If that last post did not give it away I guess this one will. Just had a panic attack, I guess it was couple days in the making. Certainly cannot blame it on the heat, which does not cause blood pressure to rise, as far as I know. Now I am at the ghetto coffee shop, where the a/c is not so impressive, and I am waiting for my sanity to slow back down while also pouring coffee onto it. That seems counterintuitive but I’ve found it makes no difference.
I did discover that my older a/c somehow got set to “warmer”. I have no idea when or how that happened. So it’s on cooler now and seems to be doing ok. Whatever, man, these next few days are going to suck on sleep and sanity. Now I am just trying to decompress from that shit. Really glad a friend and I did not do our epic walk today, not just because the weather sucks but I might have freaked out even more at being in the company of someone else… I mean anyone else. Anyone at all.
Our plan had been to walk the length of Queens Boulevard. On a day like this that could be deadly. But I thought it up again and it’s just not a very interesting walk. A lot of callous highway and noise. So I had a better idea. Walk the RFK/Triborough to Randalls Island and over to the Upper East Side. That’s a fun one. This friend and I walked over the 59th Street Bridge years ago but I don’t think he’s traversed the Triborough. So there you go. If that’s not interesting to him we could do the George Washington Bridge, which I’ve never done but always wanted to. I also want to see the Bus Terminal up there, it should have some payphones. I lived across the street from the bridge and the bus terminal but never set foot on or in either. The bus station was considered a real shithole back then. Not sure of its stature now.
But we can’t do this until after July 12.
Wow, I am a mess. My life is a slow-moving trainwreck. I did manage to make a few other changes to the mailbox site but it all still sucks so hard, all my websites.
I reactivated FB. Actually I kept the background account going so I could deal with the payphone FB page. But that is not the same. I can hardly stand the sight of FB anymore. It has not been fun for me for a long time, that Facebook thing. Although the payphone page has actually become kind of cool, with people sending up a few photos a week. Nice and low key, and nice-seeming people who I guess came from the CBS spot.
I do not really like being an entity, as opposed to a person with a name. Posting as “The Payphone Project” just feels stupid. I felt the same way at Sports Illustrated, when I had to respond to site visitors’ e-mails as “Webmaster”, and with no real name. I mistakenly sent some replies from my named account, though. One of those ended up being re-posted to somebody’s blog. I think it was me telling him that he was illegally using our content on his web site.
And I used to link from somewhere on CNNSI.com to my personal website. That led to at least one person writing a bitchy complaint on my personal site about the fantasy football thing CNNSI was supposedly offering but which we actually had no control over. That’s how I learned not to use your real name in some circumstances where The Company or The Brand is who should take the shots.
I got away with so much shit in those days, though. I remember when the SI Swimsuit Issue website came around. It used frames, and a thumbnail image of the magazine cover was in the top left corner. For a couple of hours one night I made that image link to my personal website. A handful of e-mails came to Webmaster, asking wtf, who is this guy and why is SI linking to him? I was the only one who saw webmaster e-mails at that time. So my little secret stayed safe.
Another time I wanted to see traffic in real time, as per the command tail -f /var/log/access_log. I could not do that command without root privileges so I put a single-pixel gif on my personal web site, added it to the bottom of every page on our website, and tailed the access log from my server. It was amazing, hundreds of pages per minute were being downloaded and consumed by web browsers from everywhere in the world. It is still like that for some sites, though a lot of the traffic now is just garbage.
I remember a woman I dated for a while who got in some trouble when working at AOL I forget exactly what happened but it came down to her being identified as an AOL employee who was posting flames and harassing people on company time, and then lying about almost every part of the interactions. She had fairly limited knowledge of the Internet at the time (imagine that from an AOL employee) so she did not know that anybody who knew the code could see what IP address she was posting from… Or something like that. Sounds pretty stupid today — and I seem to remember it sounded pretty stupid back then, too — but it got her into a shitstorm back in… guessing mid 1990s.
Blahblahblah.
Now to go back home and continue calming the fuck down. Or maybe just wander around in circles again, idiot-style.
