15 August 1998: Non Paradiso, Non Purgatorio

I look over at the clock. It's not a surprise; I've been looking at it at closer and closer intervals throughout the day. What jars me more each time though is that I still haven't gotten up.

I'm not in bed. I'm at my computer at work. I'm willing to bet that one large slice of OMFBs reading that first paragraph assumed I was in bed and another slice at a computer, and that the small remaining fraction either imagined nothing and are dull beyond compare or imagined something off-the-wall. I myself would assume bed, being lazy and not a computer- or netaholic and furthermore assuming everyone is like me until learning otherwise. I wish I were the off-the-wall imaginer; for me being wholly awake and imaginative rarely coincide. Rambling, I remind myself, doesn't make me imaginative. Rambling can be proof of weariness, tedium, or that state of mind induced by sitting at a Wintel machine for over six hours without a pee break or a morsel to eat trying to create easily navigable web pages nothing but Microsoft Word and a basic knowledge of HTML, as here.

A large amount of data, over four years, for 50 states, in any of eight overlapping categories. Access or FoxPro, you suggest. Give me this and that information for these three groups over those years. Nope. Static tables is all I can produce. Adobe Acrobat, you suggest, so at least the tables will be attractive and easily printable for those unenlightened souls who still print. Nope. No can do. How about an image map so navigating among tables is attractive and simple. Never. I use Word to make the basic page and import the data from Excel and then tidy up the code and everything else.

Bolding the first word of a paragraph? Okay, but remember to replace all the occurrences that Word marks up with <B><P> with <P><B> (and </P></B> with </B></P>).

Using alternating colors in the rows of the static tables so it's easier to distinguish one from the next? Okay, but remember to change the background color from whatever six-digit invention Word used to a proper hexadecimal one.

Applying more than one attribute to the body ever at all in a file? Okay, but remember to go through every single fucking tag in the whole thing and change all the overlapping ones to nesting ones.

Word, the web authoring tool in the sixth circle of hell.