The Chris Casey Experience

This is becoming something of a habit. I suppose that’s the point of blogging but it seems to have taken about 12 years to sink in.

I ran into an old high school friend today. He recognized me first, which is always embarassing. The Nintendo Brain Training commercials are true, every last one of them.

So we had lunch and caught up and to be honest we’re boring adults now. He has two kids and a support desk job and a Rush addiction (the band not the idiot). I discussed being a webmaster and how crazy my job is. In the end we agreed to pretend to think about calling each other in the indeterminate future.

So hey aren’t you glad I’m blogging about all this? I lived it and you get to read about it. Whoo-freakin’-pee.

I seem to be getting good with this Blackberry typing thing, but having unlimited Internet access and an easy phone keyboard seems to be messing with my head. For instance, I picked up a Twitter account with the intention of giving it a shot, but seriously, who gives half a rat’s buttocks what I do all day?

This is the allure of the Interblogospheroweb, I suppose. Suddenly we’re all celebrities. Well, forget it, I reject the notion of instant fame just because I own a URL and know how to type with my thumbs on a Chiclet keyboard. Do you hear me, Internet? I’m dull and ordinary and nothing you can do will change that!

If you feel the same as I do, please give generously to my Paypal tip jar so I may continue blogging about my unique philosophy of life. Being average is a lot harder than it looks, you know.

Hey campers! Welcome to a new year. Another year older and deeper in debt. Oh Lawd don’t call me etc.

But it’s not all plodding in a creeping pace from day to day, measuring out my life in coffeespoons. I have … drumroll please … wait for it … a new phone.

Okay so who cares whatever. But this thing is pretty neato. My wife and I both got Blackberries, so I have an actual keyboard to thumblog with or whatever you kids are calling it nowadays. It’s almost as fast as typing and my errors are few, surprising since I have such blunt thumbs. A few more weeks and I think I’ll be zipping along at near keyboard speeds. Internet beware.

Whee-hee! Now apparently spammers are sending mass emails spoofing my URL as the return address. There’s also been a big upswing in the spam I’m receiving. Just today, from midnight to about 11 a.m. here, I’ve gotten over 400 spam mails. Luckily the Exchange spam filter picks up most of it, and there’s a spam filter on my server too. Still, that’s some pretty impressive idiocy at work there.

I dunno if this is related at all to my previous post. I wouldn’t put it past some pimply-faced pocket surfer to get a wild hair and screw around with some crotchety old bald guy for no good reason. Or maybe it’s just the luck of the draw. Or maybe every site on the Internet has this same problem. Who cares, it’s fun!

So anyway, I’m off to go get some “miracle meds for my penis” because apparently “she’s bored in bed.” It’s about damn time I finally “won in the bedroom.” I never win anything. But more importantly I need to make “MEGADICK a reality.” I mean c’mon. MEGADICK! :rock:

I just deleted over 50 spam messages which were left as comments for my little blog here. FIFTY! While I’m flattered to think that they believe anyone actually reads this tripe, it’s alarming on a whole nother level. These right here are prime examples of people who JUST DON’T GET IT, and yet they try, oh so hard it just makes their tiny little hearts go pitter patter, to get their little V!@GRA and BI66ER PEN15 messages out to the world at large.

 Actually, malformed/misspelled titles like that are old hat. Now spam tries to sneak under the radar like a mysterious message from the Orient. “Marcia: Responding to your query,” the title goes, and people immediately begin to wonder: What query? I am indeed a big clueless sack of crap sometimes, and I take pride in making that painfully obvious everywhere I go on the Interweb, but I don’t remember asking any questions of someone called “Marcia.” Who is Marcia? Do I even know a Marcia? Could I have a secret admirer named Marcia? Maybe someone pretty, with honey-colored hair and a tendency to wear waistless 70s-era dresses? That chick was sure hot on L.A. Law. OH LORD I HAVE TO KNOW WHO THIS IS MUST CLICK EMAIL MARCIA MARCIA MARCIA RAARGH and that’s how they get you to buy into yet another can’t-miss penny stock scheme.

