Monday January 26 • 5:21

mood: Not tired. I should be tired. My eyes hurt, though.
song: “Anywhere With You,” Thirst

It’s late. Or would one say “early”?

I keep telling myself that I’ll go to bed earlier and get up earlier; this usual 4am to 11am thing starts to get a little tiring. I can’t help it, though. And it’s just getting worse. Pretty soon here I’ll grow feathers and be able to turn my head around 360_; I’ll perch on a tree and coo out melodies to the night creatures. I’ll explode into a twisted festival of shadows as I push myself off into the moonlight. The darkness, my ballet; in the morning I sleep.

Phhhyeah. Or not.

Maybe I just can’t sleep anymore. I’m in the constant “There’s so much to be done!” frame of mind — and when I’m not doing it, I worry about not doing it. Worrying isn’t restful.

So much for my New Year’s resolution: I’ve just not been doing a very good job pausing. You know how every year you think, “this one’s gonna be different, this is the one I’m going to follow through with all my resolutions,” and it never happens that way. I wanted to kick the New Year off with a solid goal and a steady head, you know, a big BANG. I started it with a bang, all right, just the wrong kind. It was more of a big splat maybe.

Wah wah. Cry cry. Stop being so pessimistic, Meg. It’s all about the journey, right?… Right? Somebody?

There there. Shh. You’ll live.

My thoughts are I just need to do a little winter cleaning and then I’ll feel better. I’m what the Latin language so gracefully calls a “packrateous”, in both my environmental surroundings and my mental ones. There is only so much you can keep; only so much you can worry about before you either have to throw stuff away or you forget it.

“Oh shoot! I was supposed to call so-and-so!” Or… “Was I supposed to do a show tonight?” Maybe even… “Hi! Nice to meet you. I’m… I am… uh…”

Well, first things first: I actually did start cleaning my room today. (55 gallon garbage sacks are my friends.) Though, organized musician is kind of an oxymoron sometimes… I mean, only speaking from one who knows.

Maybe this way my plans will be better planned. Maybe this way I’ll be healthier. Maybe this way I’ll have time to write more songs. Maybe this way I can spend more time pausing. Maybe this way I’ll be able to go to bed earlier… Yup. I think I am already growing some feathers.

Yours,
megan

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Friday January 09 • 3:11

mood: I’m pretty good, how ‘bout yourself?
song: “lost,” noir désir

Four Easy Steps to a New Web Site!

Step 1: design your web site!

Web sites can be a pain.

“Is it supposed to do that?” I said moving my cursor around the blue screen of my iMac. “It looks like the pictures disappear when you hold the mouse over ‘em.” I was smacking my gum, but after spending three hours working on the same bug with the “photos page,” the bubble was popped by a sharp look from across the room.
“No, it’s not supposed to do that.”
“Are you going to fix it?”
“No.”

Web sites can also be a lot of work.

See, we decided to update mine — keeping the same theme, but giving it a little bit of a smoother look/feel — but that’s always hard. You know, so many things going on: remembering to book the shows, send out the press releases, do the e-mails, write the songs, have the practices… so, it isn’t always easy to get around to it. It’s easier to go along with your normal life and realize suddenly that you have not updated the web site since September 1999 and that people have probably stopped visiting it because the ones that hung around back then can’t remember who you are because they haven’t been to one of your shows DUE to the fact you didn’t update any show info on your performances page…

But, maybe the decision was a pre-New Year’s resolution; Mike (our guitarist) said he’d do it.

“You know, more gifs, more jpegs, smoother, sleeker!” he said eagerly, and with fervent nods of approval from the rest of the band, we seconded his motion.

And I’m glad Mike said he’d do it, because if the band wanted me to do it… Well, let’s just say Mike has got it down: he has got the look, the lingo, and all the jargon you can pour milk over and eat for breakfast.

