I may have mentioned that actually blogging hasn't been happening lately. I was reminded at some point though, that I have a Tumblr blog which I think is pretty neat. It requires neither the conciseness and short-cleverness of Twitter, nor the actual thought behind making a real blog post. So point your feed readers here for links, videos, random thoughts, quotes, etc...

nonsensor.tumblr.com

No, the ellipsis isn't a tribute to Alex. In fact, this is all a tribute to me. On my blog. yep. Later, I will record my own tribute album to myself.

While reading this entertaining and silly rant, the likes of which are often seen on the internets, I started thinking about my own experiences with terrible clients, moving deadlines, and Comic Sans. And I started visiting URLs I hadn't thought about in about seven years (I got my first job in "the biz" in 2000, shortly before "the biz" went bust). So I bring you... a virtual tour of Mike's closeted work experience.

• K & I Sheetmetal. The debate over whether to include their "AND" in the URL was long enough I should have known what I was headed for. The mocks were beautiful, I was really proud. And then they said hey, Mike. Why don't you try ductwork! We love it! And there you have it. Scaling ductwork. The final version was converted to FrontPage. We were big on FrontPage server extensions, the original bad CMS. Perhaps not surprisingly, K&I never edited the site in the seven subsequent years.
• The Healthy Shakes. D'Frosta Shake is a semi-cultural icon in Pittsburgh. You can buy this thing in a gas station freezer, nuke it a couple minutes, and it becomes a milkshake. It has a cow graphic that looks like someone's little nephew Johnny drew. I blew their minds by drawing the cow from another angle. The cannibal fruits you see in this post were another cartoon I drew for the site. We actually sat in on a really frightening meeting at this company, a joint venture between the people who came up with the technology and a local ice cream company. Shouting, swearing across the table. This is just how business is done in the burgh, I'm pretty sure.
• Blooms Florist. Years of bad editing through the Mercantec SoftCart e-commerce package has perverted this design quite a bit, but you get the idea. Flowers of the future, right? SoftCart is gone, my company long ago folded, but oddly enough you can still order flowers.
  

I think these were the only public-facing sites I did at my first job, so there you have it... The embarrassing truth of my past.

For those of you enjoying a Dead Milkmen reference about now, congrats. For the rest of you, that's really just about how media impersonation of yours truly has come to an undeniable head. First it was underage British wizards, now tech video blog anchors. Specifically, Randall Bennett of Tech Check Daily in a story involving people lying about their identities on the web. Ah, yes.

Word to Randall for using one of the most incriminating pictures on the Internet to demonstrate my visage. But if some karaoke with my Weblogs, Inc. brethren is as bad as it gets for pics (and trust me, that is as bad as it gets), then I'm not doing too bad. And these pictures aren't his fault anyway. They're Barb's.