There’s a supervisor at my workplace I’ll refer to as “Bossy Blonde,” who has a tendency to stick her nose where it didn’t belong. Usually that meant monitoring what I was doing at my desk even though she wasn’t my boss, and despite the fact that I was working in a division completely unrelated to hers.

I knew she’d be working here tonight, so I began to explore my options. Where could I go to enjoy some privacy (and check my blogging stats) without her peeking in on me? We had an office with a very nice desk and PC that could have been an ideal solution for me, but it got locked up at the end of the day. Not one to give up so easily though, I decided to use the credit card tips I found at Lifehacker today, and tried to jimmy the door open with one of my library cards.

“Frick frick frick! Why can’t these doors ever open up easily like they do in the movies???”

After a few minutes of twisting and prying, nervously keeping an eye out for anyone who might walk in on me, I finally gave up. Ok, this wasn’t gonna work.

I continued to scout my territory, and eventually settled on a nice little corner desk I found hidden out of view by a maze of cubicle walls. It was the perfect spot to hide out for a few hours until I could finally go home.

I settled in, sighing contentedly as I happily logged on and checked my emails.

“Hey Linc! Whatchya doing here??” It was the boss of the section I was hiding in.

“Oh hey!!!!!!!!” I said, wincing as my thumping heart cracked a few ribs, “I’m just umm, hanging out here for my um, meal break, that way nobody bothers me.”

“Oh, ok.” He looked at me with a little uncertainty, then picked up his keys and left.

I looked at the time. Still another 50 minutes to go.

“@#$%,” I muttered. The search for my quiet place continues.

Overheard at work today:

“Ohh, Linkie! Remember when you were telling me there were two prices for a car, the manufacturer’s price, and what was the other one, I couldn’t remember?”

“Uhh, the invoice?”

“Yeah yeah, that’s it! I need to get a new car and I just fell in love with this Nissan Murano I saw at the dealership. It’s fully loaded for $38,000, but I wasn’t sure if that’s how much I had to pay, or if I could get it for less.”

“Wow, that’s some serious coinage.”

“Oh yeah, but I got enough in my bank now to buy it!!”

“Must be nice to have an ex-husband,” I muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing, ” I quickly said.

My subscription to Match.com expired recently, concluding yet another sad chapter in my never ending search to find my snuggle bunny. I got over 300 views, and of those who read my profile and sent me winks, many were either 19 year old single mothers with 5 kids looking for a Daddy, 40-something year olds looking for a boy toy, or Russian women looking for a visa. I actually paid money for this?

There’s little doubt Match.com has been amongst the crappiest crappity-crap crapfest of a craphole dating site I’ve ever used. And what irks me even more is their glowing boast of how millions subscribe to their dating service, yet what they don’t tell you is that those “millions” get shrunk to thousands by state, then down to hundreds by locality, then to dozens when ruling out the whackos, then to one who is PERFECT for you, but just as you’re about to wink at her, she closes down her account after the guy at work finally works up the moxie to ask her out.

You would think an alternative dating site might prove more fruitful, but it seems the same women can be found on these sites as well. And I don’t mean similar people mind you, I mean the SAME EXACT women. Evidently this is the choice I’m left with: pay 30 dollars a month for one dating site, and if I’m unhappy with it, I can cancel my account and sign up for a completely unrelated matchmaking site for only 10 dollars more a month, offering… uh…. the same exact group of single women.

I’m beginning to think ringing up the DC Madam might not be such a bad idea after all. What I don’t get though is how some of the brothers can sign up for these very same sites and meet the girl of their dreams 30 seconds later. Fine. Here’s a toast hoping your marriages end just as quickly, where your precious love is replaced by alimony and child support payments that quite unfortunately for you will never, ever end. So there. Bastards.

But I’m not bitter.

