I was up late last night putting together a newsletter in PageMaker for a client. I don’t suppose it was absolutely necessary to have done by tomorrow but that’s what they wanted.They only gave me about 12 hours notice that they wanted it done, so I could’ve turned them down but I felt like taking on a challenge. Brother, it was rough.
I left directly from work around 6pm to go down to Dripping Springs to meet with them and I didn’t get home until 8:30 or so. I watched a little of “Mildred Pierce” during dinner with Jody. Then I got started around 9:45pm and stayed up working on it until 4am. I was exhausted when I finished. When I started I barely knew anything about PageMaker but it is easy to learn when you absolutely need to learn and the alternative is outing yourself as someone who promises but can’t deliver. That is terrifying. I remember once when I went to meet with someone to manage their server I made a really newbie mistake by chmod’ing the directory of one of their live websites without realizing that the chmod (file permissions settings) changes cascaded down into the files and subdirectories rendering the file permissions for all the files to the default settings. This made their website unviewable since the read permissions for general access were disabled by default. At first, I didn’t realize what I had done and thought I broke something. I had a sinking feeling of panic. While I was trying to figure out which unix commands would fix the problem the owner was sitting behind me watching what I was doing. If I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong I would have had to tell them that I rendered their website unviewable by messing around with something I didn’t have the know-how to mess around with.
Anyway, when I did finally go to bed I couldn’t sleep because I was having a hard time breathing due to some strange respiratory illness that came on all of the sudden yesterday. I went to lie down in my chair so I would be sitting upright since that seemed to help a little. I planned on calling in sick today since I only had a couple hours of sleep, but at 8:32am I woke up on my own and felt good enough to go to work. I plan on passing out around 7pm.
Hang in there brotha. It’s prolly a mix of exhaustion, and stress.. If it keeps up get your ass to the Dr. damnit :P
Hey, and don’t be a stranger.
-Mike G.
Thanks, Mike. That’s nice of you to say.
I too have been through that kind of learning curve crucible, with all its accompanying anxiety. You can always call me if you ever have any PageMaker questions, I’ve used it a lot. You’ve got to take care of the machine, by which I mean your body. One time, I worked on a web project for so long that my vision very suddenly became totally blurred to the extent that I could no longer see anything on the screen and I had to just go to sleep to get my sight back…and now I wear glasses, small wonder.
I like the new site by the way, you’ll have to give me show me the guts of it sometime. You’re constantly trying new things and staying on top of the mad skills, which fits your m-b type (whereas I have a tendency to be stodgy and anachronistic). Take care of yourself!
Cool. That would be cool. Do you use AIM anymore?
Well, I appreciate the compliment. I always thought you were better at a lot of that stuff more so than myself.