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Archives: [+]
I've done a lot of things today, but it has still felt like a nothing day. This being the first day back after a long weekend accounts for part of that feeling. But mostly it's because I didn't design anything today. I just worked on weekly reports (which I still didn't finish) and tried to understand the tape backup system we use here at ETS. I'm eager to get working on the PHP/MySQL stuff (I'm downloading MySQL as I write this and downloaded the lastest PHP earlier). But the backup problem (i.e. the complete lack of one) is the priority right now.
Anyway. The evening should be better. This is the first day of my new diet. And I'm going to hit the gym as well. Before that, though, I have to drive to Tontitown to pick up a piece of furniture that Gina and I bought yesterday. It's an old piece that we're going to refinish and use as a tv/stereo/whatever stand.
That's enough fun for one day...
[posted by Wheat]
I'm posting from Dallas, TX. Gina and I are here visiting Vicki. We came down Friday and will be leaving early tomorow afternoon. We've had a great time here. Vicki is really wonderful and a great hostess. We've wanted for nothing. It's been great visiting with her and my half-sister, Kendall. Getting to know Vicki has been one of the most wonderful things in my life.
On to tech stuff: my lithe box (or at least the power supply) is fried. I'm going to have to ask my boss to either repair it or replace the whole box with something better (which would be a good thing, since it's just a 266MHz Pentium II).
Gina just walked by. I think she's having trouble sleeping...
[posted by Wheat]
Part of my previous post got cut off, but no matter. It was mostly too personal to be posting here anyway. I'm having a good day today. I'm off work tomorow and flying to Dallas to see Vicki. Gina and I are going, so it will be a nice little vacation. Today I put the finishing touches on the tares redesign www.thetares.com. The old version was a frames-based site (one of my first, so I was proud of it). This one uses tables and CSS instead. It's pretty spare at the moment, but that will change. I did the rollovers with Dreamweaver. I'd always been too proud to resort to that before, but jesus it makes 'em easy. I hand coded the ones on my homepage and they're a bitch to troubleshoot. Does anyone make a decent JavaScript debugger? A command-line one (like the one that comes with Perl) would be great.
I've been surfing a lot of highbrow design sites today. Besides my old favorite zeldman.com, I've been turned on to ,once-upon-a-forest.com, praystation.com, and k10k.net. Most of these are more concerned with flash than HTML, but they're all inspirational, and that's point.
My wrists are killing me today. I need to take a break from typing.
Katowich will be back in town next week, and there's already talk of playing some music together. He sent me a new story today as well, which I'm looking forward to reading.
[posted by Wheat]
I'm watching our two kittens, Lenny and Niles, play with the extension chord of the old Mac Performa 631CD (which I had to set up in order to grab an old resume file for my wife). My email connection is so slow tonight, that I'm posting here instead. I worked today on thetares.com (nothing has been uploaded yet). I'm phasing out white backgrounds and frames from my web-design life (though I'm still making an exception for nested framesets, like the one I used for the ETS site). The Tares site was one of my first frames-based sites, but now I'm formatting the whole thing with tables. And I eventually hope to use some kludge of JavaScript and PHP to include parts of the content on the fly. For right now, it's still a static site, but it will use less of the browser window and load much more quickly. I'll also have more control over the look of it (and design is all about control).
On a music gear note, I noticed that Godin guitars is making a five string version of their incredible semi-hollow fretless electric bass. It's one of the most "upright" of fretless electrics out there. It gets the boomy lows and the papery highs that comprise the sound of an upright bass. That's something to dream for (though I wish they'd make it in a six-string version).
Speaking of sixes, I feel quite at home with my Carvin LB76 (thanks Vicki!) after only a month or two of playing it. I should have bought a six years ago. For a while I just couldn't afford it. Then I got on this kick where I wanted the best six in the world (for me, a Ken Smith), since all low-dollar sixes I'd ever played were worthless. Then I discovered the Carvin (and Carvin evangelists are as common on the web as libertarians, so I was skeptical) which has got to be the best bang for the buck out there--especially if you buy it used. I got mine for an insanely low $500 + shipping. (It lists for around $1200 new; you can typically find them on the net in the $800 range). It came with some really light weight strings. But after a new set of D'Addario's and a little truss rod tinkering, it really plays well all over the neck. And it opens up a lot of room for the stuff I like to play. My Fender four string is still the best for slapping, but for most everything else, I've been relying on the Carvin.
