Archived Ramblings - 2002

12-30-02

And today I turn 29. There you have it.

12-24-02

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Spent some time last week on updating some details and sections of this site, though I won't go into the changes except that I'm finally getting the music section tightened up and cleaner. Every day it seems to get easier to code with web standards thanks to all the current browser makers and their efforts to standardize to the WC3 specs. More is coming.

I'm using the always improving Mozilla/Netscape browser most of the time now for personal use, putting IE in the testing only category. As for Mozilla, I'm primarily using the Chimera build (only for OS X) though of course I still run a handful of browsers to keep abreast of what is or isn't working with this and other sites I create.

Also got my dad's first site about 85% done so hopefully sometime in the coming weeks that will go live.

The cat had his tube removed about two weeks ago and is healing up fine. Thanks to this crisis being over things are returning to normal for me.

Some friends and acquintances have been building up a large project that identifies and celebrates the true female body image - sort of as a wake-up call to what Hollywood and our own imaginations have done. While still only a preview of what the project will fully bloom into here is the web site: bodyBODY: Aphrodite Raves. My squeeze is involved as well.

11-30-02

These past two months have had some rather significant emergencies to take care of, so much so that all my projects are on hold until a few weeks out or more. Everything is a blur and I've been feeding my sister's cat through a tube for the past four weeks in the hopes that he will recover from fatty liver disorder and begin eating on his own. My sister won't be back until an unknown time so aside from her footing the bill I'm doing all the maintenance and care.

Apparently most Americans are borderline "Type A" personalities, which puts us very close to becoming so unhealthy that we risk early cardiovascular failure. I've become susceptible to this myself through work and a combination of cumulative factors. As such I am operating with excessively high blood pressure and after some attempts to get it down through excercise and diet have had to begin medication. That means it's predominantly stress that has generated this problem, though my health is not perfect either. At this point, only time will reveal whether or not I can overcome this.

I'm still plugging away at my minimal but sophisticated CD release while working on my dad's web site, some other web projects and work in general. But mostly it's the cat and his tube that take my non-work (and some normal work) hours. A good rule to follow if you have a cat: if that cat doesn't eat for three solid days haul him into the vet – it is guaranteed that something will be medically wrong.

09-30-02

On Saturday September 21 at 1:40 PM my dear old cat Sabra had to be put to sleep because her kidneys had begun to fail during the previous weeks. Only now has this really begun to sink in. Now just over a week later I am catsitting my sister's cat Ariel while she treks across the country to write. Meanwhile Seattle continues to suffer from the economic glut. I'm in love and have begun to work on more and more art projects (or "hobbies"). The weather is starting to cool down.

Everything feels different.

09-16-02

Happy Hour Mixology: Another piece of alcohol-induced culture is now scanned and online for your pleasure. The date is unknown, but this one appears slightly older than the previously posted Spirit of '76. Also the last two pages are missing a bit as someone just couldn't live without one of the drink recipes...

08-30-02

Netscape is coming back from a long and sluggish rebirth. Mozilla 1.1 (lean) and Netscape 7 (bloated) both render sites quickly and with nearly exact visuals as Internet Explorer 6 and other standards compliant browsers. Things are changing kids, and I'm all for it.

08-25-02

A busy cluster of work and play have kept me from this site yet again.

Today I fully migrated my workstation to Mac OS X 10.2. The update was flawless and has proven to be quite worthy of the price and my patience. Operating systems being the complicated beasts that they are to develop, I'd say that OS X is growing in leaps and bounds.

The CD project continues, with artwork nearly complete except for layout and typography which must wait for me to finish mastering and working around various compositional problems. I think this release will be OK, but it could still be much better.

07-24-02

Farewell Leo Mckern. The real Number Two.

06-28-02

For the first time in my life, I am.

06-21-02

Slowness all around white light. Thinking more than doing, but in the end the thinking is going to support the doing. There is just too much going and only a single window of time for it.

However difficult it may seem, there is still beauty in all of this.

06-09-02

New to the Gallery: Scanned for your pleasure, The Spirit of '76 Happy Hour Barguide. I was three years old when this was printed.

Over the past week I've been tweaking the stylesheets. This has been a reminder of how different some elements look between Windows^® and other operating systems. I'm mostly talking about little things like how a dotted or dashed line looks. Personally I think Windows draws border elements in an ugly fashion, sort of big and too spaced out. So I guess I'm going to have to change some things in the source a bit to keep the designer in me happy.

06.06.02

Tracks for my current CD are coming together, but still perplexing my satisfaction. Assembling the final movement of the disc is all that is left other than more mixing and mastering. Just a few more months and I will feel whole again.

And just this week life has offered some wonderful distractions as well.

05.25.02 - Memorial Day Weekend

Some new tweaks that change the look and feel of the site are in effect. I was feeling restless.

Hmm. It's 2:45 AM and for the first time today it feels quiet. Starting today my neighborhood is the parking lot for the Northwest Folklife Festival at the Seattle Center (across the street). In 1994 I was a participant in the festival as a member of the Evergreen State College gamelon ensemble. That was the first major gig the ensemble had as it was in it's first year at the college. It has continued since though for the past few festivals I've missed seeing the students that followed in my wake because I didn't go. Folklife is about good music (and food) but at the great expense of huge crowds - something I am not particularly fond of. For me it becomes difficult to enjoy the music or even navigate your way to it when there is a constant mass of people wandering around. And every year it just grows and grows.

Folklife is free, but donations are very much encouraged by wandering volunteers that are good at getting a donation. Folklife is second only to Bumbershoot, which is another fantastic but very crowded event. Bumbershoot covers a wider gamut of music and attacts an equally wider crowd of attendees. Both festivals are great for people-watching as they both have so much culture surrounding their music. Still, even as an avid musician and listener I find myself less and less inclined to participate.

