in case you're wondering where your host has been, he's wondering the same thing. i haven't intended to checkout like i have but just got caught in the wake of change. with a new job comes new routines, new people, new focus, new hours, and quite simply just new, new and some more new. now that i'm going through it i realize i was in great need for some more 'new' in my life. and aside from the neglect this part of my world is seeing, things are going swimmingly, i just haven't yet hit on a steady cadence for my days.

last night while i cooked dinner, bella sat at the counter and sketched me (below). the details are great, from the print on my shirt (which is dead-on) to the korean bulgogi in the skillet (which was so good), to my cable-wrap glasses (which are mightily bent right now) to the smile and wide-eyed gaze (sleep deprived delirium) her eye was quite succinct. unfortunately that keen eye had to also nail my flared and stubby legs. dumb luck that.

i share in a small professional consortium of sorts. there's just three of us and i am for certain the pup of the litter. one of the two taught me everything i know about web design and the other everything i know about web development. we all used to work together. now we don't even live in the same state and in one case not even the same country.

several years back in a ski lodge atop the canadian rockies, the three of us made five-year projections about our professional lives. one of us nailed it, one surpassed it and one, well, one keeps meandering towards the light but hasn't yet held a straight line to its source.

chris wanted to create a jackpot product. a sophisticated and enticing utility that would allow him to support his home while investing his energy in something he believed in. four years later he is performing enterprise-level implementations of a wiki-fashioned, microsoft-centric, intranet manager he calls thoughtFarmer.

bookguy privately covets the notion of hopping industries. i won't get into the specifics of his aspiration but the venture would offer him new sorts of mental exercises using his very impressive technology chops as well as his gift for oration and unavoidably, leadership. he is unconsciously adrift towards such a change, he just hasn't noticed the oar in his hand yet. i predict he will soon look down and see it though and when he does decide to lower it into the water it's better than a done deal.

and i, i managed to stay diligent and patient about things until i secured a position with the one institution in my city that i hoped to secure a position with. and time has aged it well.

i'm glad to see the three of us trending in such positive directions and i wish my cohorts much success. i wish myself an ounce more, or as bella would say, a worm's bite more, than them because as the runt of the litter, i need to be that much better to hold my own on our next ski boondoggle.

i start my new job today. you should have seen me last night. it was like the night before the first day of school. picking out my clothes. getting all my desk supplies organized in my book-bag. double-checking my alarm clock, which is to say i asked marty twice if she had set her alarm. she had.

and check this out. here is the sort of stuff my new boss does.


and, for reference sake this has been the nature of my work to date.


i ask, how could two fellas with such disparate, yet brilliant, subjects of expertise create anything short of breathtaking and wondrous? i agree, we just can't miss. this is going to be a super-fun and rollicking experience.

in preparation for my new job, and more significantly, my exodus from my previous one, i'm going to take the week off. i'll be back on the 10th.

i've been with my current employer weeks shy of fourteen years. it is the only company i've worked for in my adult life and i started in their lowest non-janitorial position.

yesterday morning in a windowless conference room i said to my boss the words "i'm cooked" and slid a resignation letter across the table towards him. he looked at the document and softly said "son of a bitch".

two days earlier i penned my signature at the base of a written job offer. to that, if someone handed me a blank piece of paper and asked me to describe my dream gig, my notes would not have been as appealing as the position outlined in what i put my name to here.

bookguy, who offered me sage and consistent counsel through my job quest, said i should have quit long ago not because it was the right thing to do professionally but because i seemed to be a natural at writing resignation letters. in thinking back to crafting the brief message, the words did flow with great ease from my keyboard which i guess says about all there is to say.

the following subject was discussed during one of the more recent work pow-wows at my desk. the guy talking is one of the youngest coders in our group and he's also probably in the best shape of anyone in the office, but as always is the case in our industry, his physique is beginning to slide which is starting to plague his thoughts. i assured him that if he stays in technology just a few more years, the problem will iron itself out because he will no longer be able to bend over in the first place. i didn't smile or laugh when i said it and he studied me seriously for a moment before waving me off laughing. i then gave him a reassuring, yet pitying, smile. in my tenure, i've watched many young men go through this body image revelation. no two really accept it the same so it's always a treat to watch.

