In this entry, in which sparky tries his hand at some "advanced" HTML techniquies, and wonders why they make his text turn red, we examine:

Odd realizations

My job, which may or may not be going well.

A few pet peeves I have about my favorite browser. Actually, just one really big one.

A question, which was answered but not asked.

edit: Thanks to Pix for providing me with a hack to get rid of the red mousover effects.

I realized something today - I don't mind being alone.

Case in point: for the past several years, my routine upon entering my bedroom has been the same. Enter, activate the lights, then shut and lock the door. I have gotten so used to doing this that I do it almost without thinking. I prefer isolation to the distracting noise of the house - and the incessant chatter of it's occupants. I don't mean to say that I dislike my family; that is not the case. I do, however, place a high value on time that I spend without other people.

One of my friends called me yesterday morning, claiming that he wanted to hang out later on. I was enthusiastic, not having had an opportunity to be with him for a while, but the evening wore on and he never called me back. (When I called his house, his parents had no idea where he was.) I was slightly disappointed, but not upset. I just shrugged and went to hang out at the bookstore.

Maybe I've just become accustomed to being by myself. Being home-schooled nearly all of my life, I never experienced the daily interactions with my peers that most kids who attend a public school do. Even the year I attended a private school, I tried to keep to myself, despite being mostly liked.

And of course, being alone all the time will eventually drive me stir-crazy. No human copes well with extended periods of isolation. But spending the majority of my free time my myself isn't unpleasant. It is, sometimes, preferable.

Two weeks ago at work, we had a meeting. It seems one of our employees had told an end user that the hospital was "too cheap" to purchase new LCD monitors for everyone. Unbeknownst to him but knownst to us, he was speaking to the vice president of the hospital. Needless to say, this was not a pleasant meeting. The manager of the project lead came in to reprimand us all. Oddly, they didn't know who had done it, and didn't seem to interested in finding out who it was. Rather, they were extremely, and understandably, disgusted with us as a whole (Partly due to other ongoing problems, as well.) After they were finished, the project lead came over and said that he "needed to talk to me". Of course, my heart instantly went into tachycardia as I was led out into the hall, where the guy who hired me and and the project lead were.

"Uh-oh, I'm in trouble." "Actually, no. We, ahh, really like your work, we've heard a lot of good things about you from users. We're promoting you to breakfix. We don't want to lose you down here, but we don't want to hold you back from something that will really help you in the future. Are you interested?" ("Is yesterday too soon?" I thought, but didn't say.) "Uhm...yeah!". "Cool. We'll plan on having you start there tomorrow.".

So now I'm a breakfix tech. (It breaks, we fix it. Catchy, huh?) There's much less corporate interference, and the environment is much less structured, which is great for actually getting things done. Which is funny, because the way I ended up getting promoted in the first place was by being insubordinate. I broke the rules that were stupid to get things done, and I end up getting an attaboy for it. (At this point, sparky falls out of his chair laughing with subversive glee.) Of course, nobody really knows that the reason for my success was doing things my way, but that's just fine with me. The secret for success then, seems to be "Break the rules when it's necessary, but don't get caught.".

The only bad thing about my promotion is the simple fact that once you get promoted by impressing people, you have to keep doing it. It is a sad truth that once you show you're capable of going above and beyond the call of duty for a certain job, and get promoted, you're expected to keep going above and beyond. A law of business life then, seems to be "A person will keep getting promoted up to the point they find themselves in a job that they can't handle.". Hrm.

And now, let's talk about web browsers.

The ideal web browser would be one that showed only what you wanted to see, when you wanted to see it. This has, of course, never been the case with real-world web browsers, which have always been susceptible to, among other things, ad banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, and other forms of invasive advertisements. (Most notably full-screen unclosable Flash animations.) The first web browsers (Mosaic, Netscape Navigator) simply weren't plagued with these abominations. But eventually, as the scum that is marketing agencies discovered the vast potential for turning the internet into a giant advertising cesspool, these aberrations of the marketing world began to appear. And so, too, did the technology to fight them. One browser I'm particularly impressed with is Mozilla Firefox. It's fast, uncluttered, and has a nice built-in popup blocker.

(This was going to be a question, but I figured out the answer on my own.)