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That Rarest Gift
When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.
--Saki
Thursday, December 4, 1997
I've been chatting on the phone the last few days with fellow Seattle journaler Wally Glenn. He called to let me know that he was back on contract at Redmond, after a few months at other jobs, and to share some of the "specialness" associated with the new tasks he'll be doing. It's always problematic to take over something that was started by others.
I was able to let him know a slightly easier way to access the statistics (or as Letterman says, "sah-tistics") for his site than doing a lot of Unix stuff. There's more power the Unix way, but the default logs generated by NWNexus aren't bad. The drawbacks are mainly that unless your page gets a certain amount of traffic per day, it doesn't show on the list (but the pages I care about do get that minimum), and there isn't an easy way to get the referring links, which could be of interest sometimes. I'd still be doing the command line way, but they moved files around and I never managed to figure it out again. Turns out he is getting quite a bit more traffic than he thought he was!
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I'd be remiss not to comment on the Netly news article about the online journal stuff. I thought they were a little tough on Nick! Other than that, it seemed fair. It was followed by a lot of noise on diary-l about whether outsiders (non-journalers) were subscribed to the list.
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So Wally was talking on his show tonight about bad and good gifts, what with the holidays coming up and all. I think the worst gifts I ever got for Christmas I got at about the age of ten or eleven. I didn't have any special things I was craving that year, but the year before I think I had gotten an aquarium, which I had really liked! My mom and dad, who didn't communicate with each other very well at that time, each decided separately the next year to get me -- a clock radio! They were angry at each other, and I actually cried from -- not disappointment, but disillusionment, maybe? That my life just then didn't have that magic of childhood, and I hadn't made it to adult maturity yet to be able to shrug it off, that my parents couldn't read my mind and discover some glorious gift that I didn't even know I wanted. So my mother took her clock radio and returned it, and I used the one my father got, which was actually a cool travel alarm and radio that folded up, for some years after that.
Probably the gift I've received that had the most long-term effect was a little boxed set of Georgette Heyer paperbacks that my mother picked up as a last-minute "extra" gift when I was in junior high. She is still my favorite author, whom I've read over and over, these last twentyfive years or so.
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