Month: August 2007

I know everyone loves it when I discuss my lady parts.

Once again the hormones did what ever they wanted to do and caused a ruckus. Most of the month I am your average semi functioning passive aggressive. But 2 or 3 hours before the (euphemism) I become just plain aggressive. Even hostile. Lending weight to that old saw that a woman can’t become president because she’ll get her period and nuke some innocent country. Like thats so much worse than destroying a nation so we can have more cheap oil. And how well that has worked with gas costing over 3 bucks a gallon. Oh right, that’s because a hurricane destroyed some oil rigs. And it’s definitely not because Haliburton is going to make money hand over fist whatever way the cookie crumbles.

Mens, thank your stars Hilary is menopausal.
I am joking in case you didn’t know.
So my little hegemony was rattled because no one bought toilet paper for one whole day.
One.Whole.Day.
I am 36 years old. I have not had to live like a college student with milk crates for furniture and paper towels,napkins or tissue paper for toilet paper since I was 21. Part of being a grown up is buying the T.P. before it runs out.
If you can’t manage to do that- then as the person to use the last sheet of toilet paper you are responsible for going out and buying some more. If you fail at this small task either because you plain don’t give a crap or you just don’t notice or you are too much of a sensitive artist to be bothered with such petty details, then you are an asshole.
I live with 3 guys (not what you think) all of them are rather challenged when it comes to domestic affairs. I’ve long since given up on hoping they will clean. But I will fight them to the death on the toilet paper buying and replacing issue.
Normally I grumble under my breath and stomp about. That’s my passive aggressive mode and where I live for 3 weeks each month. But today I bitched about it until my boyfriend threw dishes.
I admit that shut me up.
Speaking of passive aggressiveness there is a site called passiveaggressivenotes.com. I am going to submit my note that I taped to the bathroom door.

Massive TV finally picked up

They came and got it today. Of course I wasn’t home when the woman from the charity called to say they were on their way. At first I was all bitchy and huffy because she’d already made me stay home all day on Tuesday waiting around for her and she never showed. To her credit she did call me at 10:30 pm to explain,but still, annoying.

Luckily the sportsfan was home and even helped them get it’s huge bulk down the stairs. I told her and told her she would need at least 2 strong dudes to help her. She brought one dude and herself.

But now some under-privileged kids have a mini theater sized TV to entertain them and I no longer have a TV the size of a closet hogging my back room!

Everyone wins.
ashley really needs a tv
Except this one girl who was so desperate to get the set that she actually emailed me a photo of herself in either a bra and underwear or a swimsuit…

Makes me wonder if I was a dude what influence that may have had on me…if I’d be all like screw those kids the hottie gets the TV.

Great Success!

I met up with my father last night to talk about his site and etc but I was so happy to see how fabulous he is looking these days. What a difference a summer in the garden can make. He gave me some tomato and basil from the garden-and they were delicious.

We made serious headway with plans for the site,too. He showed me the printouts of the site so we could talk about content and I was happy to see the site prints very well.

We agreed that Georgia was a fine font and we agreed to get rid of all the strange punctuation. In my defense I copied and pasted the content from the old site into the new one and perhaps, like the game of telephone, things became even more confused during this process. All sites should have correct spelling and grammar and punctuation but literary sites especially have to watch this area.

I feel bad that my dad has felt like he had egg on his face all this time because of the awkward punctuation. I always meant to do as he asked but always got side tracked by some design issue.

So I have officially nabbed him as editor! And he should be good at it because he did it for a magazine for many years.

The biggest achievement was the both of us agreeing that he needs to switch hosts. Switching hosts will save him over 140 dollars a year and greatly improve our options for expanding the site. All in all it was a very good meeting.

The tomatoes and basil went right into the pasta sauce for my dinner. Yum.

Abandon Cart All Ye Who Enter Here

” Anyone can write a book. Anyone can publish a book. It takes a genius to sell a book “
-Alfred Knopf

Today I read an email from my dad about a discussion I opened on how happy he was with his site. I was never 100% satisfied with it.
My dad is a print man. He didn’t like the font I picked or the punctuation mistakes.I just knew it was still slightly confused and had too much repeat content. I also knew that as an online shopping experience it didn’t cut it. But I didn’t feel I had the right to change the content of the site.Sure, I took new photos and connected a lot of them to LightBox. I made the site look more up to date. I changed it from static HTML pages to PHP…but lack of bells and whistles weren’t the problem. The site’s goal is to sell books. We don’t make it easy to sell books from the Web site. Game Over.

This is entirely due to the fact that on his host it wasn’t possible to have a mySQL database connection until a few weeks ago. This cut us out from using ZenCart or PHPShop or Cubecart. So we made due with the host’s store building program (Shopsite Starter) that only allows you to have 15 products for sale in the store at any time. Talk about limiting!
My dad has more than 50 titles for sale. I tried to convince him to upgrade to the second level of Shopsite which cost the same as what one month of hosting costs-doubling his costs. He balked. I don’t blame him. For what he pays he could have (mt) Media Temple’s awesome service. But switching an entire site is a big job as everyone knows. I am seriously going to suggest it, however.
Hosting has advanced and the days of hosts being able to charge business prices while providing totally crap service are pretty much gone.
Until we can sell every single title from the same shopping cart service, the site will remain confusing and confused. I mean, it is hard enough these days to sell books. Harder even still to sell obscure niche literature. Which is why we have to provide the clearest, easiest shopping experience to my dad’s customers.

Have any advice? Is it better to offer only 15 books for sale (but then what to do with the 40 other books on the site, just not even show them at all?). Should I chuck Shopsite and Mercantec and only use Paypal? I’d love to steer clear of Paypal for the time being.

Should I make the jump to (mt)?