3.09.2003

 

Strap yourselves in. Your friendly neighborhood Hose Monster is about to tell you why the gentleman depicted below has earned divine status.



This strapping, handsome sir holds the responsibility for the beauty of the new Hose Monster Blog which now greets, which replaced that god awful Blogger template under which I labored for so long.

I find myself reacting to people with such cynicism sometimes that when people make efforts to simply do nice things for me, it affects me to such an pleasant extent. Some months ago I engaged in my first Instant Messenger chat (IM me today for the hell of it: Lisandro15) with Tom of the venerable Orby Online. I'm not exactly sure how we stumbled onto the topic, I think it might have had to do with his somewhat recent redesign of his page that got me to complimenting his new layout, discussing how much I hated mine, lamenting the fact that I am program-language (and mathematically) retarded and joking how he could redesign my page any time he wanted.

My hero Tom more or less responded, "sounds good to me."

I didn't really take him seriously, mostly because I imagine, without any real experience, that designing a web page is a serious undertaking, especially for a college student taking Spanish at a highly-regarded educational institution. (At this point I'll not comment on how wasting time on projects, like N64's Goldeneye [dating myself in the eyes of current undergraduates], is often a much more popular exercise of energy for college students than doing their actual work.) Anyway, the conversation more or less ended and we went back to our separate pursuits.

A month or so passed with no contact between Tom and I, and I forgot about our conversation. Forgot about it until another IM window appeared on my screen with a URL directing me to the inital mock-up of what has become the new HM. Enter my astonishment. I'm glad I live alone, for had someone been with me at that point, they would have heard me squeal with delight like the little girl who finally gets a pony for Christmas. Rather embarrassing for a dude preparing to enter his mid 20s.

Anyway, over the last couple of weeks, Tom has sent me various modifications to the redesign, and I have added very little commentary. What few comments I did have Tom incorporated with flawless precision to my great pleasure. And when the layout was finally finished, my hero Tom even did the nitty gritty work of uploading the new site and making sure everything worked. He even surprised me last Friday when I opened my page to see if I had any comments and instead finally had a beautiful new site.

So I'm exuberant with my new Hose Monster, and I hope you find it visually more pleasing. In the next few weeks, as law school permits, I might make some little modifications myself like changing the font of the posts and the color of my links, easy stuff I know how to do. But allow me to take this opportunity one more time to kiss the ass of my pal Tom for kindly making this site a happier place for all of us.

Now all we need to do is learn the identity of that woman above who has kindly decided to arch her ass to the sky for all of us.