P.S. H is for Huggabalu.

7:37 PM
Blogging again on a Thursday afternoon. My apologies to all, seasons are starting for some of the areas that I'm responsible for so things have really been picking up in my real job so I haven't been around as much as I'd like.

I have a real job the requires me to be on-line most of the day. It's kind of nice because I can work from home and I don't actually have to get dressed to go to work. It also sort of sucks for the same reason. If there's work to do at midnight, I'm doing work at midnight. If there is work to be done, I'm required to do it regardless of what's going on.

Friends know that I'm on-line a LOT even when I'm not working. I live in a very remote area. Most of my friends are a couple hour drive away and I get out every couple of weeks for some needed time out. If I didn't do this, I'd probably be one of those weird guys who never leaves the house and who is always on-line wearing nothing but a black T-shirt and his fruit of the looms (boxers or briefs? No speedos, baby, speedos ).

But I am on-line and I'm into what I'm into.

I'm not really into the whole TechTV community thing. It shouldn't be offensive to anyone, I just never got into the whole TechTV fandom community. I deal with communities all day/night and it takes a lot to get me to participate in anything but chat.

One of the good things about keeping myself out of the community aspect of TechTV is the fact that I can watch things. Since I don't tend to participate in the controversies (and let's face it, lately there have been a lot of controversies), I can try to be objective and commentate on things and hopefully help some of these things find a proper resolution.

It takes a lot to get me to participate. It takes a lot to get me pissed off enough to say something. I just don't have time to play these days and frankly, to get me to say something or to do something in a controversy, it takes a real act of stupidity. It takes something on the level that it's going to hurt the overall TechTV community or, in a couple of cases, something on the level that it would anger TechTV enough to take action against fan sites such as this.

Let's face it, TechTV has been very nice about all of these fan sites. While my site is relatively tame in what we feature, there have been a least one occasion where folks at TechTV weren't comfortable with what was in a strip and asked for or suggested changes. There have been a lot of times when I have changed strips on my own -- with no one asking me -- because I felt I had either gone so far over the top that I was just being mean, or because, frankly, I didn't like how I portrayed someone.

Believe it or not people believe things based on sites like this. I know that if I were to portray, oh, Steve, for example (NOTE THE NEXT PASSAGE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH STEVE IN REAL LIFE AS I DO NOT KNOW HIM SO TAKE NOTHING FROM IT), as a guy who never washed his socks and who is known around the station as "Stinky Toes" there are people who would actually believe it.

Worse yet, even if they didn't believe it, there would be folks who would start calling Steve "Stinky Toes" (or what have you), and the poor guy would be riddled with a constant stream of name calling without having a way to defend himself against it.

How do I know this? "Zoltan" is all I'll say. Poor Jim L. We've backed off on using the character because while it's funny, it was getting Jim a lot of attention and you could tell from his times in chat that he absolutely hated the name after a while. While it can be fun to tick of Jim (his reaction to the chat room's hatred of the AIBO was so funny that it's beyond words), the intent of Zoltan wasn't to tick him off. That's why we've backed up to some degree from that character. He'll return, but sparingly.

You also have to be careful with relationships. Believe it or not, these people are not fictional characters. Sure sites like this use them as "fictional characters," but what we all write about are firmly based on real people and like with anything (including the 5 million George W. Bush jokes), there are people who will believe what you present in a strip or a story or a site as being true.

Again, based on something I've gone through here. A TechTV person asked for a strip between that person and another character. I misinterpreted what they wanted and how far I should take things and something went up that was a bit more than they were comfortable with. They asked for changes. I didn't want to do changes.

Lets face it, when you're doing a site like this, there's a lot of pride in what you put up. From time to time if someone wants something changed it's darn hard to change things.

After a few minutes of being completely pissed off -- since this person had asked for the strip -- it hit me. This was a TechTV person participating in my site. Not only was the person participating, they were ENJOYING what I did so much that they wanted to be a part of the creation of a strip. While the entire fate of the site didn't hang in the balance of my decision, I came to my senses and made the changes.

From my point of view, I'm glad I've made the changes and I'm completely open to suggestions from the TechTV folks on how they'd like to be portrayed (I refuse to name drop so they know who they are). I've made changes based on what they like and what they don't like, and while my e-mail (that's Reallycoolsite@aol.com), is kind of hard to find on this page, they can always catch me in chat or contact me or contact me through the few people who know me.

My policy is that I'm not going to be the idiot who screws this up for everyone else.