Really though, I’m getting tired of you fricking happy dappy, lovey dovey, smoochie woochie herd of pervs always getting in my face no matter where I go. I can’t enjoy a hot chocolate at Starbucks without you sitting next to me and nuzzling noses. I can’t watch a movie without you guys sucking faces or stroking each other’s hair front and center. I can’t even go to the park and just try to enjoy the mother-fricking nice spring weather without seeing a whole parade of you walking around holding hands, or playing kissy faces, or rolling around on the grass as if the world were your very own bedroom.

May you all spontaneously combust into ashes. May the plague of mankind descend on you like molten lava on a village. May the wasps of a thousand hives sting all your insides with deathly poison. May… lots of bad things happen to you.

I need to take some valium now.

A writer at MSNBC recently took a look at the Twitter phenomenon and concluded that Twitter was ultimately boring and stupid. Maybe instead of spending her time clapping her hands and gleefully exclaiming, “Oooooh look at me, look at me! I actually get paid to write the crap I do!” she might see there’s more to it than just announcing to the world when you recently hit the john.

Twitter brings back to life the concept of microblogging, where instead of sifting through long winded blogging entries, we can read a snippet that’s 140 characters or less. For those gifted in the “less is more” approach to blogging, such “tweets” can provide the reader remarkable insight and helpful information without forcing him to sacrifice precious time, a commodity that is becoming even more precious as the inane, white noise of the Internet continues to expand (thanks MySpace!) Check out my latest Twitter friend for an example. Most of her tweets are links to articles she’s been reading, which have proven to be very informative to me and I’m sure a few others as well. The rest are usually witty insights that either makes me snicker or break out laughing.

But besides that, Twitter gives people an opportunity to CARE. It may be vain in some respects, but there’s another part of the equation telling us that when we tweet, people sometimes actually listen. And when they listen, it shows they care. I know with my friends, I’d actually would want to know what they were doing, what they’ve recently been thinking of, how their day’s been going, and so on. If one tweets out a message, “Not feeling well today,” I might be inclined to give them a call and make sure they’re ok. I have an online buddy who recently took an extended road trip halfway across the U.S. She’s not a Tweethead, but had she been one, I would have LOVED to see the kind of tweets she likely would have made during that trip. Her writing has a hilarious and engaging style to it, so there’s no doubt any tweets send to my Twitterbox from her would have been equally as engaging and fun to read. But because I also consider her a friend, anything I read of hers through Twitter would never be considered stupid or boring. And that I think is really the point: Twitter is a tool that can not only enable people to “blog in the moment,” it also helps bring friends and family together. And yes, as with any new technology that comes along, people will always find ways to abuse it or use it to gratify their already bloated egos. Too bad the MSNBC crank who wrote that piece couldn’t get past that to see the value Twitter could truly provide. But then again, this is MSNBC we’re talking about. One can understand why Twitter might seem less than alluring to use should Chris Matthews ever discover it.

I came across Clutzr recently, which offers a social networking service that allows people to view your clickstreams (essentially where you’ve been on the web). In other words, the public at large can basically monitor every move you make on the Internet. And yet rather than consider this a really BAD idea, the makers wrapped a cute blue bubble around their package and calls it a whole bowl of delicious fun.

I know there are privacy settings that you can add, but gees. If I were doing some innocuous surfing, that’s one thing, but if I’m having a really bad day and I’m googling the keywords “how to hire a hitman,” I probably don’t want too many people to know about it. Besides, do I really want to spend a day surfing online dating sites like I usually do, with the knowledge that people viewing my clickstream will be snickering at my desperation, and then rolling over with laughter when my hours of love searching finally leads me to an article titled Loneliness: Bane of the Christian Single?

I think not.

This was the top bookmarked item on Del.icio.us today: How to Tie the 10 Most Useful Knots.

Ummm guys, just what exactly are you planning to do with this info?

I’m serious, the government needs to declare all of Microsoft a terrorist group, because quite frankly they are more of a threat to mankind than Al Qaeda is right now.

