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Monday, June 25, 2001
Gina and I went Saturday night with some friends to a place in West Fork, AR called the "Little O' Opry" where the old-timers lay down some mean country music for several hours for six bucks. Guest musicians come up and play along with the house band (who were quite amazing). Highlights of the night included renditions of "Good Hearted Woman" and "Great Speckled Dove."
In the less fun department, my Dad has been having a lot of trouble of late. His new team of doctors are trying out new meds and I'm looking into assisted living facilities in Fayetteville.
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Gina and I went Saturday night with some friends to a place in West Fork, AR called the "Little O' Opry" where the old-timers lay down some mean country music for several hours for six bucks. Guest musicians come up and play along with the house band (who were quite amazing). Highlights of the night included renditions of "Good Hearted Woman" and "Great Speckled Dove."
In the less fun department, my Dad has been having a lot of trouble of late. His new team of doctors are trying out new meds and I'm looking into assisted living facilities in Fayetteville.
[0 comments]
Thursday, June 21, 2001
I've been spending a lot of time lately out at my dad's farm, cleaning up his house so that we might eventually rent it. He's in a retirement community now, and his former home is piled high with junk accumulated over the years (especially, it seems, caned food that has been there since time out of mind). But, because dad has a strong antiquarian interest, you run across interesting things in the process. Today I found a hymnal from 1926. And while I (actually we--Gina was with me. In fact, she's the one who initiated this most recent round of cleaning) was working on clearing out his kitchen, I spun up some of his albums. I listened to Jimmie Rogers ("the singing brakeman"), an amazingly young Merle Haggard ("the workingman's poet") covering Jimmie Rogers, a few tracks from a Bill Monroe ("Big Mon" or "The Father of Bluegrass") album, and two sides of Hank William's greatest hits (which I would glady listen to over and over again).
I grew up on this sort of music. And because it was my father's music, I hated it. I don't hate it anymore. And some of it I like quite a lot from time to time. I think I began to appreciate country music the first time I really listened to and understood what Bob Wills was trying to do: combine country dance music with jazz, spanish, and (later in his career) rock elements. It was that fusion of influences that I liked and that led me, eventually, to appreciate (to some degree, at least) the more traditional stuff.
I also, and this is truly odd, found an old Yes album among my dad's records. This one, an album from 1975 called Yesterdays must have found it's way in by mistake as dad always had nothing but contempt for rock music (much less rock music by the kings of fusion). I listened to a few cuts and then spun up the Merle Haggard. I'll give it another try some other time. The only Yes album I ever owned was Fragile, which I liked quite a lot. I also sat through Tales from Topographic Oceans once.
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I've been spending a lot of time lately out at my dad's farm, cleaning up his house so that we might eventually rent it. He's in a retirement community now, and his former home is piled high with junk accumulated over the years (especially, it seems, caned food that has been there since time out of mind). But, because dad has a strong antiquarian interest, you run across interesting things in the process. Today I found a hymnal from 1926. And while I (actually we--Gina was with me. In fact, she's the one who initiated this most recent round of cleaning) was working on clearing out his kitchen, I spun up some of his albums. I listened to Jimmie Rogers ("the singing brakeman"), an amazingly young Merle Haggard ("the workingman's poet") covering Jimmie Rogers, a few tracks from a Bill Monroe ("Big Mon" or "The Father of Bluegrass") album, and two sides of Hank William's greatest hits (which I would glady listen to over and over again).
I grew up on this sort of music. And because it was my father's music, I hated it. I don't hate it anymore. And some of it I like quite a lot from time to time. I think I began to appreciate country music the first time I really listened to and understood what Bob Wills was trying to do: combine country dance music with jazz, spanish, and (later in his career) rock elements. It was that fusion of influences that I liked and that led me, eventually, to appreciate (to some degree, at least) the more traditional stuff.
I also, and this is truly odd, found an old Yes album among my dad's records. This one, an album from 1975 called Yesterdays must have found it's way in by mistake as dad always had nothing but contempt for rock music (much less rock music by the kings of fusion). I listened to a few cuts and then spun up the Merle Haggard. I'll give it another try some other time. The only Yes album I ever owned was Fragile, which I liked quite a lot. I also sat through Tales from Topographic Oceans once.
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Are blogs a means of self-expression or the final commodification of private experience? I go both ways on this one. Writing demands an audience, even if it is an imagined one. People with literary aspirations always have an image of their reader (however idealized) in mind as they write. Blogs, of course, are a much less formal mode of writing. Perhaps they rely on our voyeuristic impulses, like a diary found in an attic would. Maybe they're just an expression of collecitve egoism. I use my own mostly for my own benefit--so I can look back and see what I was working on and find traces of what I was thinking at some point in the recent past. I used to do the same thing with a private journal that started in a composition book before migrating to a hard drive. I suppose it's only natural that it has now migrated to a database on a network. But if accessability were the only concern, I could require authentication to view the page. It's the desire for connections the fuels it. We like to read another's words and say "I know what this person is talking about. I've thought this before. I'd do the same thing."