So if TechTV wants changes, they get changes. Period. No fuss, no fights, no tantrums, they get whatever they wanted changed immediately.

Why? See above, I don't want to be the guy who Pisses someone off and TechTV comes back and says "Hey, stop it with using our stuff on your site" to all of us who are doing fan sites or parody sites.

That's my policy. I'm not saying that anyone should follow that policy and there are other sites who have handled things differently. That's what they do. If one of those sites screw things up for the rest of us, then so be it. However, it's not going to be my site that screws the rest of us out of doing TechTV sites.

What's going on with Buffy the Vampire Slayer sites can and might someday happen here. Doubt it will, but again, it will not be my actions that spoil the party for everyone else.

With that, I'm out for the night. Back to work and maybe a break or two. I was tempted to pick up Madden 2002 for the PC (which TechTV should have reviewed on air -- to heck with the PS2 version), and tomorrow might mean a trip to the mall.

Goodnight and take care,

k9

4:29 PM

Back home after a very long day on the road. The good news on the day is that after four years in the Williamsport, PA, area I finally have a local bank account.

Okay call me dumb but I kept my old bank because it gave me free checking and I had my check direct deposited there. Since the actual bank branches were 50-100 miles away I never was at risk of spending all of my money or screwing up my accounts. I mean to deposit something other than my direct deposit paycheck, let alone withdraw, I'd either have to go all that way to a "local" branch or have huge reminders that they were charging me a buck fifty to two bucks to use a MAC machine.

The main reason I decided to finally switch up here was the fact that I've picked up a lot of extra work here and there. I end up getting paid in cash or check and I always have a bit too much money for my liking on hand. If I have cash in my pocket and no place to deposit it I'll spend it. I'll buy stupid things with it. I'm a guy, doing stupid things is 9/10ths of what I do in the course of a day.

Not a big story here about the bank, other than it was a half hour of thinking about my future and what options on-line banking could bring (I don't need to drive! I can transfer them on the web! Whoo hoo!), led to several hours of driving and a burger king meal as the last stop of the day.

Walked in the door, signed on and noticed that another techtv parody site is changing it's focus and may be changing from a techtv site to something else. I'm sorry to see it go and hope them the best in the future.

With that, back to work.

k9

9:31 AM on a Monday morning, have a sinus headache and watching "WKRP."

It's probably the 30th time I've seen this episode (Herb's wife throws him out), but right now it's better than TechLive. Yes, start with a slam of the early morning hours of techlive.

It's not just that I'm upset that they took away chat coverage in the early mornings. Okay, I am. I'll admit it. I sorta liked being able to jump into the room and have fun at 9 AM. I also liked how goofy product demos were at 6 AM pacific. Everyone was half awake, it was great. But now ... well it's the same as last month when they made the changes. Waaaaaay too much market coverage, the same empty set problem that faces "call for help" in the afternoons. It's dead. There's no spunk at all there and half the time it's like no one wants to be there and you can feel it because the first two hours now are just a waste of time. I've stopped watching for that reason, as if anyone cares.

Right now? Flipped on TechTV to see Michaela and Erica look absolutely dead. Flipped back to WKRP. Didn't want to catch the "cover story" because the cover story is repeated more often than the a CNN Headline News story. Worse yet, lately they've decided to "enhance" the segments by adding the worst songs in the world to open the story with. I don't know about you but I wanted to strangle TechTV the other day when they opened up the cover story with "Jesse's Girl." Oh it was a cool song for a segment, but they only used the opening to it. They go you so far into the song then pulled away. Yes, I know it's some sort of technique to mess with our minds, however, unlike nearly every other station out there, they never came back to the song to give you release.

Think about it. Imagine hearing the opening to the classic song "Wild Thing" as part of the segment.

WILD THING
YOU MAKE MY HEART SWING
YOU MAKE EVERYTHING
GROOVY
WILD THING ...
I THINK I LOVE YOU!

Simple song, everyone knows the words right.

Well their use of Jesse's Girl was like starting a segment with Wild Thing like this:

WILD THING
YOU MAKE MY HEART SWING
YOU MAKE EVERYTHING

Now the first time you hear it it's okay. The second time you hear it it's annoying. The third time you hear it you go "Groovy." The 4th time? "@#$@#$@$ play the rest of the song."

Now imagine this 10 to 12 times and ... well I hope you get the point. If Jesse's Girl comes on anytime soon I'll be cursing under my breath.

But I'm an angry young man who has time on his hands.

It's a pause in the crisis that's been the last week and I'm venting again.

k9