Details, People! Details!

I'm settling in for the evening -- after being off for a month, my day has shifted from "normal night owl" to "walks with the dead", apparently. I've been rustling around the house until 3 or 3:30 AM and dragging my sorry ass out of bed at 11 AM or so. This is not unexpected, of course. The last time I had any extended non-working time, my day rotated to just about opposite that of the Adorable Husband. He'd get up at 4:30, we'd have breakfast, he'd leave and I'd go to bed. Admittedly, he was in the army at the time, but I definitely became nocturnal, if not actually one of the undead afraid to emerge in daylight.

I'm a night owl, always have been. But usually my tendency to stay up futzing around is limited by the fact that I have to be at work at a reasonable hour. Remove the deadline, and I just stay up and enjoy the silence of the house and the freedom to get things done (well, the quiet things, at any rate) until the wee hours of the morning. If I have to get up at four in the morning, I'm probably better off just staying up. I simply can't go to bed at ten o'clock. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling and listening to the sonorous snoring of the Adorable Husband until I want to put a pillow over his head, just to make the noise stop. He, of course, is a morning person. A chirpy, industrious morning person. Oy.

At any rate, since I appear to have joined the ranks of the third shift workers for awhile, I've spent some time randomly reading other blogs (the link at the top of the blog lets you go to the next random blog) and seeing what other people think of the world. It's interesting -- everyone from the most eloquent observers of human nature to the barely-literate have blogs. They are in turns funny, sad, dramatic, banal, informative, provoking. Much like having a random conversation with someone on the bus; you never quite know what kind of turn it will take.

But I have a nit to pick with an awful lot of blog authors -- update the template of your blog. I mean, really, people. It's not that hard to remove the "Link me" blurbs in the sidebar that are defaulted by all the templates. Get rid of them, replace them with something interesting, but for goodness sake, don't let them sit there like a beacon of idiocy. I'd say about 3/4 of the blogs that I scanned through today have the default links in place. Do they not notice?

If you can't be bothered to clean up the basics, it's a lot harder for me to take anything you say seriously. It's like wearing battered tennis shoes to a job interview, or misspelling someone's name on a letter. Just wrong, and noticeably sloppy. People get judged on first impressions every single day. Fair or not, lack of attention to details signals that you just don't give a damn.

Then again, I tend to (quite irrationally) discount the opinions and intelligence of people who very obviously can't put a coherent sentence together. Oh, typos aren't too bad -- everyone makes them and sometimes they slip through. But out-and-out bad grammar, wrong words (every time I see 'your' for 'you're' or 'there' for 'their' I want to throttle someone), or blatant --and correctable -- misspellings (like rouge for rogue on an RPG board, or athiest for atheist on a board discussing that very topic), my brain kicks in with "Idiot!" and my perception of the person's actual IQ drops 5-10 points. It's not that hard to look up words: just typing it in google will often result in a suggestion for the correct spelling you're looking for!

Which of course suggests that I think I am always perfect. Not on your life. I mess up and typo with the rest of them (especially when I type quickly), and I certainly hope that everyone reading it docks my "virtual IQ" a few points every time. But I can string together a competent, if not always eloquent, sentence and I do try to spell check. Not perfect by any means, but I try.