in a related aside, many years ago bookguy said something to me that stuck firm since. we were on the elevator going to lunch and he told me he could tell if someone was overweight by seeing nothing but their shoes. curious i tested him and he was repeatedly spot on. when i asked how he was doing it he said the laced knots on their shoes were not centered on the tongue but more towards the inside of their body and this was because they pull their foot up onto their knee to tie it, versus leaning over and tying them straight on.

can't wait to send the kid at work into a further tailspin by applying this observation to him.

and i know your first impulse is to be jealous of the insightful and meaningful conversations that seem to routinely gravitate towards me every day. to that i say, you should be jealous. but you should also be chagrined that you don't get to hear all the juicier ones to blue for the net.

i'm thankful to work in an industry that does not include the following phrases.

• second shift
• third shift
• or night shift

i'm unthankful that the advent of the pager is what made the removal of those terms possible.

click to watch
more than one person has commented to me that they imagine this is how i am at work. it is clear to me that those people either ...

1. work with me currently
2. worked with me in the past
3. have or had a hidden camera set up in my office.

john locke from the first season of Lost

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. 37 years in 5 minutes

i'm still recovering from what has been a very rollicking month. hope to be back up to par next week.

with life on the web your efforts rarely seem to generate appropriate affection. it's a one-way forum and those that play, or keep playing at least, know this. so to receive multiple rewards/kudos in a short span of time is pretty unprecedented, especially for a one-trick hack like myself. this week felt like troy-appreciation week. i don't want to get into the nature of the various puffs of wind sent up my skirt but just know puffs of air were billowing all around my catholic school girl plaid (and not the kind of puffs that make alex snap his head up and say inquisitively, 'GAS?').

one thing i will share with you though. on the day before the everyman's photos were released, the site received 7,000 requests. on the day the photos were released it satisfied, quite admirably might i add, 200,000 requests. i think the everyman should have no problem besting its 1,000,000 request month record.

going to bed now. g'night.

p.s. if walt and i have another child, a son, i'm going to fight hard to name him Marcher.

i owe a personal customer a major site addition by wednesday. i owe work two site mockups by friday. and then of course there's that modest time-drain called the everyman which will be available to the public (and judges) on tuesday of next week. the above is to say i will most certainly be out to lunch the remainder of the week.

and any who see me during this run do not be alarmed by my disheveled appearance, unshaven chin whiskers or maniacal grin. i'm a closet masochist. reminds me of college. marty hates me when i self-abuse. but, marty didn't like college too much either. and for those that warn me of the pending crash given my elevated levels of sugar and caffeine, you can't come down if you never stop the intravenous delivery of said sugar and caffeine. it's children's math really.

and when i get in these jags i totally feel like ray liota at the end goodfellas. unfortunately i look a bit like him too. do you know what it takes to look like a guy strung out on cocaine when you're not, yourself, using cocaine? it's no minor achievement, i gotta tell ya.

if someone chooses to not use their sick days and comes to work ill, jettisoning their poisoned dna throughout the office, other presently healthy employees should have the right to use the diseased individual's sick-days (since they seem disinclined to). i mean why shouldn't the un-sick folks get to stay that way, un-sick? as for who should get first dibs on these confiscated privileges, a neurosis-based pecking order seems to make sense. what's one more bulleted list to corporate america?

granted, such an intelligent selection process would more than guarantee myself first rights to any neglected sick day. and don't think i'd only take honors in my current office because i'd win this lottery in your office, your partner's office, the office of every person you've ever known or done business with. you're reading the words of a man who can see germs as easily as i can see if you flushed the toilet in my home. and i'm not talking about detecting your day-after-the-super-bowl bowel movement, but your near-clear, post-bally's workout urine. hell, on a good day i could tell you the score without even walking into the john.

and, if i hear one more person tell me they're beyond the point of contagion i'm going to hack a spittle-laden sneeze on their keyboard and say "yeah, me too."

TROY
yes there was a hiccup and the archives didn't happen for about four months.

EXECUTIVE
four months! that's one hell of a hiccup.

