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with an e and no apostrophe
Tuesday, October 19 2004
I demonstrated the website I'd built last night to the client in High Falls today. The demonstration went so well that the clients assumed we were actually online, and asked me to do something that would have required an internet connection. To me this was strange not because of the convincingness of the demonstration, but because it indicated the clients actually have a passing familiarity with the web. They're an older couple who don't even have a computer. She's oddly stylish and resembles the late Carrie Donovan, the woman who used to be in Old Navy ads; she spends her mornings watching soap operas in the parlor. He can push a nail through drywall with his bare hands and is missing the end of his left thumb.
While I was in that part of the world, I went to Rosendale Hardware to buy a hoe. (That's with an "e" and no apostrophe.) There wasn't much of a selection, so I ended up with one that claimed to be "homeowner grade." This was presented as though it was a good thing even though "contractor grade" or "military grade" would have been better. But at least I didn't end up with a flimsy-ass "sharecropper-grade" hoe. Why am I buying a hoe in October? It's really the only tool for mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow, and I have a lot of concrete and mortar to mix in my slab resurfacing project.
This evening I was doing a clean installation of Windows XP onto a computer for a "consumer grade" client, the kind who thinks that AOL is the same thing as the internet. Every time I have to install AOL on a computer, a little piece of me dies. The latest version of AOL is called 9.0 Optimized. Whoah, and is it ever fast! The little AOL guy flies across the screen, leaving a triangular vortex of blurry pixels in his wake. Over and over and over and over he crosses the screen as the progress bar provides the following helpful information: "Installing new features." If I were to install AOL 2.0 Extreme (or whatever it was called back then), the progress bar would also speak of the "New features" being installed. But of course those features wouldn't be new at all. And the installation would only take a minute or two. Installing the latest version of AOL, on the other hand, takes longer than installing Microsoft Office. And for what? A desktop littered with new icons, an application that thinks of itself as an operating system, and a theme park simulation of the internet.
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