MIKE: I’m writing the script in html, which is basically the normal format for Scooby dooby gobbledygook…
ME: Um yeah… I agree. And the picture thingy thing is doing some weird thing on the guest book page. I think it’s sick.
MIKE: Yeah, the source code is a little screwy. It’ll be fine after the html is translated into the web host’s server. I don’t usually work with R2D2, it tends to C3PO on me, causing the BYOB to crash.
ME: Hate it when that happens…

So yeah, after spending hours and hours over the holidays, Mike finished a great new web site — all we had to do now is implement it. Simple, right?

Step 2: upload your new web site!

WRONG.

“I’ll launch it tonight, late, so no one sees the switch over,” Mike said just a few days ago when he had finished with the design. It seemed like a plan to me.
“Call me if you need to,” I told him.

So, picture our Mike, bent severely over his computer’s keyboard, tapping out bits of argot into a computer screen. A pale glow spilt onto his face and the lonely language of his fingers on the keys told him he was well on his way to uploading our new web site. But Alas! Sacré bleu! What is this? It was then that Mike noticed our hosting company did not support the script our new web site was using for its “guestbook” feature.
“Looks like the only one it supports — which seems to be obscure — is one that we don’t have…” Mike called me, “So I called Tech Support and they said we have to switch from the service we have now [we’ll call it Service 1] to another [which we’ll call Service 2].”

“Sure, why not,” I agreed. Whatever that means.

Later that night…

“Well, it looks like they need us to call the Sales Department tomorrow when it opens…” Mike called again, “Even though this is a technical issue…”

The very next day…

As directed by Sales, we started the unsubscribing from Service 1 and the subscribing to Service 2 process.

“It says here that we need a name and password to access the domain name,” the guitarist was talking to Sales. “But, Megan bought the domain name so long ago that she can’t remember what they are; can you e-mail that info?”
“We can’t do that, no.”

So I called them and spent over 15 minutes figuring out riddles and answers to secret questions that would verify to Sales that I really was me. But how am I supposed to remember what my favorite city was in 1999?

Half an hour later we had it — they gave in and issued us a new user name and password and we continued on our journey.

The cool thing about switching from Service 1 to Service 2 is that you get more features with the latter and it’s cheaper… who knows why.

“No it didn’t work that time either, try it again,” the Sales Department said when we tried to enter the credit card number in. “Try a different card. Try again on that card. Do you have another one? It’s still not going through…”

We kept trying, and by the time the bank called doing a Fraud Check, Mike and my credit cards together had been charged 15 times for the same thing — no lie.

“Oops,” said Sales, “Try again later.”

Later…

Finally we paid for the new service and hooked it up, nice and shiny. Oh, but wait, Sales forgot to tell us our domain name needed to be transferred.

Sometime after that…

“So wait, you’re telling me it’s going to take three days to transfer our domain name to another Service YOU offer?” Mike was a little mad. Mike never gets mad.

“Yes, about three days,” Sales said.
“The tech department told me it would take three hours to get the new site up…”

On top of losing our web site for a few days, we lost our e-mail.

Not long after…

“NO EMAIL?!?!” I whined.
“Yes,” Mike explained, “and it doesn’t get forwarded to the host’s server, so if someone sends you something while our site’s down, it’ll either bounce back to them, or it’ll get lost in the ether…”

Oh! Why good timing was so unkind to me I will never know. We all were expecting e-mails about the upcoming show at the Red Devil Lounge. I created a new e-mail and mailed my e-mail list about it.

Most people thought we had dropped off the face of the earth: “Nothing’s working? What has happened to your web site?”


Step 3: launch your site!

Well, after about two-dozen calls to Tech Support and Sales, and having our problem forwarded to the company’s Engineering Department, three days later our site was up. Finally. Beauty. Right there on the screen. Mike had worked so hard on making the site, but I think he worked twice as hard trying to launch it.

And the e-mail started to work again. And the clouds parted and the sun came out and a little blue bird came and rested on my shoulder. And Mike went to get something to eat and go take a nap.

And all was back to normal (as much as it ever was.)

Step 4: enjoy your new web site!

Yours,
megan