Clapboard - Full Frontal Nerdity

Sitting in the 15-pass on the way here from the airport (here being the Presidente Intercontinental in Mexico City), I had all sorts of half-formed thoughts about wandering, about watching out the window, and about how seasoned tour guys don't seem to do it.  I mean, they take some advantage (a couple of guys went to the pyramids yesterday on a pseudo-day-off - how, I do not know), but all these things and places seem to blend together in their minds, or else they're so used to it that they don't care.  Never having been to Mexico City, or really anywhere in Mexico for that matter, everything I could see on the ride was interesting to me.  They use 8 numbers for their phones here.  The first branding I could see from my window (American, Window, Exit Row, starboard side) was that on a wal-mart store in what must have been a suburb.  If the tricks of light didn't deceive (it was dusk, afterall), those suburbs seem to go on awhile.

Anyway, the half-formed thoughts were about how much of the world I have not seen and about how I would like to be able to see it versus how I am seeing the small parts I *am* seeing. Those two positions (what I want and the reality of my recent travels) are on distant ends of a pole, with one glaring exception - someone else is paying.  Thinking about the traveling I could get done on the amount of money the tour has to spend to get me around is truly staggering; if I spent 1/4 of the money per day they spend on me, I'd be amazed.  Honestly, I'd bet it'd be 1/10.  I'd spend it, though.  You can bet I'd eat my way around the world.

So here I sit - Presidente Intercontinental, feeling like I'm not connecting things as well as I should.  Feeling a little out of touch, and not in the phones, internet, email sense but in some way that I'm not threading things together the best possible way.  Like I need to seriously optimize my code to run this new program or something.  It's a hazard, I'd hazard, of living the sort of life where you try to always do the most interesting thing available to you at any given time without sacrificing your history to do that.  That's the first time I've written that, or said it, and written out longhand it seems daunting, actually.  Like a manifesto.  Or something you'd carve on a headstone.  There's an image.  "Here lies Matt, having always tried to do the thing that was most interesting.  Need I chisel more?"

I have an FTP program on my phone, so I'll try to snap some phonepics while I'm here to update with immediately. Failing that, I'll do a big ol' trip photo update when I get back.  Fun times.

Just in case anyone's wondering, I'm posting the name of Dr. Ann de Wees Allen a zillion times after the break because Dr. Ann de Wees Allen has trademarked her name (theoretically) and will yell at anyone using it without her permission.  I think it's a stupid thing to do and might mean that Dr. Ann de Wees Allen herself is a bit of a fool.  So, click past the break to read her name zillions of times.

I've been working, believe it or not.

With my impending departure for South America with Bon Jovi looming, I'm looking at a foreshortened timeline and thinking about how I can get work completed for MWS before I go.  It's a short-ish timeline, given the back-and-forth that has to happen, but still, it's doable.  Then, through Priscilla, I booked a gig working on the practically-abandoned non-profit website CAN-DO.org.

The founders live across the yard at the moment, and Eric just left for Haiti, so it's a time crunch to get everything updated and working.  The site isn't a CMS, but instead was written in Dreamweaver (I can only assume) and the pages that I have are all a disaster.  Totally unnecessary nested tables within more and more tables, no real patterns (each box is slightly different from the rest, or boxes within sections have different problems), and almost no CSS.  Each page has some random CSS generated by Dreamweaver at the top, and the stylesheet is an amalgam of overlapping styles and mess.

Long story short, I now have more work than I can handle.  Or almost more work than I can handle.  I'm writing this blog post, for example, while I await replies to two emails and rest my eyes from staring at the code, wondering why the site works so radically differently on IE than on Firefox (and, indeed, everything else).  At least I'm building karma on this one, right?  My rate is slashed and I'll be able to claim some tax advantage at the end of the year, supposedly.