Yesterday was one of those typical entrepreneur days, full of challenges and narrowly averted catastrophes which just end up making the team stronger.
It started out quietly enough, with a scheduled meeting with one of our service providers. Only problem was, when we showed up at their headquarters, we got an urgent call from our contact saying that she was at our office. Some wires had crossed somewhere, evidently. So half-an-hour of Jay-Z and Nas and a cup of coffee later, we finally rolled into our meeting, which I’m happy to say went very well. There’s nothing like some good hard hip-hop to put you in a negotiating frame of mind.
From there, we headed back to the office to work on a few things. Form validation is a sticky issue around here, as there are many ways to do it but most of them involve messy alert boxes and can sometimes result in the filled-out data disappearing. I finally found something that works nicely and doesn’t look like a dog’s breakfast, but for some reason it was causing the insert action on the action page to fail. After staring at it for a cumulative several hours, I finally realised it was because one of the form fields was tagged as id= instead of name= – such are the blatantly obvious things that can cause MEGO.
We managed to arrange some coverage from City TV for our Daily Bread food drive campaign, and wanted to capitalize on it, so we decided to have some jackets made up with our logo on the back. The only problem was, it was a totally last minute arrangement, so we ended up running to the mall and spending a good three quarters of an hour trying to find suitable jackets – they had to be white, and preferably made out of wool. The ones we got ended up being really nice, and then we killed half an hour in the food court waiting for the transfers to be applied. I’m happy to report that no food was consumed there – I’m pretty neurotic about what I eat, and it’s been a decade or so since I would venture into any kind of fast food establishment, but I digress…
We arrived at the Daily Bread HQ, where they were celebrating their annual volunteer Christmas dinner, and it was really the first time this year that I’ve felt anything remotely close to the holiday spirit. It was really nice, and good to see all these volunteers, many of them recipients of Food Bank donations, enjoying the fruits of their labours. A lot of nice, friendly people and their kids. Hardin worked on his interview skills while we arranged the unloading of over 3000 lbs of food, generously shipped by our star partners, The Messengers International. City caught it all on tape, and we managed to score a bit of a publicity coup, as well as contributing to a really worthwhile cause.
After that, there was reason to celebrate with a couple of gin and tonics before I blasted back into the city to check my friend and fellow genius Waleed Abdulhamid at the Trane Studio for a truly barnstorming concert. Those who were there, know exactly what I mean…
Currently reading: Motto magazine
Currently hearing: Further Adventures in Techno Soul (Ferox Records)
Currently watching: English Premier League football
Time you will never recover
There are certain headlines I come across every so often which instantly scream, ‘DO NOT CLICK!’ They warn of facile self-promotion disguising itself as comment. A recent example must be that annoying English guy from American Idol stating that Bob Dylan would never win American Idol. Now, needless to say I didn’t read the article for a number of reasons – most having to do with the limited number of hours in the day and the fact that the opinions of someone who thinks teenage singers should aspire to become the new Michael Bolton really don’t interest me – but I can get the gist of it just from the headline. The man who inflicted S-Club 7 on the world has the temerity to question the musical abilities of someone who has added immeasurably to the canon of popular music and is considered by many to be among the greatest American poets of the postwar era. Let’s just let history be the judge in that particular instance.
Speaking of annoying English guys, I made the mistake of clicking on Chris Hitchens’ recent absurd article about ‘why women aren’t funny’. I’m not going to provide a link to it here, out of humanitarian considerations, but suffice to say it’s patently ridiculous and full of asides like ‘you know what I mean’ and ‘am I wrong?’, prompting the appropriate responses – ‘No I don’t’ and ‘Yes’. I have two words for Mr. Hitchens – Sara Silverman. I might also remind him of the legions of men out there who are simply unfunny or the many more who seem to be missing the humour gene completely. Working in the tech sector, I meet them all the time. In any case, I thought that a preeminent literary critic would have better things to do with his time than a poorly considered ‘Men are from/Women are from’ schtick.
On a more interesting note, Malcolm Gladwell – sometime Toronto resident and lately of New York and the New Yorker – has penned a couple of insightful articles lately, one on Enron and another, which is actually a series of blog postings touching on recent celebrity racist outbursts, both of which are worth a look.
Finally, and totally unrelated, I must give a mention to emusic.com, which is like iTunes’ cheaper, cooler kid brother. They don’t have everything, but they have plenty of the good stuff, including today’s selection, and the subscription rates and lack of annoying DRM systems makes them preferable in my eyes. On another musical note, Onsulade’s DJ set at Therapy on Saturday night was a thing of beauty – mind blowing.
Currently reading: Taking a breather after finally finishing ‘A Short History of Everything’ by Bill Bryson
Currently hearing: In White Rooms – Booka Shade
Currently watching: The Killer – dir. John Woo