delgrosso dot com

The two monitors on my desk give me a combined desktop area of 6,400,000 pixels.

“Wow,” I hear you say, “that is indeed a metric assload of pixels.” So it would be no surprise, statistically speaking, if at least one or two of those pixels were broken. Dead, as it were. Le petit pixel mort, as they say in Spain.

But no. I’ve been lucky to have two awesome Apple cinema displays that are pixel-perfect. “A rarity!” you cry out. And you would be right.

Until this morning.

The first thing I noticed when I started working was an irritant in my left eye, like a tiny ache. I turned my head to the left, and it was gone. Looking forward again, it was back. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the irritant wasn’t in my eye, but was in fact on the far side of my left monitor. A stuck pixel.

A stuck pixel is, in my opinion, an order of magnitude worse than a dead one. A dead pixel emits no light, so if you have a dark desktop area (like I do), it simply blends into the background, and you don’t notice it unless you’re looking at a window directly over it.

But this pixel on my left side, it is stuck. On green. Not a light green, but a glowing neon green. It has been irritating my peripheral vision all morning long. It stares at me, like an evil green Lovecraftian eye. Watching me. Tormenting me. Judging me. When I look directly at it, it looks away¹, feigning innocence. But I know it’s there, casting its green gaze upon me all through the day.

I hope it goes away on its own. Perhaps one day it will tire of watching me, and return to the inky blackness from whence it came. I can only hope.

Apparently tomorrow is some sort of big holiday. Who knew, right? Hallmark is always making up these crappy holidays just to get people to buy more $8 musical cards.

Nevertheless, it has come to my attention that I did not send each and every one of my dear friends an individualized holiday greeting card. A situation that I will attempt to remedy, right this instant, by providing a template you can use to create your very own personalized holiday greeting from yours truly.

Simply print out this post, circle and/or insert your chosen personalizations, and voilà - a heartfelt holiday wish from me. You’re so very welcome.

- – - – - – - >cut here< – - – - – - – -

Dear _____,

Wow, another whole year has gone by. Hey, remember that day I [made a hilarious tweet / got your dog drunk / hit on your aunt / got you out of that speeding ticket]? That was so crazy. And then there was the time you [Favr'd my tweet / threw up on my kitchen floor / made that awful gazpacho / hit a pedestrian with your Segway]. It’s been a wild year, huh? Yeah.

You’ve been such a great friend ever since we met [in third grade / on Twitter / at reform school / in the confessional], and I just wanted to wish you the happiest [Christmas / Chanukah / Kwanzaa / Ramadan / parole] ever.

My best wishes to you and your [lovely spouse / girlfriend / boyfriend / mother that you still live with at age 36 / sexually ambiguous live-in "friend"], and good luck with [grad school / your new job / impending cosmetic surgery / recovering from rickets] in 2009.

Your [friend / pal / impersonal internet acquaintance / AA sponsor],

[Tony / Tone / @tony_d / Mr. Delgrosso]

From the “If You Can’t Laugh At Yourself” file, I submit the following photograph:

Look at all the little losers

The funny thing is, pretty much all of these clothes are somewhat in style again in one way or another. There are a couple of shirts in that photo that I wouldn’t mind having now.

If anyone can point out which of these little urchins is me, you win a prize.

Recently, I’ve come to accept my obsessive-compulsive disorder for what it is: Meticulous Perfectionism. I refuse to be labeled as an “anal retentive”. Sigmund Freud may have theorized that a child interrupted in the late stage of anal development can produce obsessive behavioral traits in adults, but I didn’t shit in the bathtub as a child to later be described as anal retentive. No thank you. You can keep your slang term, because I prefer mine slightly more.

The psychological theme here is self-control and obedience. Ultimately, my toilet training failed and my parents were always too controlling, so naturally we can place the blame on them for my overly rigid and highly organized adult life. It’s time for a review, so shall we? Great!

BOOKS: I organize my books in any number of ways. They are grouped by category and stacked horizontal or vertical in ascending order according to size. Color coordination is far too insipid and tawdry. You should possibly contemplate killing yourself if this is your method of organization.

CLOTHING: My clothing is first organized by clothing type, i.e. pants, jeans, long sleeve button shirts, short sleeve button shirts, t-shirts, etc.  I don’t necessarily organize by color, except for t-shirts, which are very important and the obvious exception to the rule. Abusive t-shirt organization is attributed to flaws in the Oral Stage of your development, approximately at 18 months. There is nothing that can be done now, accept failure and move along to creating your To-Do List.

TO-DO LISTS: These are fundamentally flawed, because the amount of time that it takes to keep rewriting them after you have marked something off of the list reverts back to making more work in and of itself. If you were able to make it past that last sentence, then it is best we move along to the grammatical section pertaining to proper spelling and enunciation.

GRAMMAR: One of the biggest annoyances is encountering and dealing with a general malfunction of the common English language. If you can’t properly speak or form sentences, then I am no longer interested in what you have to say. You can also forget about ever being considered my friend. I might possibly call if I need money, but please write what you are going to say on paper first before attempting to speak to me. I can forgive childish misspellings and even a misplaced apostrophe or two, since no one is perfect, except maybe for me. It most likely comes down to a problem with the Genital Stage. Again, the psychological theme is maturity and we all know you skipped that phase of your life.

I hope these tips have brought a new found feeling of pride for those who also suffer from the same obsessive thoughts and phobias. Remember, it’s not anal retentive, just perfectionally meticulous.

[ I'm surprised you stopped washing your hands long enough to write this post. - ed. ]

- Josh Hopkins, guest blogger

Yesterday a friend asked why I haven’t left a comment on his blog in a while.  I apologized, and said I’ve been leaving fewer comments on most blogs I read lately.  One reason is that a lot of the content I’ve been reading has been so sharp and well written that I haven’t had anything worthwhile to add that would make it any more meaningful.  Another excuse is that I’m just really fucking busy.

But the larger reason is that every time I click to add a comment, I’m confronted with some variation of this dialog:

To leave a comment, please enter your OpenID, ClaimID, Blogger, WordPress, or Google user info. We also accept TypeKey, Yahoo ID, or just your email address and URL. You can try logging in with Disqus, but good luck with the spam you’re going to get. LiveJournal users can suck it. Your avatar/Gravatar/bassguitar image may or may not show, for no particular reason. You may also see an image of yourself that you’ve never even used on the web. Maybe that embarrassing headshot of you in your Cub Scout uniform from 1977. If you’ve never commented here before, it may be held for moderation and mockery by the site author.

The process of commenting is becoming more of a hassle than security at JFK.  So, I tend to just stay out of the conversation.  Most sites can’t tell the difference between the info that I enter anyway, so it usually defaults to a Blogger ID, which I didn’t even know I had, and can’t seem to get rid of.  Oy.  Once I get my “ID” problem sorted out, I’ll get back into the mix.