Today, however, something happened apart from a call last week from the Purchasing manager and my promise to get something on the screen. I futzed with the code a little bit today and by god some weird pushed back into my subconscious little voice suggested I try a couple of things. Nothing too radical: Steal the basics of the page design from one of the commercial sites on the web, modify it into some weird approximation of its former self, make sure it fit on a 640 X 480 screen and punt. Damned if it didn't work.

There were one or two tags used that I've never tried before and they were kind of slick. Style sheet tags and some interesting uses of the division marker. Normally that might have put me off, but for some reason I was ready to pick these pages apart and learn their logic. Pretty soon the day was gone and I hadn't noticed. That hasn't happened in a while and I suspect, when I get back tomorrow, I can pick up where I left off. That's nice. A light at the end of the tunnel. I'm looking forward now to doing a lot of work on the internal sites I'm responsible for. Just what I need: Work on this thing at night and work with another side of the same thing during the day. You read about people who do this in newspapers. They talk about them on the Public Television channel when they're raising money. None of these stories have a happy end.

More than that, for the first time in the over four years I've been at this job, I have a work station capable of handling web page design. I don't mean HTML and a browser. I use HomeSite, but I also use PhotoShop, Illustrator and Image Ready at home and I loaded them for the first time on this machine at work. Woof! Spoiled me rotten. Load PhotoShop, load Illustrator, load HomeSite, load a couple of Browser sessions, bring up the new 32 bit version of OnSite and then hop back and forth between them like bare feet on hot summer cement.

At home this would take time, if only because I could never load all that stuff together. They wouldn't fit. This thing at work has two Pentium II 450MHz processors and 384M of 100MHz RAM. God meant us to have dual processors and 384M of RAM. Actually, he meant for us to have 640M of RAM, it's just the word hasn't gotten around yet. Some of you think that eating regularly and making the rent each month is what life is about. I've had similar notions. Not so, not so. Life is about whipping between programs at the touch of a button faster than man or eye can see. (Life is also about some ancillary stuff like black asphalt on a late summer night on a Harley Davidson motorcycle under a full moon, the wind, warm as blood, blowing through your hair. True love and New York pizza round them out.)

All right, the Sole Proprietor is slobbering over toys. Stuff. The soul of a snail. True, true. The Sole Proprietor is without shame. Or sensitivity. Or soul. But this is Tuesday, the second day of the week. Soul doesn't even spit before Thursday night and never really reaches voice before Friday afternoon. (Are you having trouble ending this Sole Prop? It's your journal, just stop.)