Dr. Dobb's Journal January 1999
T wilight comes early to these mountains at this time of year, riding a cold wet breeze that frays the nerves and makes the neck hairs rise. On a night like this, dogs howl and trusted programs crash.
A handful of customers sat huddled in ones and twos at the tables or the bar, and the corners of the room drew back into the gloom like fading hopes.
Then the ghost walked in the door.
On second glance, I saw that it was one of my regulars, Paul Piescik, only tonight the whole southern hemisphere of his face was dressed in tropical white. Most people wouldn't go out in polite society wearing that much gauze, but then again, most people wouldn't call Foo Bar polite society.
"You don't look yourself this evening, Paul," I greeted him, running the rag over the bar down at the far end where he likes to sit.
"Yeah, yeah," he grumbled through the gauze, claiming his favorite stool. "I broke my face."
"I see you did. How'd you happen to do that?"
"Helping the dog chase the neighbor's cat," he growled. "Only Sugar Bear ran around me, so I got spun like a top with the leash, and slammed into the garage."
Down at the other end of the bar someone chuckled softly.
"Go ahead, laugh," Paul snarled. "The surgeon did."
I poured him a glass of his favorite, Slurm, and, after another quick glance at his face, put a straw in it.
He explained that he'd been spending more time on the Web since the accident. That, more than the broken face, was what had him depressed.
"Lotta bad web sites?" I asked.
"There are too many to list! K-Mart, JC Penney, Federated Department Stores, Sears, the State of New Jersey -- " he paused for breath -- "they all have sites that are either unnavigable, unsearchable, have no e-mail capability or have e-mail addresses that don't exist."
"You may be right, but I don't know that I'd single these sites out. Lots of sites have problems. I often have trouble with Microsoft sites, maybe because I use Netscape Navigator on a Mac. That's two strike against me. Or maybe it's because I have Java turned on. Microsoft is trying to pretend that Java doesn't exist; I read that Microsoft web developers were recently ordered to remove all Java applets from all the company's web sites."
He paid no attention. "Search engines seem to all be in decline. Take Excite, where the process of adding a URL is accompanied by a notice that meta-tags for keywords are totally ignored. Or HotBot, which apparently can't count or can't deliver the count; the last page comes up short and has a 'next' link that produces nasty error messages instead of the last of the list."
"But Paul, problems like these could get fixed by tomorrow morning. Do you have any chronic complaints?"
"Geocities and tripod," he muttered, pushing his glass across for a refill.
I poured more Slurm and gave him a fresh straw. "Why are you down on them?"
"For leaving the gate open so the general population can put together crappy sites with no horsepower behind them and gratuitous pop-up advertising to boot. Who opened the door to these civilians, anyway?"
"But that's the Web, Paul. What can you do?"
He shrugged fatalistically. "Nothing. The World Wide Web has become a cobweb, but there's nothing in the attic." He sat sipping his Slurm morosely and didn't say anything more.
You, too, can get your own bar stool at Foo Bar, just as reader Paul Piescik did. The stools are in short supply, though, and the price is subject to my whims. Just breaking your face and flaming major corporations may not be enough. The entrance requirements to the Flames Feedback Forum at Swaine's World (http://www.swaine.com/) are somewhat less stringent.
--Michael Swaine