Wake Up Call

August 4, 2005 D. H. McKee

Off

My stupid BlackBerry didn’t remind me of a late night conference call I needed to be in. So I reset it, and got a flood of emails in about the call. It’s from one of my guys in Thailand right now, hooking up with a big ISP. So I went to bed, expecting a loud wake-up call in the middle of the night. To my surprise, it didn’t happen until about 6:30am. So I’m now sitting in front of MSN (shudder) with a non-technical person from the far-east, who doesn’t speak/write much English, who is trying to install Linux. Actually, right now he’s trying to setup the server so I can SSH into it (or “telnet” into it, as he keeps putting it, despite my attempts to dissuade him from using telnet).
I hate MSN. I hate it because of the way “ppl c0mmunic8 on ti”. I hate it because of the latency that people introduce to others in the conversation, yet don’t expect it themselves (for example, I go to the washroom, come back and no less than ten messages from someone saying “hello?”, “you there”, “dude!”, etc.). I hate it for the very reasons specified above — it’s an impossible medium for tech support — worse than email, if you can believe that. I especially hate the smileys. Every time I get into an MSN conversation, I feel I’m trapped in a silent vaudevillian nightmare, where people have to over-exaggerate every action, lest the audience somehow fail to grasp the meaning ;). Now, with MSN, there’s the ability to make exaggerated smileys too, so I’m buried beneath an ethereal of throbbing speech bubbles and cute question mark icons that would make Care Bears diabetic.
I also hate how users can go offline without you noticing them do so. This is also a problem with cell phones for me.

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About This Site

As a guy who occasionally curates art shows and wrangles artists together, I often have to edit and post artist bios, profile pictures, and artwork images. This can be a problem, since many artists and writers aren’t used to selling themselves. Artists rarely know how to present their art for display in a brochure, and writers aren’t used to writing about themselves.

Writers often treat the bio like it’s an interview or something. Maybe like they’re having a conversation with you, the reader. While it may work sometimes, the most common way to write a bio is to write in the 3rd person.

I’m like those writers, and I’m talking to you directly, unlike the common way to do a bio. You should see my About page. It makes sense to me, since this is a bit which describes my blog’s website. When I get famous enough that I don’t have time to talk to you, I’ll have an intern write everything in 3rd person. Until then, you get to talk to me.

Like blogs of old, this one is a personal document of the comings and goings of me. Articles I’ve written, links I’ve posted, videos I liked, etc. Here, a first-person perspective is the way to go, at least for now. So, this is my site. I’m D. H. McKee, a sometimes artist, sometimes writer. Mostly just a guy on the internet.