TROY
true enough. let's call it more of a wet belch.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. go hide

to say i like immediate gratification would be like saying i like to urinate just once a day. although, with me, it's not really about immediate gratification as much as it is about constant gratification. think intravenous drip.

while there are numerous personal benefits, societal downsides exist. i recently told a co-worker how i was considered a very high-maintenance employee. he asked...

it's quite remarkable what a fella can achieve when he's not trying to entertain a bunch of folks he doesn't even know.

what i saw monday @ 4pm


and, what i saw tuesday @ 4pm

a guy i know listed me as a reference for a job he is applying for. when talking with his potential employer on the phone yesterday, this memory kept creeping into the room making me neurotic about all of my word selections.

TROY
so i think i may have hit the wall yesterday.

MARTY
what? you? you mean you call falling asleep in the middle of a party with 10 people in the room and the super bowl blaring on the tv, hitting the wall? no, that's totally normal behavior.

i had a meeting with some potential web customers last night. wanting to appear deceptively alert, i took a quick power nap before rushing out the door to meet them. upon getting home marty asked me why i had marker all over the side of my face. further inspection found that alex scrawled his first red-permanent marker mural on the right half of my head while i was dozing. on the good side, the kid shows promise. on the better side, even with my face all marked up, i got the gig. i'm thankful to be in an industry where the talent is expected to be more on the bent side than not.

the new guy's wife

(this definitely qualifies as a string of words i never expected to be said to me in conversation. it also qualifies as one of the most amazing string of words ever said to me in conversation.)

a guy and i were talking at work about what it would be like to go to jail, like for-real jail. this guy is a pretty normal looking dude. normal height, normal weight, has to shave everyday, beginning to lose his hair. you know normal dude. additionally, he doesn't have a feminine thread in him. given all of this, i had to set the boy straight. now oddly enough, after defending my standing as the more appealing prison bitch, i swear this guy didn't look at me the same the rest of the day. is there such a thing as a corporate cube bitch? if so, i'm afraid i may already be spoken for.

remember the story i told a week or two ago about the 4-yr old kid in my neighborhood who peed funny and how i thought i would become a legend if i urinated like him in my office commode . i've had more than one person tell me to stone-up and just go ahead and whiz funny in the john, becoming said legend. something about how i'm always preaching memorable moments and all.

my response to them is that i would but when the legend was retold by the guys i work with it would begin like this: the up-side is they would remember me, perhaps not by name, but they would remember me, and hence the legendary status.

while playing outside at the neighbors house, bella ran up to me and said she had to go pee. "so go pee" i told her. she promptly whipped down her pants, squatted and proceeded to urinate in the grass pretty much right where she was standing when she asked the question.

some of you may think that the odd part of this story is that i not only encourage but actually instruct my child to drop trow and whiz in someone else's lawn, but it is not. nor is it in the detail that one of the boys playing with us, a four year old, ran up behind bella, laid down on the ground desperately trying to see the pee come out. i'm watching this little guy watching my daughter and thought, man this kid is a freakshow.

ten minutes later freakshow-boy announces his own need to urinate. his mom, like me, told him to go ahead and go. so he pulled the bottom of his shirt up to his neck, pinching it under his chin. he then pushed his pants and underwear down to his ankles and jutted his groin out in front of him as if he were trying to form the letter C for some seseme street skit. now for those of you out there certain this nearly naked pose is the weird part of my story, slow down. the weird part is not his body's pose, but what he did with his hands during the stance ... using both hands, he made a diamond shape around his penis/genitals, framing them while he peed. as i'm taking this whole vision in, i spied bella squatting a few feet from him studying the heck out of this dude's urination technique. i considered yelling at her to leave the freak alone while he peed but was myself too transfixed for such petty administration. so we both, father and daughter, watched the 4 year old from next door empty his bladder into the front yard of his home.

in closing, i can't even tell you how much i'm looking forward to my next work day where i can casually stroll to the bathroom, cram my polo shirt up under my chin, lower my pants and boxers to my ankles, jut my doughy paunch forward, letter-C-style, and aim for the urinal which will be an impressive four feet away. the only real question left will be if others in the bathroom will lay on the ground (ala freakshow) or simply squat (ala bella) to observe, what i'm sure they will all agree is, a mesmerizing vision to behold.