05.10.02

Thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman who a week ago posted a mention of my successful use of GoLive 6 to convert and now maintain this site as validating XHTML 1.0 transitional markup. Also thanks to "Ray" for pointing out an interesting Netscape 4.x bug with CSS and border elements. That all led to me fixing some known and unknown bugs.

Zeldman correctly points out that Adobe hasn't made whoopee about GoLive 6 and standards support the way Macromedia has with it's Dreamweaver MX. Dreamweaver also benefits from collaboration from the Web Standards Project itself, but Adobe has impletemented it's standards support on their own. I personally think that the most significant feature an editor can have is working standards support, so in the cases of both GoLive and Dreamweaver I'm quite excited that this is now a feature.

It's important to me that editors evolve to be useful to all of us. I'm impressed that this site could be converted to XHTML so easily - literally a few clicks. But it was clean and validating HTML before the conversion done in a tweaked out GoLive 5 (no 5.0 does not mess up hand code). It's possible to tweak older versions of GoLive by editing the rather powerful web database, i.e. telling it to close every tag in lists etc. when it does not by default. But unless a power user is into getting into the deeper parts of the program this is missed. I've always felt that if you use an editor you need to understand HTML so that you can fix or be aware of issues that editors can sometimes bring up.

And why use an editor if you know HTML? Site management. This is where editors really can be of assistance. I've done some rather quick and amazing work thanks to editors and in the real world time is often the most limiting factor of a project. The trick is to know the limitations of the software and avoid them. With standards support this becomes less and less of an issue.

So I can only hope that other editors follow suite. I'm not fond of any of them outside of Dreamweaver and GoLive and I especially have a distaste for FrontPage - what it can do to muck up HTML has been a headache more than once. Whether this is the program or those using it I'm not sure. Nevertheless, the struggle continues...

In other news: The music section is once again re-coded and re-designed. The old layout was less conducive to "liquid" design. The design itself was liquid but with full conversion to CSS and standardized markup you run into padding and box model issues even between new standardized browsers. I did not want to move to absolute pixel-precise placement and the text flow was always disjointed, so I've changed the layout. It's not done yet but nobody goes there enough right now to make it a large issue.

In the works are two CD releases, which also spurred the updates to the music site. More on that as it happens but within six months I expect to release my first musical project in over two years followed by a second release of even more (but different) material. This is all new stuff using all new equipment that has changed the feeling and quality of my music. More as it happens...

I've also added a photo section to the gallery part of the site, which has had some reorganization as well. This isn't final yet either, but it's a decent start.

04.25.02

Post production and mixing on some new music has been occupying most of my free time. Around that I've converted this sites navigation buttons to using pure CSS rollovers - making the page even smaller and a more compact download.

03.31.02

Happy Easter! While everyone runs around manipulating colored eggs or attending religious ceremonies I caught a link to an interesting article:

Why Doesn't the US Value Art?

I ask myself this question often.

03.25.02

Spent the weekend half sick - just when I could use some time to work on some music and other things. Watched a lot of DVD commentaries including the newly released Donnie Darko disc which has two commentary tracks of goodness. And then there were the Oscars. Cartoon Network ran their own Fancy Anvil Awards earlier in the day which turned out to be pretty good. During all of this I was halfway out of touch with reality so I feel like I've been in a dream for almost two days.

03.09.02

XHTML markup and doctypes are in effect. I've been playing with the new GoLive 6 update, which is in many ways a fantastic revision because it supports doctypes and proper HTML or XML markup. Also the new developer server tools are interesting. If this site warrants becoming a database then now might be the time to start since my use of GoLive has been predominantly for it's site management and quick editing. In the old days once I had modified the default settings the application would write html as I wanted, but now it's better because it's aimed more at standards. Granted, no editor is perfect but with standards support there is hope.

02.24.02

I've been doing more work under the hood - some significant changes and optimizations. It seems that I've messed up and uploaded pages that weren't ready for all browsers, specifically the new music section, and there are some other glitches as well. Despite these errors, other more glaring things have been fixed.

02.18.02

For the past few weeks I've had a little vacation from the site while I've been working on an album cover for a client. I must say that so far 2002 has been fast and furious on all accounts.

My next big overhaul will be getting these pages fully XHTML compliant. Also the music section is in a rather complex beta being completely written in CSS, having a significant text re-write, added content and some new music releases are in the pipeline. Did I forget to mention that I've been a busy little bee?

01.27.02

The main problem would seem that this site still fails to show everything I can do. David Lynch calls himself a "frustrated builder" and I can relate. I have too much to show or even began to filter on my own. Neither the commercial work nor the art for art's sake is getting it's full treatment - yet.

01.12.02

Some new content in the Gallery section - more specifically some old animation. Nothing spectacular mind you, but this is going to segway into some of the other content I'll be adding later on.

As much as I hate requiring plug-ins, Quicktime is neccessary to see the animations themselves. By the way, Flash is also used for some of the pages on this site, but more people will have Flash than Quicktime by default. However Quicktime's flexibility as an authoring tool allowed these animations to be converted from a database to tiny movie clips with no loss in quality.

01.02.02

Happy new year! All copyrights in this site have been updated. I'm still rewriting and editing the text on these pages, so forgive the rather embarrasing errors that currently exist. Hopefully 2002 will be fresh and productive compared to 2001.

Also to clarify some of the changes: the Gallery and Portfolio are respectively different sections now, and much of the content within them has been rewritten, redesigned, added or omitted. The About section also has two new sub-sections. There are other minor changes as well, but the next signifcant overhaul will be the Music section being converted to full CSS along with updates to content.

2001 Ramblings