Breadcrumbs

Sometimes I feel like I need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Not those ghetto breadcrumbs that were so popular with the web all those (two) years ago, but real freakin’ breadcrumbs, like a pocket full of moldly bread and such. Seriously, how useless are web-based breadcrumbs, who have the nerve of being all hierarchical and such? I was born in a country founded on the complete and utter rejection of royal monarchies, and I’m not about to find myself ruled under such a navigational hierarchy. Breadcrumbs, you can go to hell as far as I’m concerned. Who’s mah boss, you ask? The sum-bitch ain’t been born yet.

And I spit on the ground just to make my point.

But really, too often I find myself in dark and shady neighborhoods of the interweb, and at some point I look up and wonder how the hell I ended up there. There are entire spheres of the web that are foreign to me. Assuming that the world is at least one percent as diverse as the web (note: it is), I’m sure I will find all sorts of new things to keep me busy until the day I die.

Case and point. Right now I have friends who are in Zambia, Madagascar, Antarctica and Duluth. Some are even in the United States. These are all places I have yet to explore fully, and until that happens I still have things to learn. Benkyo, benkyo, benkyo.

I’ve also been dabbling in drugs lately, and by drugs I mean JavaScript. Such ill-named substances as prototype and moo.fx and dojo and behaviour and scriptaculous have dominated my brain cells in the off-hours. Last night I wrote my first AJAX script, which sucked in a royal manner, but proved that I am capable of performing such nonsense on request.

These days I shop online with two windows open; one on Amazon and the other on Barnes & Noble. The cheapest of the two wins the order for that particular product. I often find myself simultaneously placing two orders with two different businesses. For this there is only reward and no obvious penalty, not in tax nor in shipping. No penalty, aside from the long-term consequences of my actions and the potential for a catastrophic economic collapse that has likely been predicted by Milton Friedman, that darling genius.

However, international financial ruin being something that I have not yet experienced, it would also be something worth keeping me busy. We’ll look at it that way.