03.29.99
Posted in General
at 12 pm
Mar 29 Mon (12 AM)
“When you get to the bottom
You go back to the top of the slide
And you stop and you turn
And you go for a ride…”
The Be-uls
Another week is upon me and looking ahead, it’ll be a tight one. Since one of the principles of one of my freelance clients left for Arizona, they’re now with out a creative director, and from the sounds of it, they’ll be relying on either freelancers to provide the backing there. It could be very good for me and Amy.
Another client has been dragging their feet on a finacial website, so it’ll be time to call on them to see what their status is. So too with my lawyer. He seems to be needing a nudge.
The weekend went smoothly, though rather unproductively. I did help out a 3D artist learn the basics of web design with Dreamweaver. He’s well on his way, and I think I’ve got a favor I can call in there as needed. A fellow co-worker from CMC (3 years ago?!?! Wow, it’s been that long?) asked me for some input about his web site (he makes guitars and wanted to put audio clips of the sounds online) and I finally got back to him, writing out a good 10-12k message going over the firner points of audio and the web. I’m thinking of posting it or at least sending it to a web site that might use it for some raw material.
At the bottom of the page here, you can see the Pacific Northwest Journals badge that I threw together last week. VJ (current owner of the list) added it. I wish I could get some feedback on it from the other journal owners, but it’s unlikely I will.
I’ve still got a stack of reading material to get through, taxes to do (Procrastinaaaaation….), but my desk is looking half way clean… Okay, a quarter of the way clean. Okay, better than last week.
I’m thinking of making an RSS file of my journal, just for kicks for people to subscribe to through those my.domain.com services. I could have a chanel on netscape, or on Scripting.com. It would be interesting to see how a journal would be implemented in a system like that.
Oh, and I’ve got some great ideas for my test template. It should start heading into a much more satisfiying direction soon. This week? Maybe next.
Oh and then there’s that Browser Black List system that I want to work on…
Like I said, this week will be tight. And likely as fast as the recent ones.
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Posted in General
at 12 pm
Well that didn’t take long.
Last night I wrote about putting together a Netscape Channel for Dwelling. And today, here it is:
http://my.netscape.com/addchannel.tmpl?service=net.457
Yep, you can have Dwelling as a channel in your ‘my.netscape.com’ home page. Now, I’m not a big fan of the service in and of itself… But this is cool! 🙂
I don’t have the file automated, but I’ll look into that soon. I’ll probably make the link have the first 400 letters from the entry. If you want to see the file itself, check out: www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/notes/dwelling.rss though that filename probably will change soon. Looks like I’m going to start putting <A NAME> anchors in the front page here for people to click to.
Serialized Ross. Very cool. I think I’ll go add the channel to my.userland.com. I wonder if I’d be better received at Slashdot than Katz… 🙂
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03.26.99
Posted in General
at 5 pm
Mar 26 Fri (05 PM)
It’s really been bugging me lately.
I’ve recently been subscribing to a bunch of mailing lists and news groups for some more advanced web design tools and techniques. Now that I have them at my disposal and I have clients that want to use them, I figured I’d better learn them.
Anyway, I’m constantly seeing posts along the lines of “Some of my visitors can’t see my superbo plug-in active-x dynamic HTML enhanced page. How can I redirect these people to another page?”
ARRRGGG!
YOU DON’T REDIRECT THE OLD BROWSERS! YOU REDIRECT THE *NEW* ONES!
Breathe In.
Hold.
Breathe Out.
As I was trying to say, the older browsers are the ones you can’t control. Old versions of Netscape, Lynx, Mosaic, etc. won’t recognize your fancy JavaScript redirect, or your plug-in’s NOEMBED tag, and might not even recognize the META REFRESH tag. So leave them there, on that front page. Let them get to the low-brow version of your site.
The new browsers are the ones you can control! These are the ones that you can be sure will be moved to a new page. Have a meta-refesh, a javascript write.location, or a small Flash movie that moves the browser ahead. Redirect the new browsers, not the old ones.
Just needed to get that off my chest.
(I’m just nutz. No one ought to get this worked up about this stuff. Is there a 12 step around?)
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03.25.99
Posted in General
at 1 pm
Mar 25 Thu (07 PM)
On Monday I let fly the Browser Black List on the Web Standards Project’s mailing list.
What a response. Like I expected, it was met with a certain amount of hostility that I had to respond to, on the list.
Various people accused the BBL of being too agressive, too much a vigilante move.