I was polishing up up my blog when I happened to noticed the colors I changed for a particular table wouldn’t take for some reason in Microsoft’s newest bundle of pure joy, IE7. No matter, since it didn’t affect the layout or anything… but then I glanced down and also happened to notice this HUGE horizontal bar on the bottom scrolling out for maybe half a mile before it ended. Oh no. No no no no…..

It wasn’t showing up in Firefox or IE6, so I knew this was an issue relating to IE7. Just beautiful. Worse yet, as I surfed around my blog using IE7, I noticed a few other things were breaking as well. Why, oh why, did I harbor the hope that maybe, just ONCE, IE7 would somehow prove not to be yet another disastrous release that would cause web designers everywhere to curse and spit at any and all things relating to Microsoft? I had thought IE7 would be just enough of an improvement over IE6 (which itself gave me endless hours of grief) that I wouldn’t have to pay it any mind when coding my blog.

Nope nope nope. IE7 promptly decided to treat my blog like a public restroom, hosing everything down in its path, but in just clever enough a manner that I wouldn’t notice it right away. And now because of those nice folks in Seattle who curiously enough also liked to worship Satan in their spare time, I had to deal with this mile long horizontal bar that was apparently stretched out to cover some 4th dimensional object residing on my blog, seemingly invisible to the naked eye.

So, with the clock striking midnight, I resolved to work this through until I figured out what was causing the problem. What would follow would be a series of deleting/adding code, uploading the modified file, refreshing my page, checking the results, then rinse, wash and repeat. I continued on this neverending cycle until 4AM, when I finally tossed in the towel and crashed on my bed, muttering curses at Microsoft, then sleeping and dreaming that I was muttering curses at Microsoft. I finally woke up around 11AM, somewhat refreshed and ready to pick up where I left off.

After another hour or so of googling for answers, uploading code and swearing yet another blue streak at Microsoft, I finally found an answer. The reason my horizontal bar spanned on to infinity was because the numbers I used to list comments in numerical order were in…. italics.

That’s it. No other reason. Because my comment numbers were in italics, IE7 in its unending wisdom decided it needed to create a horizontal bar that could be wrapped around the earth three times because somehow, that just makes it all better.

I hate those Microsoft coders. I hate them. I hate their mothers, I hate their wives, I hate their children, I hate their pets, I HATE THEM. There are not enough fleas in this universe to infest the armpits of those hacking terrorists to my liking. I long await the day when the earth will open up and swallow the entire Microsoft campus whole, while angels in heaven sing and rejoice over the destruction of the greatest evil the world has ever known, at least ever since the invention of disco.

But in the meantime, I must continue to fight off these demons from infesting my blog, and lend my hand in some small way to assist those who have also been afflicted by this plague of mankind. So here it is: I noticed this problem also occured in those running Wordpress blogs using the Tiga theme. If this describes you, check an individual page where at least one comment has been made (in IE7 of course) to see if you get the horizontal bar as well. To fix, simply change the font style in the class “comment-num” to something other than italic, OR add the line “overflow: hidden” to the class comment header in your Tiga stylesheet. That should resolve the problem.

Fortunately, the other IE7 related issues were easily solvable, and I managed to clean them up just in time to see the sun set in the sky, yet another day stolen from me because of those evil snotbags in Seattle. *Sigh*

I think it’s obvious web design is definitely not for me. I had to do all this with only a rudimentary understanding of CSS, PHP and XHTML, and things have gotten a wee bit more complicated since I built my first webpage back in ‘97. Ahhhh the good old days, where you could throw some text up, wrap them in a font tag and low and behold, you had a webpage comparable to Yahoo. Now it can suck up all my time just to figure out what relative and absolute positioning means, and why it’s making my blog look like a pile of moose droppings. I can either spend all my time building and maintaining a blog, or I can spend it blogging for real, but I surely can’t do both. I think the time will eventually come when the technology will be so far over my head that I’ll have no choice but to use a service like Typepad just to avoid the chores and anguish of building and maintaining my own blog. It’s kind of sad, but what can I do. I don’t intend to go down without a fight though, so while I can still dance, I say, bring on the NOISE.