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Monday, June 18, 2001
Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court has voted to strengthen fourth ammendment rights rather than weaken them. (For those of you who slept through your 9th grade civics class, the fourth ammendment to the constitution protects you, in theory at least, from unreasonable searches). Justice Scalia, with whom I rarely agree, hit the mail on the head: "Where, as here, the government uses a device that is not in general public use to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."
[2 comments]
Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court has voted to strengthen fourth ammendment rights rather than weaken them. (For those of you who slept through your 9th grade civics class, the fourth ammendment to the constitution protects you, in theory at least, from unreasonable searches). Justice Scalia, with whom I rarely agree, hit the mail on the head: "Where, as here, the government uses a device that is not in general public use to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."
[2 comments]
Friday, June 15, 2001
Today I grabbed the latest Win32 version of Apache and set it up on my laptop along with the free version of ColdFusion. I'm going to work on my CFML skills by translating some of my PHP apps to CFML.
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Today I grabbed the latest Win32 version of Apache and set it up on my laptop along with the free version of ColdFusion. I'm going to work on my CFML skills by translating some of my PHP apps to CFML.
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Thursday, June 14, 2001
Yesterday was an up and down day. Until noon, I was feeling fairly triumphant. But the afternoon was filled with dissapointments and tedium. Oh well. On the up side, I've found more interesting sites on the web lately than I could even hope to mention here. The web may be going through a tough time as a money-making vehicle, but it's only getting better as a reference work, news resource, and entertainment room. The reports of the "death of content" have been greatly exagerated.
In my spare time, I finished up a little polling script in PHP/MySQL. I'm going to add some more features so it can be easily altered. But the functionality is there and I'm going to create a poll for the Nancy site (which had been using a "free" one with lots of adds). I need to roll a simple guestbook script as well, for the Nancy site and for The Tares, since the Perl/CGI one won't work on the new server.
Thanks to feeplan, I may finally get to have some work done on my teeth (actually, my gums). I wince to even think about it. But it has to be done, and I've been putting it off long enough.
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Yesterday was an up and down day. Until noon, I was feeling fairly triumphant. But the afternoon was filled with dissapointments and tedium. Oh well. On the up side, I've found more interesting sites on the web lately than I could even hope to mention here. The web may be going through a tough time as a money-making vehicle, but it's only getting better as a reference work, news resource, and entertainment room. The reports of the "death of content" have been greatly exagerated.
In my spare time, I finished up a little polling script in PHP/MySQL. I'm going to add some more features so it can be easily altered. But the functionality is there and I'm going to create a poll for the Nancy site (which had been using a "free" one with lots of adds). I need to roll a simple guestbook script as well, for the Nancy site and for The Tares, since the Perl/CGI one won't work on the new server.
Thanks to feeplan, I may finally get to have some work done on my teeth (actually, my gums). I wince to even think about it. But it has to be done, and I've been putting it off long enough.
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Wednesday, June 13, 2001
The redesign of nancyband.com is out there. Our singer, Sean, did the original version. This new one is all mine.
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The redesign of nancyband.com is out there. Our singer, Sean, did the original version. This new one is all mine.
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Monday, June 11, 2001
Credit where credit it due: Since I complain so much about Blogger when it's slow, it's only fair to praise it's speedy performance over the past several days. Ev must have the servers tweaked out nicely.
Oklahoma: I read this morning, as I'm sure did most everyone else around the world, about the execution of Timothy McVeigh. And while I'm sure the world is not in need of one more opinion on the subject, I'll weigh in as well. In general, I'm opponent to the death penalty for a variety of reasons (partly because of the risk of killing the innocent, and partly because I think it's a bad idea to give governments the legal sanction to kill their own citizens). Though in cases like McVeigh's, where there is no doubt about guilt and where, in fact, the guilty is quite proud to own up to his own participation in the event, I can't say that I'll be lighting any candles. McVeigh is certainly an violent, dangerous, and arrogant man. His defense of his actions as some sort of political speach (as if there were no other acts of protest available) sicken me. And if anyone deserves to die, he certainly is high on the list. At the same time, I think it only makes a nation look bad to have to resort to killing in order to solve its problems. And I also think it doesn't help, for those who defend the death penalty on the (in my opinion [and I've researched it a bit], non-existent) grounds that it provides a good negative example for other citizens thinking of committing crimes, that McVeigh faced his own without flinching.
