don't get a brand new car for $500. For $500 you get duct-tape and Bondo. I'm done with duct-tape and Bondo.

This Thursday and Friday I will be on the panel interviewing for the person who will take up the day-to-day monkey work for the civic websites and free me up to focus exclusively on back-end development and architecture with a three-day week.

In turn the three-day week is going to free me up to spend the other four days a week working on my own projects. I've had some ideas to generate some revenue from Gothic BC that don't involve slathering the site with ads or moving to subscription-only services - two things I long ago decided I was not going to do. I still have plans for a store that I'd like to see happen in early 2009. At the same time I'll be producing more fine art and getting it shown, which of course involves a whole raft of individual projects. I'm also considering the possibility of a couple of more ambitious projects that would take a decade or two to pull off.

This next year is going to be interesting.

I signed my official letter accepting my new position at work and my cards are on order. It's mundane, but it is a foundation. After having the rug pulled out from under me once the hostile take-over started two years ago, and subsequently not even certain I was going to stay in the country, this represents a paradigm shift. I haven't even been enthusiastic my houseplants because of the possibility of having to chuck them all, let alone putting my weight behind substantial projects.

That is changed now. Now I have the inclination to put my hooks into bigger projects. I have some interesting things up my sleeve.

It occurred to me today that in the six months I have been here, in addition to the valuable services I provide, I have quantifiably saved my employer more money than the gross total of my salary in the same period.

SharePoint gives me a headache. This product is a dog's breakfast. There are hundreds of "templates" that aren't really templates because they are largely similar and the bits that could be templated because they do exactly the same damn thing aren't, and if you want to make a change you can't just do a search and replace because they are ever so subtly different even though they are functionally identical. One "template" will have a table cell <td valign="top">, another will have <td valign=top>, and another will have just <td>. Gah! Even if you want to just alter the cascading style sheet to make "site wide" design changes, you are fucked, because in one template a table row will have one class, in another the a differently named class in the individual cells does the same job, and in yet another there are div tags doing the same damn thing under a different class name and the damn blocks are nested in a way that the styles conflict with each other. I don't think there is a single box element in the whole damn application that doesn't get set and reset at least three times before being rendered. And since the are multiple sloppy inheritances per object and that number of inheritances isn't strictly accounted for in the CSS specification (which wouldn't matter anyway since there isn't once single browser out there that strictly follows the specification even for relatively simple uses of CSS) cross-browser functionality is an utter disaster. Multiply that by 1,497 "templates".

And then there are the fun little "black-box" bits that Microsoft doesn't give you control over, like the main navigation buttons that nest inside one of these dog's breakfast tables. You have a row in a table that is already impossible to deal with site wide thanks to the hodge-podge of HTML in varying states of compliance and the four different classes applying to each of eight different nested box elements and inside that are nested these fun little black-box elements that render a single link inside a nine-cell table, each cell and row with a different class name, an ID tag that doesn't match, and — best of all — aren't consistent from link to link.

I swear to God, there are 13-year old girls on Xanga that do better web coding.

In the immortal words of Dilbert, this is why technology decisions should be left to those that know their mass from a black hole.