My wife (Carolyn) just had knee surgery to repair a torn medial meniscus, so I’ll be doing double-duty at home for a while to make sure she can take it easy. As a result, I’m going to be slower replying to blog comments, email and forum messages for a few days.
Carolyn had her first physical therapy session this morning, and she’s doing very well so far. I had the same surgery a few years back and remember recovering very quickly, and thankfully it looks like her recovery will also be quick.
As much as I love the web and am incredibly thankful for the opportunities it has provided for me, days like today make me loathe its anonymity. The day started off with a nasty bout of comment spam, followed at midday by dealing with someone posting FeedDemon serial numbers (since disabled) to a warez site, then ended with a bizarre series of threats from a disgruntled Dreamweaver user. Before I continue, take a look at this Google Groups search for some background information.
As you can see, someone has made several posts to various Macromedia newsgroups claiming that TopStyle has hijacked Dreamweaver. His complaint is that every time he tries to open a CSS file in Dreamweaver, it opens in TopStyle instead. And since he installed the trial version of TopStyle, it’s asking him to register it. Now, the reason TopStyle keeps being opened is actually due to a bug in Dreamweaver. Every time you start Dreamweaver, it automatically detects TopStyle and sets it as the default CSS editor – even if you’ve removed it from the “File Types / Editors” list in Dreamweaver’s preferences. So no matter what you do, if you have TopStyle installed, Dreamweaver uses it as the external CSS editor.
Here’s the kicker: this same person has emailed me several times and threatened to start a class action lawsuit against my company unless I pay him $1,000.00 by September 9. Here’s a quote:
“I have an attorney on the staff of my company and we are going to be moving aggressively against companies using unscrupulous marketing practices such as yours. The time we lost today cost us about $1,000. That is the amount that will make us go away. Otherwise we are going to seek a class action lawsuit against you. We will start by finding others who have been damaged by your practices. This will be done with a Google Adwords ad that comes up each time someone enters topstyle or bradsoft into Google. Send the check for $1,000 to: [address removed]”
Now, obviously this guy has a loose wire, and his threat is laughable – if he ever tried to file suit, he would be in hot water for extortion. But being a one-man-show, it’s incredibly hard for me to spend time dealing with people like this – yet I have to, because their posts to public newsgroups show up in Google searches for my software.
Does anyone else have to deal with this kind of garbage, and if so, how do you handle it?
Just got back from my first bike ride since having surgery a few months back, and it felt great to hit the road again. I’m definitely out of shape compared to before the surgery – in my bike shorts, I probably looked like a can of biscuits exploded – but I did manage to ride the hills without keeling over.
The highlight of the ride was when I saw this little feller in the road:
Yes, that’s a rattlesnake, and it’s actually the second time I’ve seen one while biking. The first time was much more memorable. See, I had gone for a longer ride that time, and had to stop for a nature call. No restroom was in sight, so I climbed down an embankment where I would be hidden from passers-by. I had barely started to take care of business when I heard a very loud rattle directly in front of me. Back then I had no idea there were rattlesnakes here in Tennessee, but there was no mistaking that sound. I looked up to see a medium-sized rattler just a couple feet away, coiled up and looking very angry at me for soiling his favorite resting place.
Now, for the sake of my female readers, I should explain that when a guy is exposed like that, he definitely doesn’t want to see something with sharp fangs staring at him.
Luckily, I was able to back away – veerrryyy slowly – and avoid an embarrassing bite.
Not long after that ride, I was biking in the very same spot when an owl suddenly swooped down in front in me, grabbed a snake that was hiding in some grass, then flew back in front of me with the snake dangling from its talons. I remember thinking to myself, “I hope that’s the same damn snake that surprised me.”
Best wishes to Feedster‘s Scott Johnson, who just announced his engagement.
…that I still haven’t recovered :)
The trip was actually a birthday gift for my Dad from his three sons, and we all had a great time. We stayed at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, which is smack dab in the middle of Bourbon Street. My room had a balcony overlooking the street, which was a great place to hang out and watch the freaks go by (until we joined them, of course). Apparently the Mardi Gras atmosphere stays alive all year on Bourbon Street – the number of sober people rapidly declined as the night wore on, and the number of bead-tossers rapidly increased. I was honored to have a young lady toss me some beads and ask me to strip in return, but given that I’m a married man I wasn’t about to shed any clothes (now, if she would’ve tossed me an iPod instead of beads…).