[The youngest kitten, Niles, is absolutely insane right now. He's blazing all through the house, messing with everything in sight]
[posted by Wheat]
Wheat's Homepage is live once again, at a new URL: http://ubets.uark.edu/~jemartin/home. If you try it without the /home, you'll be forwarded to the right page, so not to worry. Today I'm working on some other sites damaged in the crash, but I'm not feeling as driven as I was yesterday. I have to leave the office after lunch to go to the doctor and get a new driver's license. I'm not looking forward to either. Back to coding...
[posted by Wheat]
Okay, I spent all day on it: resurecting my homepage from the dead (or, from a months-old backup, which amounts to the same thing). It's almost ready for primetime, but I'm wainting until tomorow to upload it. Then I'll turn to some other reconstructions before having a final go at either salvaging my dead hard drive, or wiping it clean and installing Red Hat 6.2 from scratch. Though I do lament the loss of my JavaScript tutorial site (Web Interactivity: Designing with JavaScript), my pages are probably far better for me having to go work on them as diligently as I have today. It's sad that I sometimes need something as dramatic as a hard drive crash to prompt me into working on my stuff.
I'm going this weekend (leaving Friday) to visit my birth-mother, Vicki, in Dallas, Texas. She tracked me down back in May of this year. Since then, we've exchanged quite a lot of email and even met once (she flew up here). I'm really looking forward to this.
[posted by Wheat]
The great web page reconstruction is going well. I have the front page of my home site ready, and it's better than it was before the crash. I should have it and the rest of the home site online by the end of the day. Then I'll work on the tares site (though I'm still waiting on some show dates and images from them), or whatever else seems broken. :)
[posted by Wheat]
Okay, all is not lost. I've bee digging through my files, and despite the fact that I've been very bad about not backing up, I did manage to find a backup I made earlier this semester. The stuff on it is far from current, but most of my web files are there, so I'll be putting up a new homepage at http://ubets.uark.edu/~jemartin (there's one there now, but it's just a placeholder). This comming week, I'll be working on recovering files from the crashed hard drive on lithe.uark.edu, but I'll also be working on reconstructing my pages from these backups. The site needed some redesign anyway (since I'm using PHP now and since I'm gettin bored of looking at it), so maybe it's not a bad thing even if I can't recover the lithe hard drive. But it is going to mean a lot of work on my part. Luckily, most of the staff is going to be out of town on a trip, so I should have some uninterupted time to lock into deep code mode and fix things up.
From here on out, I'm implementing backups on a daily basis. I'll back to Zip drive until I can get the tape backup up and running. But I'm thinking a CD-Burner would be the best solution for my personal files. I'll see if I can swing one of those.
Enough for now...
[posted by Wheat]
My server, lithe.uark.edu, went down due to a bit hard drive crash. I've been working on it for a few days now and have now managed to boot from the Red Hat 6.2 CD into "linux rescue" mode. But I haven't made it very far past that (I'm still trying to figure out how to mount the crashed drive so I can fix it or move files off of it).
The really crappy part is, all of my stuff is on that drive, including most of my web design work. So, right now anyway, I'm a man without a homepage. I'm devoting all of next week to recovering what I can from that drive.
But since blogger keeps a copy of your blog on it's server, I logged in and redirected it's output to our other server, ubets.uark.edu (where, if I were smart, I'd have mirrored all of my design stuff). So at least I'm left this one amusement. And, if worse comes to worse, this will be the first page of my new site (redesigned from the ground up).
At this stage, I'm still relatively confident that I can get into that hard drive and grab most of my stuff. At least, that's what I really hope will happen. I worked on it most of yesterday, but I have a more pressing project that I must finish today (and I need a break from crash recovery anyway--there's only so much I can read at one time on that subject).
Some email just arrived. I'm going to check it out....
[posted by Wheat]
I'm at work and this entry is going to be work-related. I have some ideas about things I could do at work that would improve things, and I thought it would be good to jot them down here.
Today Keith and I have been scrambling to find gear we need to do this or that, and just as I was about to start pricing out an external zip drive, I found out that we have one (burried in a drawer in the secretary's office). So I'm thinking that a more centralized check in/out area for (especially) small bits of gear would be very helpful, along with a solid inventory of what we have.
One of the closets in my office would be perfect. I'm thinking I could use some wire shelving to make it a nice, secure space where we could keep all of the gear that people might need only ocassionaly. I haven't run this idea by my boss yet, but I'm thinking I will. I already have most of the software in one place, but some of it is spread out between the offices.
Had a nice email from Jamkat, who is moving back to Fayetteville from Lawrence, KS. It's going to be great having him (and his fiance, Anne) around again.
[posted by Wheat]
The blogger folks need to use some browser detection on their interface. It look beutiful on IE 5 for Win32, but on this iMac, it's a bit crampt. I haven't surfed it on the Linux box yet. It's probably even worse there.
