The Sole Proprietor designs these things to run comfortably on a 640 x 480 monitor and here a 1600 x 1200 display scrunched it up like a ball of paper in the middle of the screen. The Sole Proprietor uses an NEC P750 17" monitor at 800 X 600 with a Matrox Millennium card and 8M of RAM that he often bumps down to 640 x 480 to check for size. He'll work on this some more, but he's carping.

(OK, he set his monitor for 1600 x 1200. On a 17" monitor that makes his page look like a postage stamp, but it displayed properly under Netscape 3.04 and I.E. 4.1. Netscape still placed a greyed out scroll bar between the list of journal entries and the Ring Journal Logo, but it didn't wrap any of the lines. He'll put this off until the weekend. Or the millennium. Or maybe forever. He favors forever.)

Today was filled with vendors running around preparing to demonstrate their client server based reporting software, Hummingbird and Crystal Reports something or other as well as one internal client who was developing a Marimba application and wanted to test it on NT 3.51. Anyone out there remember NT 3.51? The Sole Proprietor dug out some diskettes with 3.51 on them, all 21 of them, and discovered that all was not right when the install bombed when it asked for diskette number 22.

And the interface. He'd forgotten the interface, Windows 3.1 only funky. He remembers thinking how cool the logo was when he first loaded it some four or five years ago and now it looks clunky and the dorky program groups look, well, like Windows 3.1. This business of growing older and the resultant short term memory loss is a lie. There's mid term and long term memory loss as well. Windows 3.1 has become some ancient memory from the past, kind of like his sixth year of life. He doesn't remember all that much about his sixth year and now he discovers he doesn't remember all that much about Windows 3.1 as well. He worked with the various flavors of 2. 2? He doesn't remember what it looks like either, let alone how to use it. Ah, well, we learn these things about ourselves as we grow (older). He just wishes it didn't grow so fast.

Given the number of guest book entries the Sole Proprietor has gotten to date, he is singularly impressed by someone like BaddGrrl who has over 2000. She had an entry from someone who was similarly impressed by that fact and moaned that he only had something like (and the Sole Proprietor forgets the number, it could have been many more) 100. One hundred? Four of the five entries in the Sole Proprietor's guest book are from friends who had to be coerced. Really coerced. Visited their offices once, twice, three times.

The one genuine entry had an interesting comment: "You probably have a lot more readers than journal signers." The Sole Proprietor is not quite sure of the reasoning used by his guest. It might be because he entered the Journal through the Ring after visiting BaddGrrl's site and there was no "please sign the journal please pretty please OK sniff" link when he tracked down the home page and signed in. There's one on the Journal page now. Along with a counter.

This week is roaring to a close. Raining out, so there haven't been any photographs except for the Kaiser Steelworker's union march in front of the Sole Proprietor's building yesterday, on their way to the new plaza in front of Oakland City Hall. He had a camera with him loaded with a roll of TMAX 400 black and white. Should have picked up the contact sheet today, but forgot. The vendors who were working furiously getting ready to sell his company their software tomorrow had some weird and interesting last minute difficulties that kept the Sole Proprietor late. He would have forgotten anyway. It was that kind of day.

Went in to the hospital lab for the blood test this morning and stayed to have breakfast in the hospital cafeteria. If they're going to take the Sole Proprietor's blood, he's going to take something back. Sounds weird, but its kind of nice to be up early and have breakfast at a different place. The hospital and cafeteria both are relatively empty at 7 to 7:30. The staff is busy in the rooms jacking the patients awake so they don't get a decent night's sleep. Dee-dle-dee-deep.