McVeigh cites the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents as the motivation (and justification) for his actions. I have concerns as well, as I'm sure many must, about the way in which the governement agencies involved handled these standoff situations. At the same time, having concerns with government actions, about which we still (and I imagine, will remain) unclear is certainly no justification for the sort of violence that McVeigh inflicted on 168 unsuspecting office workers and children (who, in his words "had to lose their lives"). Political speech, even in more radical forms, is one thing. Killing civilians is quite another. As one of my English professors, M. Keith Booker once said, you gain nothing in protesting terrorism if you become a terrorist yourself in the process.
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Credit where credit it due: Since I complain so much about Blogger when it's slow, it's only fair to praise it's speedy performance over the past several days. Ev must have the servers tweaked out nicely.
Oklahoma: I read this morning, as I'm sure did most everyone else around the world, about the execution of Timothy McVeigh. And while I'm sure the world is not in need of one more opinion on the subject, I'll weigh in as well. In general, I'm opponent to the death penalty for a variety of reasons (partly because of the risk of killing the innocent, and partly because I think it's a bad idea to give governments the legal sanction to kill their own citizens). Though in cases like McVeigh's, where there is no doubt about guilt and where, in fact, the guilty is quite proud to own up to his own participation in the event, I can't say that I'll be lighting any candles. McVeigh is certainly an violent, dangerous, and arrogant man. His defense of his actions as some sort of political speach (as if there were no other acts of protest available) sicken me. And if anyone deserves to die, he certainly is high on the list. At the same time, I think it only makes a nation look bad to have to resort to killing in order to solve its problems. And I also think it doesn't help, for those who defend the death penalty on the (in my opinion [and I've researched it a bit], non-existent) grounds that it provides a good negative example for other citizens thinking of committing crimes, that McVeigh faced his own without flinching.
McVeigh cites the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents as the motivation (and justification) for his actions. I have concerns as well, as I'm sure many must, about the way in which the governement agencies involved handled these standoff situations. At the same time, having concerns with government actions, about which we still (and I imagine, will remain) unclear is certainly no justification for the sort of violence that McVeigh inflicted on 168 unsuspecting office workers and children (who, in his words "had to lose their lives"). Political speech, even in more radical forms, is one thing. Killing civilians is quite another. As one of my English professors, M. Keith Booker once said, you gain nothing in protesting terrorism if you become a terrorist yourself in the process.
[0 comments]
Sunday, June 10, 2001
Today in music: Mulehead rock. They're a great alt-country band from Little Rock, Arkansas, and they've been in my CD player at home for over a week now. Just today, I finally scored a copy of the latest Queens of the Stone Age album. And, as I type this, the CD changer has just moved on from Mulehead to the Nancy disc (which I'm still quite proud of). I swear I will get off my dead ass and launch our new site this weak (are you reading this, Sean?
The web economy might still be drying up, but I don't care. My PHP and SQL skills are comming up. If it ever does turn around, I'll be in a better place. And maybe by then I'll have finished up my portofolio (what a project that has become). I rolled a nice little polling application on Friday in about 45 minutes. A good eight hours more and it could be a nicely polished piece of work. And the Online Progress Reporting Tool (OPRT) that I rolled for UB is, for all practical purposes, a finished product (there are a few admin screens I'd like to add. Currently, there's one for adding new students but you have to drop to the command line to edit or remove them. That's maybe two or three more hours of work). I think it took eighty-eight hours total, which is really good considering all that it can do.
I started learning Flash 5 last night. I'd taken a few stabs at it before, once using the built-in tutorials and one using some Peachpit book (which, for once, wasn't a good idea). But last night I just cranked it up and kept playing with it until I figured a few things out. I actually worked up a nice little intro (I know you're probably sick of those by now) for wheatdesign but I haven't uploaded it yet. I'll probably add it on Monday. I'm going to teach Flash this summer at TechCamp, so I need to learn enough to keep ahead of the kids. :)
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Today in music: Mulehead rock. They're a great alt-country band from Little Rock, Arkansas, and they've been in my CD player at home for over a week now. Just today, I finally scored a copy of the latest Queens of the Stone Age album. And, as I type this, the CD changer has just moved on from Mulehead to the Nancy disc (which I'm still quite proud of). I swear I will get off my dead ass and launch our new site this weak (are you reading this, Sean?
