Category Archives: construction

Meta Blogging; Politics

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Strange how time seems to move so quickly isn’t it? I just updated the dead link at the bottom of this page (you know the one; it entices you to click on the next update, regardless of the fact that I have yet to write it), I have thought to change that link so that is just text, but then I would not have all of the personal satisfaction of knowing that someone, somewhere, is actually trying to click on it. At any rate, It was during this little process that I realized that it is going to be October pretty soon, within a few hours in fact. Seems like it was only last week that I was thinking I needed to get the damn archives around here up to date, of course that was while I was on vacation in July, so you should see what I am getting at with the movement of time.

The real problem with updating the archives isn’t about actually spending the time to do it, since it honestly only takes me a few seconds to scan each update, write a very brief description and slap it on the page. No, no, the real problem with it is that it requires me to read all the dribble that I write. Did you think that the lack of proofreading was due to my integrity? No, nothing like that at all. People say that you are always more critical of your own work, but come on, some of this garbage is just, well, garbage.

When I initially set up this site it was due to a free site having deleted my page and all of its content. Paying a few bucks a month to keep the content online didn’t seem like a bad idea, so that is what I did. I am not sure if I ever had the intention of setting up a daily journal/blog -type thing, but that is what happened. While I do enjoy writing all of the stuff that I post here, I don’t really enjoy reading it all that much. The writing of it is quite theraputic, while the reading of it is boring to me, and hopefully no one else.

It is with those beautiful, self-deprecating thoughts that I go into todays post..Be Warned..

• I, and I alone, have taken it upon myself to declare today “National Stand Out On Your Lawn Holding A Large Metal Pole While Praying For Ligntning Day”. Possibly not the whole day, but certainly for the two hours that the presidential candidates are going to be on television. I am not one to be cynical, oh wait I guess I am, but the simple fact that the online games I like to play have flooded over with players since the start of the ‘debate’ just makes me think that no one really cares which party has the better control of their puppet.

I am actually going to go watch the debate to see if I can be so ‘Un-American’ as to try to form my own opinions based on what the candidates say. Of course the debate is all but scripted, so good luck to me.

I hope to pick this up after Survivor is over, but no gurantees.

The debate was all that I expected: Bush said the phrase “war on terror” at least a thousand times (and I only watched half of it), while Kerry did his best to bring the facts into view; The fact that Iraq was less of a threat than at least four other countries (as far as ‘weapons of mass destruction’), the fact that we invaded Iraq on our own (no help from the UN on that one), the fact that the deaths in Iraq have been steadily going up since the war was ‘over’ (deaths being both the U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians). For some reason you can’t seem to hammer a fact into the head of George W. Bush…No, seriously, I bet if you had a fact that you wanted him to hear, then listened to how the ‘key part of the war on terror’ that fact was, then you became agitated and grabbed a hammer….You know where this is going.

The really unfortunate thing is that I don’t think that Kerry really did all that well at the debate. I could be wrong, or cynical, but it seemed that Bush was able to make his little eyes very steely when he looked into the camera and said “terror” or “war on terror”. I think Kerry had a lot more facts than Bush, possibly a better way to achieve the goals (though that would require looking at each candidates website to find out), I just think that Kerry might have been able to sell himself a bit better.

One thing, in the debate, that I found to be a bit surprising was that Kerry actually brought up the subject of ‘stem cell research’, and Bush’s policy against it. It was a bit of manuevering that Bush had to do to get that subject changed back to the ‘war on terror’, but he did it. He never once mentioned his staunch opposition of it. I tell you, if Bush is not re-elected he could certainly make a good spin doctor for someone else, someone else who likes to not hide facts, but change subjects, that is.

This year’s presidential debates are going to fall into the next trivial pursuit game, I am afraid. The only people that are watching them are steadfast supporters of one or the other of the candidates. The ‘undecided’ people are all playing on-line games, much like I should be, but my ‘journalistic integrity'(hehe) keeps me from doing so.

Here’s to hoping that the presidential candidates sober up…

Meta blogging; Ozzfest

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I spent some time today screwing around with the layout of my page. I came up with a couple of things that I kind of liked, but nothing that I was sure enough about to commit it to the internet. The thing is that without any advertising logos to put on here it just seems foolish for me to have it divided as it is, when there is so little information in the left column. I like the things that I do have over there, but on the occasions where I actually write a bit there is just a lot of dead space over there. Conversely, when I removed the left column the daily text stretched so far that it became difficult to keep the eyes on the correct line. That led to me reducing the size of the table, leaving about 40% of the screen as just background.

Once again I realize why I just ripped off this layout instead of coming up with something of my own.

