Weird dream…about Microsoft
This was an odd one. I’ll have to see how much I can remember.
In the dream, I am at the Microsoft campus. I am walking with Bill Gates himself, as he returns to his office from whatever event we had just had. I don’t remember why I wound up with Bill Gates, but we seemed to hit it off pretty well and wound up talking after the event, then talking as we made our way back to his office.
So I figured this was as good a chance as any to try and gain some extra ground. I said, “So, Bill, while I’m here, are there any cool new projects I can see a little preview of?” And he said, “Well, I tell you what. If you can help me out with a little office work I’ll be able to make time to show you around a little. Okay?” And of course I agreed. He stopped suddenly and turned to a woman at a desk that we were passing, and asked me to give her a hand.
And by the time I looked up, he had already picked up the pace again and was continuing on his way back to his office. I started to introduce myself to the woman but she snapped at me, “Here! Take this down!” And handed me, not a phone, but the little handheld speaker/mike of a CB radio. There was a woman on the other side that was giving me information, and I hastily found a post-in note and a pen and tried to write it down. But between the fact that I could barely hear her, even though I had the handheld pressed as hard as I could against my ear, and the fact that I couldn’t get the button working right so it kept on switching from receive to transmit, I didn’t get much of it written down. So I had to ask her to repeat it.
And of course on top of the listening problems, I just had terrible handwriting to begin with, so even after I got it all down, I had to recopy the post-it note so it would be legible for the woman I was working for. Who was standing next to me, apparently testing me.
The day continued on like this. After a while, the office space around her started to fill up, as some of the programmers got to work. One of them was my friend Rich Bojanowski from Chicago, but I don’t think I recognized any of the others. I didn’t have time to talk to them either, the woman I was working for was apparently having a really stressful day and kept shouting at everyone, especially me. I think she led the print department. Not design exactly, but the department in a business that handles business cards, stationary, invitations, etc.
What I had written down from the woman earlier was just such an invitation. The woman I was working for had placed the order for the invitations as soon as I had taken down the information, and now it was time to pick them up and take them over to the woman that had ordered them. It meant walking to other buildings in the campus, so I had to stop in the break area to pick up my coat and put on boots (I guess it was snowy outside).
The woman I was working for was finally able to take a little break herself, and seemed to have felt bad for yelling at me all day. She was a nice woman, just overly stressed. She joins me in the break room and tries to make a little chit chat while I get ready to go outside, as an attempt for an apology. “So, what were you doing before you joined us?” I was a little confused, and realized that she had no idea what I was doing there. So I said, “Well, I haven’t really joined you. I’m just helping Bill out with a little office work so he could have time to show me around later.”
The woman kind of fumbles a little and says, “So, you’re not our new office assistant?” “No,” I replied, “actually I own a web design company.” And her jaw drops, and has this look of abject horror as she realizes that she’s had this CEO running through all of her peon hoops all day. And on top of that, one who was on good terms with her boss.
The look on her face alone was worth it.
February 24th, 2004 at 11:39 am
That’s very odd, Dave. But not a bad dream, I wouldn’t mind dreaming about seeing some new MS projects. Even if they weren’t real
BTW, the text on your comments page has reverted to being unreadable til you highlight it.
I don’t know what solution you used, but adding
height: 1%;
to the comments body section of the CSS works wonders for me.
February 24th, 2004 at 12:25 pm
How is this? I tried the height: 1% trick. But I can’t see a difference. It’s a rendering problem — and as soon as I switched to FireFox I never had a problem again! It’s some IE bug. But anyway — how does it look now?
February 24th, 2004 at 12:36 pm
Seems to work. Yeah, I’ve started using IE more and more, just to see what I need to fix. The damn peek-a-boo bug… ech…
Sorry to keep on with this, but I really cannot figure out why it’s not letting me execute scripts with apache… am I missing something somewhere? What all do you have to do to enable cgi? Urgh…
February 24th, 2004 at 12:41 pm
By the way, I deleted IIS and I’m not looking back… after it seemed to make my wwwroot a zero byte folder that I can’t access no matter what I do, I don’t think I want to use it anymore…
February 24th, 2004 at 1:15 pm
What operating system are you using again? XP Pro (as opposed to XP Home) has a lot of security settings. Make sure that the folder you have the scripts in has execute priveledges for everybody. As far as I know, Apache runs scripts as an anonymous user, not as the logged in OS users or the website visitor or anything like that. I’m not too sure what else to try….I’ve never had that kind of problem before.
February 24th, 2004 at 1:40 pm
I think I’ve finally figured something out!! The cgi-bin settings in the apache config said “options none” instead of “options exec-cgi”
Now I just have to reconfigure everything, since I had to move it to a different place, cross my fingers, maybe sacrifice a chicken, and see if it works.,
February 24th, 2004 at 2:02 pm
It appears that little slip up, having to change “none” to “exec-cgi” was the problem. It’s up, have a look
February 24th, 2004 at 2:30 pm
Looks good, but I couldn’t post a comment for some reason, not sure why. Also, you’ve got a few problems with your popup code. The onmouseover and onmouseout should be inside the SPAN tag, not outside of it (and the way you have it, they are actually even in their own paragraph tag). And forget that I used line breaks at all, that was just so the code would fit on the same page. It should look like this:
<SPAN CLASS=hiddenKey onmouseover=”Show(’msgPopup’)” onmouseout=”Hide(’msgPopup’)”>key</SPAN><SPAN CLASS=hiddenArea ID=msgPopup>hidden text here</SPAN>
February 24th, 2004 at 4:21 pm
Yeah I fixed the popup. I checked the page source of your tutorial to see how it was coded in, I just had it the way it was spaced before… can’t figure out the comment thing at all.
February 24th, 2004 at 6:21 pm
Got the comments working. Had to set everything to localhost:1349 instead of panickedthumb.no-ip.com
Something to do with the command line not getting passed right. So THEN I had to change the template so that when you clicked the link, you didn’t get “localhost:1349/whatever.cgi” because that would try to redirect to the users computer. For some reason you can set domain/location for home and archives, but not comments, within the MT configuration
But it works now, I had to recompile it so its the freakin default again. Bah. Oh well, it works.
February 24th, 2004 at 6:25 pm
nope doesn’t actually work I was wrong… I fixed one problem but now I have another
February 24th, 2004 at 6:34 pm
OK with Apache, when I compile it with the domain in mt.cfg set to panickedthumb.no-ip.com (the no-ip redirection to my_ip:1349), the comments parameters don’t transfer. When I have it set to localhost:1349, I have to edit the template for opening the comments window to panickedthumb.no-ip.com so that it doesn’t look on localhost, BUT when someone not on my pc tries to post comments it does the localhost thing still… seems that I’d have to use my IP, but I have a dynamic IP, which is why I did the no-ip redirect, it has a program that will automatically update it. So there’s no good answer it would seem.
Sorry to keep clogging up your comments.