The web economy might still be drying up, but I don't care. My PHP and SQL skills are comming up. If it ever does turn around, I'll be in a better place. And maybe by then I'll have finished up my portofolio (what a project that has become). I rolled a nice little polling application on Friday in about 45 minutes. A good eight hours more and it could be a nicely polished piece of work. And the Online Progress Reporting Tool (OPRT) that I rolled for UB is, for all practical purposes, a finished product (there are a few admin screens I'd like to add. Currently, there's one for adding new students but you have to drop to the command line to edit or remove them. That's maybe two or three more hours of work). I think it took eighty-eight hours total, which is really good considering all that it can do.
I started learning Flash 5 last night. I'd taken a few stabs at it before, once using the built-in tutorials and one using some Peachpit book (which, for once, wasn't a good idea). But last night I just cranked it up and kept playing with it until I figured a few things out. I actually worked up a nice little intro (I know you're probably sick of those by now) for wheatdesign but I haven't uploaded it yet. I'll probably add it on Monday. I'm going to teach Flash this summer at TechCamp, so I need to learn enough to keep ahead of the kids. :)
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Sunday, June 03, 2001
I have a lot of stuff going on right now (and Blogger is s..l..o..w.. today). This comming week, I'm going to finish up my latest PHP/MySQL project. I hope to have that over and done with by mid week. Then I get to train people how to use it (though that shouldn't be hard. I've kept it as simple and intuitive as possible). But while all that is happening, I still have to get ready for some presentations the following two weeks, a database rebuild in June and July, and the technology camp that I put on in late July. Added to all of that, I need to get a syllabus together for the course I'm teaching this fall.
But today I managed to make some progress on my sites and whip my house (er, appartment) into better shape. Gina's super busy with school, so I've taken over a lot of the around-the-house duities, which is actually cool for the most part.
Vicki has been in Paris! So I'm still waiting to hear from her. She should have made it back to Dallas today.
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I have a lot of stuff going on right now (and Blogger is s..l..o..w.. today). This comming week, I'm going to finish up my latest PHP/MySQL project. I hope to have that over and done with by mid week. Then I get to train people how to use it (though that shouldn't be hard. I've kept it as simple and intuitive as possible). But while all that is happening, I still have to get ready for some presentations the following two weeks, a database rebuild in June and July, and the technology camp that I put on in late July. Added to all of that, I need to get a syllabus together for the course I'm teaching this fall.
But today I managed to make some progress on my sites and whip my house (er, appartment) into better shape. Gina's super busy with school, so I've taken over a lot of the around-the-house duities, which is actually cool for the most part.
Vicki has been in Paris! So I'm still waiting to hear from her. She should have made it back to Dallas today.
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Gina's up from her nap, but off to a study date. I'm finishing up the laundry and putting the finishing touches on some sites...
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Well, I almost have my new blogger template working the way I want it to. The basic idea is to integrate the design of WheatBlog2 with the rest of wheatdesign. Blogger's servers have been slow today, so it's been a tedious process. I haven't republished the archives yet, so they still have the old look. As a part of the ongoing redesign process, I did some work on the design gallery (currently offline) yesterday and today. I took new screen shots of all my sites and added a JavaScript jumpto function so you can go straight to the portfolio item you want without using the scrolling interface. It looks great. It still won't work in recent versions of Netscape/Mozilla. Some of the 6.x versions don't support the scrollto and jumpto properties. So I'm going to create a separate version for those and use a little browser detection to forward problem browsers to content they can handle.
I saw the Gus Van Zant remake of Psycho this weekend. I also watched "Psycho Path" which is a documentary on the making of the remake that comes along with the DVD. Both rocked. I'd heard bad things about the remake, but I've become quite a fan of Vince Vaughn of late (and I've always liked Gus Van Zant), so I decided to give it a try. Now I want to watch the original again. But I admire the director for doing this remake. It reminds me of Borges story about Don Quixote (i.e. the idea of a remake that is an exact replica).
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Friday, June 01, 2001
I've been working a lot this week on updating wheatdesign.com (including moving this blog from it's old home at wheatblog.blogspot.com over to it's new home at www.wheatdesign.com/blog. Soon, I'll change the design so it matches the rest of the site, but that'll wait.
On the coding front, I've been busy all this week (at work) creating a PHP/MySQL web app that will let instructors in our summer program report their grades online. It's very cool and coding it has taught me a lot more about PHP and SQL.
[0 comments]
I've been working a lot this week on updating wheatdesign.com (including moving this blog from it's old home at wheatblog.blogspot.com over to it's new home at www.wheatdesign.com/blog. Soon, I'll change the design so it matches the rest of the site, but that'll wait.
On the coding front, I've been busy all this week (at work) creating a PHP/MySQL web app that will let instructors in our summer program report their grades online. It's very cool and coding it has taught me a lot more about PHP and SQL.
[0 comments]
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