As incredibly stupid as spamming is, even more disheartening is that it must work sometimes, at least enough to sustain itself. I suppose in a population of several million you’d probably find a healthy percentage of people who were just wondering how to have one of them four-hour erections they were just talking about in that commercial on Sally Jesse. Damn, four hours, that’d be a hoot. Hang your coat on it, maybe teach the dog to do some chin-ups. That’ll slay ’em down at the Moose Lodge next Wednesday.

I know spammers don’t actually read the blogs they deface, but what the hell, I have to get this off my chest: If the business you’re in has a multi-billion-dollar industry dedicated entirely to stopping you from doing something, then maybe you should consider the possibility to, oh, I dunno, STOP DOING IT. Yeah sure it’s fun to do things that other people don’t want you to do, especially if you’re a zit-ridden 12-year-old whose potential lifetime experience of being inside a woman ended 12 years ago. If you get my drift. But c’mon, some of us just want to hang out. now I know that some people hate you and you get off on that because AT LAST YOU ARE FEARED BY THE WORLD AND YOU WILL MAKE THEM ALL PAY AAHAHAHAHA. Seriously, though, I know Laurie didn’t let you put your hand under her blouse that one time at summer camp, but you can’t blame the entire world for that. Most of us are just folks. You’re being feared and hated by ordinary people. We’re not multi-billionaires or people who have any say in the society you think has abandoned you. Those guys could give a rat’s ass. In fact, you’re putting money in their pockets by forcing the rest of us to pay for anti-spam services. Is that your goal, to sow tiny little seeds of chaos that will ultimately be stamped out and you’ll have nothing to show for it except the lingering disgust of people who would otherwise have been your friends? This is your life and you’re spending it being a dumb little snotnosed butthead instead of actually trying to make things work out for yourself.

Aah, forget it. I’ve depressed myself thinking about how some of these kids would respond to my tirade. I know, I would have said the same thing when I was younger. Now I’m just tired. I won’t even end on a joke. G’night, folks.

Why yes I am a comic nerd, thank you for asking.

Well, it’s a turning point. Or maybe it’s a tipping point. Maybe even a point of no return. In any case, the point is this: I have a new job. Starting next Monday, I’ll be working for a nation-wide distributor of sign supplies as their sole Web developer. It’s not 100% the pure design and layout job I was hoping for, but what the hey, it’s a start. It also pays better and has much more opportunity for advancement. I’m pretty psyched.

Of course, it’s very sad to leave behind a great bunch of people, who were my main reason for staying the past couple of years anyway. But I’m still in town, they know where to find me, and I’ll never work for a committee-run organization ever freakin’ again, so it all works out. Several people there, even people I never got to know very well, have asked me to take them with me. If this job turns into what I expect it to become, I could almost certainly oblige some of them. Tee hee.

So this coming week I expect to go out to lunch with several people who think they should feel beholden to me because I was doing my job. Since I’ll never turn down a free meal, it’s all good to me.

But wait there’s more! I bought a new car yesterday. My old 1999 Saturn is still plugging along just fine, but it’s starting to make kinda throaty noises and the “Check Engine Soon” light’s been on for a while and it hasn’t really been maintained all that well and I’m making some pretty sweet bank at the new place so what the hey. It’s the sort of car I’d never have expected me to get: near-luxury class, all the trimmings, and a bright red exterior. It even has an outside temperature indicator. An outside temperature indicator. Can you believe it?! I’m spazzing out here!

I’ve just arbitrarily decided that the success of a video game console depends on how quickly it sells 8 million units worldwide. Because I’m wacky that way.