Having written the previous, I went on to spend a lot of time looking for a few songs that I remember fondly, with hopes of updating my side bar. It turns out that the first three I thought of were absolute shit, and the one that I ended up placing there was not far behind. I guess that is why every generation hates the music that their parents listened to, considering that I can hardly listen to most of the hair band shit that I used to listen to. The one saving grace of my generation is that we have Megadeth and Metallica to listen to in a pinch. I don’t mean the horrible soap-opera-esque crap that they started putting out in the mid-late ’90s, I mean the real Metallica and the real Megadeth.

I am sure that every generation makes a stand like this at some point. Trying to defend the music that they grew up listening to against the new bands that are coming out. The thing that makes me think that some of the power bands that I was listening to when I was sixteen, Metallica, Megadeth and Pantera specifically, are better than the bands of today is the fact that they are being played on the radio in rotation with the new Metal. Perhaps that is just in the area I live, but the fact is that they are still being played, more than twenty years later. The only other songs that get that kind of air-play are oldies.

As I approach 30, I realize that I am no longer the kid that used to bang his head while listening to the old metal bands, but when I see kids half my age wearing ‘Master of Puppets’ t-shirts, I realize that some of the kids are still listening to it.

I had the opportunity to go to OzzFest last summer, thanks to my wife having an amazing job where she won V.I.P. tickets to the event. The one thing about that experience that really surprised me was the sheer number of old metal t-shirts I saw. I felt like I was damn near the oldest person there, but lots of the kids were wearing Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Anthrax, Slayer t-shirts, regardless of the fact that they weren’t even alive while those bands were in their prime.

I sure hope that by the time I reach say 50 I will quit trying to defend all of the metal that I listened to when I was a teen, but the sad truth is that there is just nothing coming out today that is as heavy and even tries to tell a story. Thunderous guitar riffs are pretty easy to come up with, the hard part is making something that will last. You can have the heaviest riff known to man, then have someone just scream, “keep on rollin’, rollin’, rollin’,” over the top of it and it will be absolute garbage. Put that next to the riffs in a song such as Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”, which is basically an anti-drug campaign, but it tells a story and it sticks. I am sure you can see the difference. If you can’t then I am old.

• The aforementioned OZZFEST was by far the best show that I have ever seen. There were so many bands there that I could not possibly list them all. The ones that played the main stage, though, were Chevelle, Disturbed, Korn, Marilyn Manson and, of course, OZZY. We wandered around the festival for a good five hours or so before they actually opened the entrances to the main stage. I was able to see a couple of bands, like Voivod, on the second stage that I had always wanted to see. There was another band on the second stage called MotoGrater that I mention only so you will know the name.

I don’t remember the exact date that the show was, but it was in the middle of the summer, in Arizona. Temperatures outside that day were over 110 degrees, which led to us using our V.I.P. passes frequently to get to the only area with a misting system, and the V.I.P. restrooms, which were the only air-conditioned place in the whole venue. It was there, the bathroom, that I met the guys from MotoGrater as they were trying to wash off the silly make-up that they put on before they do a show. An hour or so later, I met the bassist for Korn in the same restroom. Keep in mind that it is tough to try to talk to someone while they are pissing in the urinal next to you, let alone ask for an autograph. I briefly thought about shaking his hand, as we were walking away, but considering that neither of us had stopped at the sink to wash our hands, I thought better of it. And NO, I didn’t look at his Johnson. I stared at the wall just like I always do. I did ask him if he was in the band ‘Korn’ and he said that he was. Then he asked me who was on stage, I told him who it was (though I can’t remember at this point), and he disappeared through a door marked “NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT”. I didn’t try to follow.

I was absolutely blown away by Marilyn Manson. I do not care for their music, but won’t turn it off if it is on the radio, it is just the kind of thing that I don’t actively hate, or like. His (their) theatrics really stole the show. To the point that I was a bit disappointed when I finally got to see Ozzy (for the first time in my life). Manson certainly took care to stage a show that would shock and entertain you for his full set. The rest of the bands, Ozzy included, just did their songs. I will give ozzy a bit of lee-way on this one, since he is no spring chicken, but the other bands, like Korn, couldn’t they have done something other than just play their songs?

Manson had choreographed marionettes (they were actually people behaving as such) that did things for his entire set. He had a little tiered stage kind of thing that they would climb. It is difficult to describe, but it was an experience. The other bands just played their songs. If you want to hear the song, you have the cd, the sound quality is going to be a lot better, just listen to the damn cd. Marilyn Manson, on the other hand, really sold me the experience. Even though I do not like Marilyn Manson, I would be more likely to buy tickets to his next concert than I would be to buy tickets for the next, say, Korn concert…Even though I like Korn a lot more than I like Manson.

