redshifter.org

Almost out of the weeds here. The past two weeks have been some of the most trying days of my life:

I'm on an HTML project that is one of the all-time toughest, mainly by my own doing: I'm being super-strict with Standards and it's been hard as hell. Many times have I been tempted to drive up to Redmond, WA and kick the living shit out of the pricks are that programmed Internet Explorer, with all its bugs and rule-ignoring ways. A few times, I've panicked, thinking that I was out of my depth and failure was the only option. Luckily, it has not come to that, but my health and mental well-being have certainly suffered for it. The big deadline is this Tuesday, and I think I'll be right here in front of the screen the entire time until then. No tables. No spacer gifs. Using CSS to replace graphic text with live text. No javascript for mouseovers. No screwing around.

Mid-HTML freak-out, I had to move, which was a royal bitch. The staircase up to our apartment was a formidable foe, to be sure: long and steep, with a 90° bend. A couple of Mexican day laborers approached us on the street and offered to unload our truck for $40, and damn if they didn't bust their asses for us. I was nervous that they'd try to rip us off or pull some other sort of shenanigan, and I'm happy to say that they were on the level. The one dude carried my 4x12 speaker cabinet up the stairs on his shoulder. That thing weighs like 150 pounds. No joke.

Infantile went huge last week. We were written up by TrendCentral, a market forecasting company, and within hours we were entertaining inquiries from Target, label reps in LA, and stores all over the place. Not to mention a spate of orders placed on the web site.

And some horrible news yesterday: the passing of a friend. Stick together, people.