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Support Your Neighborhood Web Bastards & Bitches

God Damn It! The damned website is out of date. Here it is the 4th of March and Flying Booger must be off celebrating Fat Tuesday. You'd think that my monthly fix of reading the Half-Mind Catalog would be more important than watching women flash their breasts and getting plastered.

All kidding aside. Being a web-bastard, grand master, grand mattress, beermeister, religious advisor, ad nauseum . . . can be quite time consuming. But try to have a real life for just a few days and some hasher is going to complain. Well, let them complain. At times, albiet few, there are some things a bit more important to life than hashing. I know, blasphemy.

If it upsets you enough that your local web-bastard hasn't updated the web site and you know the next run is two weeks away and you need to schedule a babysitter, give a call to the hash mismanagement. Not to complain, but to inquire about the next run. More likely than not, they will have some clue (unless you call them late on Saturday evening or on Fat Tuesday). Now if you know the run is tomorrow and the web page, hotline, or email group (try them all) still doesn't have the information, then call the web bastard, email group manager, or hotline organizer at 6:00 am on the morning of the run. During this call be prepared to volunteer your services to assist the poor guy. There might be something that you can do to help him with other hash duties that will free him to update the website, email, or hotline.

Some hashes enjoy the availability of more than one capable HTML editor/programmer. That's great, but they also enjoy having 60-80 people show up at a run or they happen to be in a town full of rocket scientists, programmers, and nerds. But it can also cause problems. For example, no two programmers write similar code. This leads to multitudes of difficulties if the different composers don't have easy access to each other and can't read minds. What happens if one uploads a page update while the other is editing the same page? And then the second bastard has the audacity to send his update just seconds after the first update was sent? Another contributing factor could be that the programmer doesn't insert enough descriptive comments into his code. For example "the next 5 lines display the gif of the sexy blonde that lifts her top to flash you when you scroll the mouse over her" (Fat Tuesday on my mind again). Now, to some programmers, these few lines of comments may seem unneeded because the couple of lines of HTML are so simple that even a hasher could understand what the code was intended to do. Well, that's just one programmer's opinion. And you know what they say about opinions.

Yep, I'm guilty of riding our web-bastard a little hard at times. Yeah, that sounds like debauchery, but it's purely mental. Often it's in good fun. More often it's because he volunteered to hare the run. And if the hare doesn't know when and where the run three days from now is . . . well, you get the idea. That's a matter for the hare raiser or other appointed mismanagement.

You've read it before on the rant page and will probably read it again: if you don't like the way things are getting done volunteer to lend a hand. Criticism isn't the answer. The hash, and the web page, will only survive through the diligence of those willing to pay their dues. And "paying your dues" means more than just coughing up your hash cash contribution.

To see if the web-bastard for Rocket Shitty H3 (Huntsville, AL) is keeping our website up to date go to www.rocketshitty.com. And while you're there, send him an email and let him know what you think. He could use a little pat on the back every now and then to let him know his efforts are appreciated. Once you've done that, go to your hash's website and email your poor web bastards and bitches and let them know what a great job they're doing.

- Smoking Wiener, Rocket Shitty HHH, Huntsville, Alabama USA

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