I came over to the union to see if they had any decent Samba books and to get out of the office for a few minutes. I found a great book on design that I should probably go back and buy. It had everything from architecture to household products and all manner of other things in between.
I'm feeling desperate today, though I've no reason to. It's a sure sign I should get back on the zoloft. It's the one thing that helps. A copy of AdBusters that I glanced at yesterday has a lot of rhetoric about drug companies and the profits reaped from depression medication, which the Adbusters people seem to think of as little more than sugar pills. They show an amazing ignorance both for the reality of depression as a disease (and not just something you can get over by force of will) and of the well-doccumented success of the current medications. Depression is a real thing; It's a real thing I've suffered from for as long as I can remember. When I'm wise enough to take my meds, I'm better in every sense of the word. If I skip them, it catches up with me and no task seems worth doing and no accomplishment seems earned or worthy of pride. Depression, in my case, leads to a devaluing of my self and everythign I've ever done or might do. It's a scary thing.
But while I'm bitching, the folks at AdBusters have always annoyed me. They are a part of a very large group of leftists who don't have the balls to become marxists outright but somehow want to be part and parcel of consumer culture while still dissing it. Yet they offer no way to tell what parts of consumer culture are useful and which parts are to be derided. It's a pan-ironic stance that ammounts to nothing--silly entertainment for would-be intellecutals. There's certainly a place for the sort of ironic tactics that AdBusters endorces. But without a philosophical backing, they merely single out what targets suit them for the moment and find themselves caught up in all manner of contradicions. They become one more standard of hipness. Why are we against, Segrams? Because AdBusters says we should be (the frequent attacks on Segrams are a continuing thread. Segrams is blamed for alcohol-influenced death, sickness, and violence. But we're left wondering what the solution should be? Prohibition? One of the greatest public policy failures of the century?
Blah....I'm too angry with them to make sense....
[posted by Wheat]
The dial-up server at comp.uark.edu (which is how I get online from home) just dropped my connection and probably will again--one more reason to set up my own box as a PPP server, though that's pretty far down the priority list. Lately, connecting hasn't been a problem, but during the regular school year, it get's hectic. But I really can't bitch, since I haven't paid for internet access in a long time (not since I was living in Philly). I need to email a bunch of people, but I'm not in the mood for it. I surely owe James Katowich an email. And I need to write to Vicki and Debbie as well. Maybe I'll hit that and get off here (this stuff's becomming addictive).
[posted by Wheat]
Well, seems I wasn't the only one offended by the A List Apart article. Zeldman mentions flack it's been taking on metafilter. I read some of the comments there, which mostly have the same complaint I do. The article's complaints are all couched from an elitist position and all harken back to some mystical time in the past when the web was better because it was smaller and fewer people had access to it. Whatever.
I had a great day today. Before noon, I'd already washed dishes, worked in the garden, and played some tennis. After that I borrowed a weedeater off of Steve and cleaned up some things the grounds keeper / fix-it guy misses. So now the yard looks better (even though we still live in a slum) and I'm more at ease. The house still needs some cleaning, but it's mostly clutter that could be delt with in an hour or too. Maybe I'll hit that monday.
I had been feeling very guilty about the site I agreed to produce for Scott but had been too busy (and too much in a web design doldrum) to do much with. Turns out that things have been changing at his firm. The other partner has left (which means, I guess, that we'll have to get a new domain name for the site). And the address for the firm has changed as well. I've been out of the loop on all of this, but it's actually a relief.
Speaking of design, I should get paid my second installment on a project I started a long time ago for my friend Steve Bailey, a left-wing civil war reenactor (bet you didn't know such things existed!). I thought that I would be through with this project, but Mr. Bailey is still on board for some new things, including video and some interactivity (as soon as I get my PHP/MySQL bag going strong). That's a cool thing for me as I've really liked working with him on it. Steve Bailey is a model client. He knows what he wants but he isn't pushy. Since he's a photographer by trade, he has a good sense for design and appreciates the kind of minimalism I usually go for (saying that makes me want to design an ugly, cluttered, portal-style site, just to prove I can).
[posted by Wheat]
The Errol Morris film was the best of his I've seen--a really chilling meditation on capital punnishment and holocaust denial. Tonight I watched the Buena Visa Social Club, which was very good, though not as powerful as the Morris film. Also watched Bringing out the Dead, which wasn't bad. I've been in a movie mood of late, but I hate having to sit still long enough to watch two or three in one day. But it's really too hot right now to do much else. I'm really looking forward to visiting Vicki in Dallas. The tickets arrived today. I should take the movies back while I'm thinking of it (I'm terribly good at racking up late fees).