That is about enough for today. Feel free to email me if you agree/disagree, that is why I put the link down there after all.

Meta blogging; Abu Ghraib

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I spent a bit of time on Wednesday, and an hour and a half today, getting finished with the March 2004 archive page . That, of course, required reading through my posts from the month of March which, while time-consuming, was a lot less depressing than I thought it might be. It turns out that it really is better to let what you have written sit there for at least a month before you try to read it and do a short description, as it seems that you are looking at it with fresh eyes. There were a couple of essay type things that I wrote during the month of March that I think were really quite good. There may be some point later when I pick a couple of them out and post a section of ‘stuff I wrote that doesn’t totally suck’ on here, but that would make people quit reading my daily update, which usually does suck, and then just go to the link for the stuff that doesn’t suck. The inherent problem is that I do not know if what I am writing sucks until I read it a lot later than when I write it. In my mind everything I write sucks, only time can clear my mind enough to look at what I have written with a clear perspective and that does not lend itself to making sure that every word I put down is worth the paper keyboard it is written on.

The other thing that I noticed as I was reading through the old posts is that I seem to be getting progressively better at getting my idea down as time goes on. It seems that with each new post I get just a bit better at keeping all of the ideas in my head long enough to put each one down and move on, while in the earliest posts I was trying to type all of them at once and often lost most of them in the process. The result of that was that each paragraph that I had written would look like it was four paragraphs that I had taken a sentence or two from and tried to make into a single, flowing concept. It was shit, honestly. Though I am always my worst critic, I am sure that anyone reading this would really have to agree that my writing in this form has gotten better from when I started. That being said, I still have a long way to go to make entire posts that will hold a reader’s attention and not make me look like the ass that I am. But isn’t that what I signed up for when I started this whole page in the first place?

• I haven’t posted any news here for a while, not for lack of trying. I was hoping to get a bit or two up here today, but it seems that all there is to talk about anymore is the damn Abu Ghraib garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I think that what our people did to those prisoners was inhumane. From the pictures that I have seen, though, it did not seem as there was any physical abuse to the men. It was sick and wrong for anyone to even stage the events for such photos, but it happened, and we (the U.S.) did it to prisoners of war (well I guess there is a loophole so they aren’t actually POW’s, still it was inhumane). If we (the U.S.) can’t understand that the entire world has a microscope on the way we are handling ourselves in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ this is going to get infinitely worse for our brave men and women who are there actually fighting it.

Whether those photos were staged by the U.S. troops who posed in them as ‘trophies’ to take home with them, or if that is the way we treat prisoners on a daily basis seems to be a dead discussion in every nation except ours. Less than half of our country is behind the war in Iraq at this point and I don’t think we have any allies left that would actually send more troops over to help us if it came to that. That whole war has gone completely to hell. I am pretty sure that Dubya doesn’t mind, since it has driven oil prices over forty dollars a barrel, and that is extra profit for him, but now it appears that he is ready to bail out. Just makes me wonder what his reason for bailing out is, the fact that he has a financial windfall with oil prices skyrocketting, or the fact that an american civilian got his head cut off.

That is exactly why I don’t like to talk politics. I have some pretty strong views, and Dubya is such an easy target. I sure wish I hadn’t voted for him, but I did. So, please, to help clear my conscience, do not vote for him next election. We have seen the FUBAR that the country can become when being backed only by ‘big oil’, and that somehow drives the prices up. I am so sickened by the situation that I am honestly thinking about putting down ‘Reagan’ on my vote, as a write-in.

• Guild Wars

Today is the last day of the E3 trial of the aforementioned game. I played it a bit each day that it was online and it seemed pretty cool. The one thing that I question is whether the local PC crashes that I experienced were based on it downloading ever more data, or if my system just can not run the game. I am leaning towards the game downloading as you play, I have all of the minimums beat by a lot but still get weird freezes when trying to play it. I hope that they get that all worked out when they go to Beta testing, which I am sure they will, and the game could be really cool. Also, having the game already installed on your machine, as opposed to having to download each zone that you enter, would likely make it much easier to play. I am not going to throw out an opinion based on my experience as it would be quite negative, if they do have a beta test for it, though, I am going to jump all over that. It would be extremely cool to see such a game in its infancy working towards a world-wide release. I do suppose they would likely be looking for players who had cable or dsl connections though, yet, at the same time they must be trying to sell it to normal people like me who have neither., My hope is not dead yet…

Meta

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I did upload some of the things that I was typing about yesterday. I found that, like everything else I ever attempt in life, I remember them far more fondly than they deserve. Perhaps it is just part of human nature to think that everything that you have ever created with only the power of your mind and your own two hands is the end all of human existance, but, man to find that it could be for all the wrong reasons is kind of a stab in the heart. I managed only to upload a short mp3 that I created along with one java game. The rest of what I was going through was so bad that I didn’t want to have my name on it -not that these two are particularly better, just that since I said I would add some I wanted to have an example of each-. For the daring, just click on the ‘Stuff I Made’ link on the sidebar.