So who wins on that entirely made-up statistic? Why, the Wii of course! Yes, the Wii has passed 8 million units sold in just 30 weeks, according to vgchartz.com. The second best seller is the Game Boy Advance, also by Nintendo, which passed 8 million units sold after 40 weeks. Tied at third, the DS and the PSP both passed 8 million within 50 weeks, although the PSP’s sales kind of level off after that while the DS suddenly shoots off into the stratosphere right around when Nintendogs came out. Right now the DS is outselling the PSP by more than two-to-one. Nothing to be ashamed of for either of them, of course.

After that it gets murkier. The Xbox 360 hit 8 million after 59 weeks, the Playstation 2 passed the post at 70 weeks, and the remaining consoles are relative slowbies: Xbox 1, 105 weeks; Gamecube and SNES, 107 weeks; Playstation 1, 140 weeks; and the original Game Boy brings up the rear, hitting 8 million at 190 weeks.

Why do I care? I dunno. I like statistics, I guess. I’m also a huge Wii supporter (LOL huge Wii) and I like anything that makes it look like a clear winner. Because it really is. :colbert:

Well, this is interesting. I just picked up a copy of the new Adobe CS3 Web Edition, and it comes with Contribute CS3. What’s wacky is, I can actually post to this blog from inside Contribute! What a country!

Even better, check as I post a random video that I had hanging about on my hard drive: (EDIT: Okay that didn’t work so well. One step at a time.)

I am the lizard king, baby.

I’m angry again, so I feel compelled to post. This is NOT A GOOD IDEA. So instead of talking about the latest indignity(ies) at work, I’ll spend some time thinking about things that are going well in my life.

• My wife loves me and I love her. (Awwww.)
• I love my dog and she loves that I bring her food. She also ADORES my wife, so the two of them together in the yard is Hallmark-card stuff right there.
• My family is very close. You wouldn’t know it just to look at us, but we’re all right together in everything.
• My house doesn’t fall over in a stiff breeze, and the pops and creaks are comforting.
• Some of my coworkers are getting angry about what’s making me angry, which is a refreshing change.

Aah. That’s actually much better. I probably won’t be able to work for a while, because the very act of working reminds me of what’s going on, but while I’m off in my internal landscape I’m inviolate. Be nice if I could just go live there, but then who would feed the dog?

I just get angry when I think about work anymore. And not just your garden-variety sort of angry either. This is “veins sticking out of forehead, face all splotchy, want to either scream or throw up” type of angry. Clog-popping anger. Blood-pressure-warning anger. Incoherent streams of curse words like when Ralphie beats up the yellow-eyed kid in A Christmas Story but not nearly as cute anger.

What’s terrible is, if I didn’t actually care about work, I’d be fine. Everyone seems to think I’m pretty good at what I do, so I don’t think I’m rampantly incompetent. I honestly want to make things better, not for myself (which nobody in management seems to believe, since apparently employees are sniveling ratfaces as a rule) but for the customers. I was under the impression that was the sort of thing companies look for in an employee. It’s all about the customers, right? Isn’t that what they keep trying to drill into our heads from the very beginning? Service with a smile!

Today I flew into Houston, preparing for a full week of training in Documentum. “But Chris,” you may say, “why are you learning about a huge complex document management system when you are but a humble Web designer?” Well, the simple answer is I’m not a professional Web designer anymore. It has been unilaterally decided that my 13 years of Web design and editing experience is trumped by someone else’s five years, so the part of my job that I enjoyed the most has passed to another employee in another department at our company. But it’s not all bad, at least I get to keep my job! It’s the part of my job that drives me insane and will leave me a burned-out Luddite, but what the hell, it’s a paycheck, right?

I found this out on Friday. I’ve been Little Mr. Sunshine all weekend, let me tell you. My shoulders won’t unknot. My stomach is a seething mass of acid. I want to sleep all the time, but I can’t stay asleep more than a couple of hours at a time.

My wife is worried about me. So am I.

What I’m trying to say is: Greetings from beautiful downtown Houston!