[posted by Wheat]
I ran to hastings, partly to read the latest Bass Player and partly to grab a movie. I hadn't been there in ages, since I forgot to turn in something and racked up some late charges, but I decided to pay the piper. I grabbed an assortment of stuff Bring out the Dead, Buena Vista Social Club, and Errol Morris' new one, Mr. Death. I'm watching the Morris flick first. I love his stuff, and I was really surprised to see a copy of it (one, mind you) there (contrast the 100+ copies of The Green Mile). Anyway. I'm enjoying not working. I brewed a nice pitcher of iced tea and I'm going to straighten the house and watch some doccumentaries. Gina's still snoozing (her drive back from Morrilton, or wherever, today really wore her out). I just finished feeding the pets, so my daily obligations are over.
I read the new issue of A List Apart. There were two feature articles: one dissing blogs and the quality of web sites in general, and one stressing that being online is a quest for meaning. The first was a stupid tirade--easily a victim of the very criticisms it levels at other sites. Instead of solid analysis, is substituded attitude. I have nothing against websites as art (though I must admit that the sort of navelgazing that goes with that idea annoys the hell out of me), but that's not the purpose of every site, and it's unfair to judge all sites by that yardstick. I also got sick of the bashing of commercial sites--without which most of us web designers would be out of business. I'm not a fan of the endless portal sites. And most of my favorite sites are non-commercial. But there are some fine commercial sites as well. And there are fine blogs and boring ones. This one is not a fine one, but that's not it's purpose. It's purpose is to let me vent and let my one or two closest friends who know of this page read it. If anyone else stumbles across it, that's fine too. But I'll give you the disclaimer right now: this isn't art, so keep your expectations at a reasonably pedestrian level and no one will get hurt.
The second essay was more to my liking. It wasn't incredibly substantive either, but it makes a few points I can agree with. I got into web design because someone introduced me to the web and to the possibility of having my own little space on it. I liked the anarchistic feel of the web in those days. And, since I'm an educator as well as a designer, I was interested in the ability to use the web for instructional ends. I'm still interested in those things. And I'm still learning (now more rapidly than ever before) how to enable myself and my sites to reach people in better ways. But, maybe because I spent enough time theorizing while I was working on my M.A. in English (with courses in Marxist literary theory, and seminars in Michel Foucault, among others, during the period of time when I was burning, if that's the word, to be a literary critic), I don't cotton much to theorizing the web. I make certain assumptions and I am guided by certain design principles, but I'd rather spend all day learning a new technology and trying to apply it than writing an essay dissing one style over another or trying to lay out some sort of grand theory of site building. It's fine by me that there are people who enjoy that sort of thing, but I only rarely get any pleasure from it.
[posted by Wheat]
Gina's sleeping, and I'm avoiding doing anything that remotely resembles work. Since February (when I landed the job I'm working now), I've been relatively obsessed with work. But you can only be that way for so long before it starts to ruin your life. Since 1995, when I first started graduate school, I've been working and studying and feeling guity any time I wasn't working or studying. Now, I'm learning how to enjoy my leisure time. I'm starting to enjoy reading and cooking again. And this blogging might be a leisurly pursuit as well. I've always liked journal writing (I have a huge one that I'd like to convert to HTML sometime and older, paper-bound ones going back to 1991). And this has the same feel, at least for now. Gotta run...
[posted by Wheat]
Today was a long day. I worked exclusively with PHP and MySQL. I learned a ton of things, but I still have a lot of work to do. My main problem today was that I couldn't get PHP (3.0.12) to "see" MySQL. The only database program it would recognize is PostgreSQL (yuk!). So I downloaded PHP4, but I haven't installed it yet. I'm waiting for some feedback from some usenet gurus. I don't want to screw up everything I already have going on with Apache. So, after struggling with that issue a bit and reading up on MySQL and PHP, I finally decided to start screwing with MySQL at the command line (since I need to learn SQL). I hate to admit it (since it really shows my geek) but it was fun messing with it. SQL is a lot more intuitive that its name would imply. Steve is on net-fast this weekend, so I'll try to be human as well and stay offline (there are other things in life, if memory serves me correctly). Anway, it's quittin' time. So, I'm out the door....
[posted by Wheat]
testing. Steve Jarvis has been kind enough to help me set up a blog (not that I wouldn't have been able to figure it out myself, mind you, but since he's an old hand at it, I thought it would save me mucking through the faq). We're posting this from his casa, with the aid of his nice iMac. (These days I'm something of a Linux person, but I still have a soft spot for macs).
[posted by Wheat]
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