I ended up defending myself and my idea for a couple of days. In the mean time I set up a mailing list (browserblacklist (with an ‘at’ sign) onelist.com) that people can talk about the idea on. So far I’m the only person to post, on single e-mail. I realize that I’m going to have to feed this some more energy if it’s going to grow.
My problem is that things have been just piling up over the past few days and weeks. I’ve been putting _way_ too much energy into my sites, when that time should be used on, say, taxes, or cleaning up my desk, hooking up the stereo so that Amy can record some tapes, etc.
(Currently listening to Mick Harvey’s Intoxicated Man. I was hesitant after the first listen a year or two back, but it’s really grown on me. I don’t, as a rule, enjoy discs that try to cover a wide range of music, but Harvey does a great job with this one.)
Time to get home.
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03.21.99
Posted in General
at 5 pm
Mar 21 Sun (05 PM)
I updated the background color in the entries (added green and red, plus I lightened the color overall), optimized the archives, and realized that this journal has now been online for over a year. As well, I now hove more text in the archive from this year than the entire year of 1998. Good god, I need a database solution for this thing.
On the other hand, I got my javascript doo-hickie working on the testing page. It works just fine on Mac Netscape 4.05, though I’ll try it out on a few more browsers over the course of the next week. If anyone would like to join it, the url is http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/test/ and be careful with it. I’m still playing with stylesheets as well, so I don’t quite trust the page in all browsers.
Off to find the perfect CD storage shelf system…
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Posted in General
at 2 pm
Mar 21 Sun (02 PM)
Last night, Amy and I saw Life Is Beautiful at the Eastgate Theaters. Amy’s been just about dying to see it, and I was interested by the fact that it’s the closest a foreign film has come to getting a Best Picture oscar. (Aren’t those on tonight? Or is it next Sunday?)
The film was truly wonderful. The dialogue was excelent, the humour and the horror were both tastefully done, the sets were very good and subtitles where nearly invisibile, as they should be.
I came to the feeling that the film was like a piece of old, worn, and loved furniture. It was very much a European film, and it reminded me, deeply, of our time in Prague. Handles in the middle of the doors, the old next to extremely old. Fine and handcrafted oak chairs with worn and strong cusions. This feeling, this essence was in this film. I loved it for that.
I also loved it for what it didn’t show: grizzly scenes, gratuitous subplots. It was a fine and honest film. It was very much worth the full price of a film ticket.
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Posted in General
at 2 pm
Mar 21 Sun (02 PM)
It’s sitting there, waiting for me.
I put together a test directory, where I could play with my templates and site design without completely destroying the legibility of the site on lots of browsers.
But now I’m stymied. Stumped. Blocked. Creatively, I’ve got these ideas in my head, a little JavaScript whatzit that is promising, but no over all concept of whre it’s going. Dwelling is looking good, and for that I’m thankful, (though I’m considering pulling out some of the green in the entry background), but I’d really like to bring my site design up a couple dozen notches.
The stuff that Amy’s been doing on her site is amazing. I wish she would put it up so others could see. She’s really advanced as design and concepting goes. She was looking at some of her graphics that she had been so proud of when she made them on her little 16 color Toshiba laptop with PaintShopPro. She was chuckling and horrified. 🙂
She’s come such a long way in just a couple of short years. She may deny it, but her graphic design has really matured. I wish I could say the same for mine.
Where I’m stuck at is overall layout in regards to design. This whole template this has highlighted this for me. I’m pretty good at bringing together a single item: a navigation peice, a headline, etc. But I fel like I’m just putting pieces together when it comes to overall layout, rather than approaching the design from the top, down.
I could blame this on my computer at home, which could only handle so much at one time. To design a whole page in Photoshop on this machine would be dangerous. There’s not enough memory, not enough disc space, etc.
Really, I need to get in a groove, get to that Zen point of experience and existence where it all flows. But that’s a very small stream for me. The occasional “ah-ha!” in the shower or the “whoa…” after lyinging in bed, all groggy and in and out of conciousness, are what I seem to cling to. Is it enough? Can I increase it? Do I want to increase it?
Is this a situation where I will make The Flow, or is this a time when The Flow will happen. Likely, as usual, it will be a combination of both.
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03.19.99
Posted in General
at 9 pm
Mar 19 Fri (09 AM)
In a world where many-to-many communications is becoming larger and more pervasive, the producer is one voice of thousands, millions even. If you’re goal is to communicate then you show your product, your art, your music, your work. Then, usually, some people will be the receivers of that work.
On the that other end, there’s many potential recievers. I can open 5 browser windows and be looking at the work of a dozen people. I’m one of an audience of thousands in the course of a day that visits these sites.
