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HAPPY BIRTHDAY FAQ! |
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Q: How old is The Heidi FAQ?
Long-time readers may remember The Heidi FAQ's 1998 incarnation, when the ever-changing answers to the infamous Four Questions were merely a small subsection ("Heidi Today") of a much larger FAQ. In those days, The FAQ was obsessively updated on a daily basis -- so much so, that the few days I missed were duly noted within a secret "History of The Heidi FAQ" section embedded in the HTML source code. If anyone (Magnus?) managed to cache The FAQ's second year format (archive.org doesn't have it), the secret "History of The Heidi FAQ" was expanded on the occasion of that first anniversary and notes the original launch date. I've since lost that version of The Heidi FAQ and no longer remember The FAQ's precise birthday. I only know it was sometime in April, after tax day and before, or shortly following, my brother's birthday on the 23rd. What I do remember about the first anniversary was rewriting the middle section ("Heidi Recently"?) to answer a random assortment of reader questions such as "Does Heidi own a pants suit?" The answer, at the time, was "Yes." The second anniversary marked the death of the two longer sections, the abandonment of the hidden code text and the shortening of The FAQ to just the "Heidi Today" section (without that header). This change was made in response to various complaints by readers accessing The FAQ from cell phones and PDAs where the excessive byte size, trivial by today's standards, was impeding their enjoyment of The Heidi FAQ. The second anniversary was also the year (though I could be mistaken) when question, "How much coffee has Heidi had?" was transformed into the oft-maligned "What is Heidi's situation vis-a-vis coffee?" Owing to the inordinate amount of green tea drinking I'd done the prior year, answers to the original question had become increasingly illogical. If anyone would like to offer a suggestion for improving the question's current wording, please feel free to do so. The third anniversary was the year in which I offered to photograph favorite featured clothing items (the silver space vest! the postman pants!). Regretably, I never fulfilled my end of the bargain and I sincerely apologize for this. The fourth anniversary passed utterly without incident, though the very exciting "What Color Should The Heidi FAQ Be?" contest held last fall was an effort to make up for that lapse.
This year I am almost as overwhelmed as last year and have decided not to make any profound changes (though, as mentioned above, I am open to suggestions on how to improve the coffee question's wording). However, in honor of the occassion, I have decided to come clean about something I have refrained from mentioning for years: Heidi FAQ Products! About three (four?) years ago, and for no particular reason, I decided I wanted desktop icons of myself. I managed to create a black+white icon all by myself (used by the amazing Magnus to make the cake you see above), but I completely botched the color version. My fabulous and very talented friend Leslie stepped in and, with humbling finesse, instantly whipped out the beautiful colored icon now featured on all The Heidi FAQ Products. The products exist solely to meet my own personal whim to own a t-shirt with my face on it. The only place I found offering reasonably priced, single-run, multi-colored custom logo products was Cafepress (with whom I am in no way affiliated) -- the one hitch being that I first had to create an entire e-commerce store. Creating the store was (and remains) free, so I set one up, fixed my prices "at cost" to avoid having to pay a premium for my own products, ordered a shirt, two coffee mugs, mentioned it to some close friends and family then forgot about it. Whatever The Heidi FAQ is, it is certainly not a commercial venture. By design it demands nothing, links to nothing and promotes nothing. Offering promotional products seems to contradict this on a fundamental level. And yet, as I am in no position to judge what The Heidi FAQ means to anyone else, I am equally unequipped to judge whether the possession of a Heidi FAQ product might be enjoyable to anyone else. If you like The FAQ, maybe you'd like a FAQ product. Who am I to reason why? I reap no financial rewards from either venture and hope never to do so.
It may please the readers to know that I am less than one month away from ending my perpetual housing craziness which has so disrupted The FAQ's regularity over the past two years and, particularly, during the past few months. During this time, I have lived in no fewer than eight different places, interspersed by an astronomical number of couches. This is not due to any severe monetary crisis but is almost entirely attributable to my hesitance to make a series of crucial decisions. Thanks to such flux (and despite having my own personal tech support, UNIX hacking, IMAP hosting, and PHP programming in the form of my incredible friend Paul) I have been with and without a computer, internet access, web hosting, the proper software and any number of critical FAQ updating components during these past few years. Thank goodness, all of this is about to change. While I am looking forward to this sanity-bolstering stability, the FAQ readers may look forward to an increasing enjoyable Heidi FAQ experience. At the very least, the fact that I will shortly have an abundance of closet space will give me access to a wider variety of clothes and, with luck, you will no longer have to read about "the same old boring jeans." -- Heidi Pollock, 05/01/03
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