Apart from the wild night life, other highlights included a trip to the Voodoo Museum, a tour of the Honey Island Swamp (complete with a 14ft alligator that was coaxed out of hiding with a few marshmallows), and a Louis Armstrong parade that was part of the Satchmo SummerFest. The parade may have been my favorite – watching the entire street dance to the sound of the marching New Orleans jazz band was quite a treat. Rock-n-roll may have its share of party music, but it’s nothing compared to live New Orleans jazz.
Of course, the downside of having a balcony overlooking Bourbon Street is that the noise from the crowd keeps going until daybreak, so I’ve hardly slept since Friday. Recuperating from three late nights in a row is making me feel my age!
I’m off to New Orleans for a long weekend to celebrate my Dad’s birthday. Be back Tuesday!
Dave Winer writes about his experience quitting smoking, and it reminds me of my experience quitting. Many years ago I was a smoker, and it took a couple of tries before I quit successfully.
My first attempt at quitting was doomed to failure. See, I noticed that my cravings were stronger when my friends and I went bar-hopping, so I told myself I’d only smoke when I was drinking. The result? I drank more often. Duh.
So I quit cold turkey, and that was well over a decade ago. I’ve smoked one time since then, about three years ago – not a perfect record, but not bad. The thing that made it easier to quit was that I stopped smoking right after the end of a relationship gone sour. I figured as long as I was giving up one bad habit, I might as well give up smoking at the same time.
Oh, and here’s another story about Isaac I really like:
Every week my wife takes him to a nearby nature center where he learns about all sorts of things, including rocks, bugs, birds, and – on one occasion – the phases of the moon. At the end of this class, the teacher handed out a black-and-white line drawing of the moon and asked the kids color it.
Walking around the classroom, the teacher was pleased to see so many kids using their yellow crayons to color the drawing. When she reached Isaac’s desk, though, she stopped and looked concerned. You see, rather than carefully coloring the moon, Isaac had grabbed a handful of crayons and attacked the drawing with random slashes of brown, green, gray and purple. The puzzled teacher asked him what he was doing, and Isaac – clearly happy with his creation – replied that he was drawing the inside of the moon.
I’m happy to report, too, that my three-year-old daughter, Hannah, likewise shows plenty of signs of thinking for herself. Not too long ago she was gleefully drawing a picture which looked sort of – but not entirely – like someone’s foot. I sat down next to her and asked what she was drawing, and she grinned and replied, “an evil toe!” then started laughing maniacally.
Okay, so maybe that’s more cause for alarm than hope, but I’m still proud of her.
Last week my son Isaac turned five – which means that TopStyle is also five years old. You see, both of them were born the same day. And that day was certainly among the most stressful I’ve ever had.
I spent several months working hard on TopStyle 1.0, and was very nervous about its release since I had the ghost of HomeSite hovering over me. I remember putting in countless 18-hour work days making sure that the release would go smoothly, and a few hours after posting the final release I hit the bed, exhausted.
A couple of hours later my wife woke me up to tell me her water had just broke – five weeks earlier than expected.
Being the sensitive guy I am, I tried to convince her that she was simply having bladder control problems. Let’s just say that this line of reasoning didn’t meet with much acceptance. So, off to the hospital we went, me driving like a bat out of hell, with my wife acting surprisingly relaxed about the whole thing.
Many hours and many small emergencies later, Isaac decided to finally greet the world.
When I look back on the five years since that day, it’s clear that one of my biggest concerns with raising Isaac has been how to gradually expose him to popular culture without allowing it to turn him into a mindless consumer. As much as I enjoy a lot of our pop culture, I’m also really bothered by how it tries to feed kids an over-abundance of idiotic, soul-less crap.
In the hopes that he’d learn to actually appreciate music rather than believe it’s something that only surgically altered pop stars can produce, my wife and I started taking him to a weekly music class with a group of other toddlers. During one of these classes, the instructor asked every child to pick out a drum and sing a song while beating it. Isaac dutifully grabbed a bongo drum and bashed it senseless, but rather than sing along, he kept his mouth shut tight. After a little while the instructor asked him why he wasn’t singing, and my then three-year-old son replied very matter-of-factly, “because it’s an instrumental,” then went right back to banging away.
That’s when I knew the kid was going to be just fine :)
My wife and I decided to take off for a long weekend, and I’m leaving the computer at home to gather dust. I’ll be back July 5, so if you send a support question my way please don’t take it personally if you don’t hear back from me for a few days :)