My question comes down to this: When is it better to be the producer and when is it better to be the audience? Is there a moral reasoning that dictates when one is better than the other? What is the point at whch what you have to say becomes worth adding to the glut of information that is available? When is the time when it’s right for you to yell, to raise your voice, to attempt to be heard?
I suppose the surest sign is when people ask you to speak about and share your work. That direct response to your activities and the pull for more shows that someone finds what you’re doing or saying to be of significance. (This is assuming that your audience is discriminating in these terms.)
For me, I have to be extremely selective about what I read. I’m not a slow reader, but if I truly what something to stick in my head, I generally have to focus and concentrate. So the sites that I visit most often are those that focus on content. PCWorld’s web site is just disgusting when it comes to this, therefore I don’t go there very often. However scripting.com is great for this, and even one step further, I use the avantgo.scripting.com page, even at work on the end of a T1. That’s why I’m enjoying slashdot.org’s new system, where you can turn off all the tables. It’s amazing how much faster I can get through the new items there. I love it.
What these sites have done is focused. Focused on the content, distilling what is said down to the necessities. It may not generate grand artisitic notions, but it gets me what I want, as soon as I want it. And for that I thank them, and ask them to continue.
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Posted in General
at 9 pm
Mar 19 Fri (09 AM)
Music is strange for me.
I generally listen to it in one of three modes: Active Listening, Driving Listening and Background Listening. By far, the majority of my music listening time comes in the form of backgrounding. There’s a nice little CD player at work in the office that I’m in. It’s the one that I’m using to introduce the sales staff to my tunes. At home, we’ve pieced together a nice little system with a 5-disc player that I don’t use nearly as often as I could.
The Driving time has always varied quite a bit. Whenever I’d take the bus, my MiniDisc player was a constant companion. On occasion I’d take the DiscMan. When driving, the radio used to be the only thing wolud work, but now after I got Amy a new stereo for her Birthday, we’ve got the full range of radio, tapes and easily plugged-in CD player. However my commute time is down to about 8 minutes, which is hardly enough for a song and a half, and that’s off the radio.
Active listening has shrunk now to the point of being miniscule. Really, this only happens when I get a new disc that I’ve been eagerly anticipating. I think the most recent examples have been Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call and Depeche Mode’s Ultra and few others that have only had the treatment once or twice.
I suppose this reflects the division between the producer and the receiver. The artist and the audience. There’s only a limited amount of time in a single day. During that time, you can either create things (concepts, ideas, products) or use them. (Those obviously are not the only ways of living, there’s also passing other people’s things along for instance, but for simplicity, let’s paint the world black and white.)
Given these two options, which is better? What are the repercussions of each?
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03.17.99
Posted in General
at 6 pm
Mar 17 Wed (06 PM)
Things are going really well at work. I’ve been focusing on a Commerce solution, and have my head just buried in it.
It’s pretty powerful, but as a one man show, there’s a lot of rough edges, and not much help for new users. The mailing list that supports it is pretty active (a digest or two a day…) and the participants have all seemed very helpful and thoughtful. It’s nice to be part of a community, even if it’s something as superficial as using a commerce package.
The package itself, “MiniVend” is pretty cool. It has a ton of options and is really full featured. It can interface with SQL databases, accounting, inventory, all sorts of stuff. Right now, I’m just trying to put a simple demo together, so I’m having to strip out a ton of features out the sample catalog, in order to have something small enough that I can really get my brain wrapped around.
This is all running on Solaris, which I’m new to. There were a couple of Sun boxes at Creative Multimedia, but I never dealt with them. Now I’m having to deal with this one head on, and I’m starting to learn the differences between Solaris and Linux. This is also the first time that I’ve had full time access to a GUI on Unix. It’s… interesting. The mouse is as clunky as you can get, but I’m muddling through it.
I can see why people keep making new GUI’s on the Unix side of things. They suck. Plain and simple, they’re just clunks.
The new Blondie album get’s an 8 from me. Good stuff, all over the map, but nothing that rocks you, except for the live tracks, but that’s cheating. 🙂
I’m out to see my Brother for the first time n a couple of months tonight. I really do miss seeing him, and need to make it more of point to stay in touch. I guess his kids really miss me and Amy as well.
I’ve been working on an entry on music/artists/audiences, but it’s really long. Maybe I’ll have it done tomorrow. Then again, maybe I’ll take the time to figure out why the hell some of these entries won’t stay in the senter of the wondow… :p
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