Now on to site related stuff.

I really did not intend to do a daily update on this site, but I feel compelled to. The problem with that is that I really suck at it. I said yesterday that I have become a better writer without actually having written anything in a while, and that statement is true, but also that statement is in direct reference to fiction. I have never written any non-fiction in my entire life (possible exception being reports turned in at school), and I find this type of writing to be a lot more difficult to get the hang of. When writing the fiction I always have a story line and characters to work with, though they only exist in my mind, and after I type a paragraph or two I will go back and look at the actual delivery of the prose to try to keep it really fluid and get rid of excess crap that really doesn’t need to be there.

Non-Fiction (i.e. these updates) is a completely different monster. I will sit down with a pretty good idea of what I want to say, what spin I would like to put on my opinions, and a few remarks that I want to add for a bit of comic relief. What then happens is that my brain starts working way faster than my fingers can possibly type and I end up with unrelated comments thrown in all through the entire thing. I read back over them only AFTER I have posted them and find that, for the most part, I have totally underestimated the dificulty of doing this sort of thing.

I really wish that I had taken some sort of a course in journalism, I am sure that they probably teach you techniques to block out your impulses to add all of the random crap to what you are trying to make a point about. The sad truth is that I spent all of my time in creative writing classes which taught me how to deal with character development, plot lines, and the fluidity of a story. None of those traits really lends itself to trying to be coherent while rambling on about Levitra, or whatever you are bitching about that day.

I certainly hope that, if I continue to do these updates, I will get better over time. As it is I find myself not wanting to read the babbling and incoherent crap that I am posting here. If I don’t want to read it, how the hell can I possibly expect anyone else to? I think that question may have been rhetorical. I suppose that if the substance of the writing was earth-shaking then some people may look past the shoddy writing, but as I have not shooken the earth yet, with all of this garbage, I doubt that will be my saving grace.

I do believe that, like anything else, a bit more practice will result in me becoming better at this sort of thing. My fear is that I will continue to read my updates and find them utterly disappointing. If that should happen I would certainly be quite discouraged, and I might just give up the whole idea of a daily update. That is why I am hoping that this site gets found by the search engines sometime pretty soon. I know that my writing is crap, but I am very critical of my own work and I would like to see some feedback from someone who is, say, Not Me. But, that is another issue all in itself.

Meta; Witles

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Well, I uploaded yesterday’s update to the wrong folder, not that it matters with my current readership being only me. It was still accessible had one clicked the link for ‘Next Update’ at the bottom of the page. So that means that there really was a good reason why I put the link to the next update on there, even though about 99% of the time it is a dead link here on the main page.

The good news is that after uploading and reading that update, it was probably better that it not grace the front of this site for even a day. Not that I think it was particulary bad, just that I had hoped to be somewhat impartial with what I write here. Yesterday’s update was far from it, in fact I actually wanted to flame myself for some of the points I was trying to make. Let that be a lesson to me, Proof-read before posting. Proof-reading is one thing that I never do before I post, another is spell check. I would like to do spell check, but I do not have a word processor installed on this machine, so I just assume that it is good enough for my purposes. It is not like I am writing something that is going to be published in a national newspaper or anything.

I was thinking again about what else I might want to put on this site. I have decided that I am going to put some crap on here that I have done, a couple of java applets, maybe even this one piece of music that I was working on a while ago. I set about to searching my hard drives for copies of these items, but was unable to find the majority of them. I know that I have had them posted on various free sites at some time or another so I will go to search them out. Fear not, if I do not find them you will probably be better off than if I do.

As I began to re-write one of the Arthur Witles stories yesterday, I was disappointed to see that it made reference to yet another story which I do not have a copy of. I remember a few of the one-liners from it, and also remember it as being one of the better ones. I so do hate technology. There was a time when I wrote everything on paper, and never, not even once did my file cabinet say “that device is not accessable”. I guess this is my punishment for putting too much trust into microsoft based technology.

I left in the reference to the Arthur Witles story that I no longer have, and with any luck I will remember enough of the story to be able to write it again. I guess it will probably be better to just do a complete re-write anyway, as with most of my stories it is utter crap. For some reason I have become a better writer over the years without ever practicing the craft. It is strange how that can happen, but not surprising. Writing is one of the only things I can think of where you can get better by not doing it. Imagine a guitarist getting better at guitar by simply listening to other guitarists, it just does not happen. As a writer, though, the more you read the more fluent you become. I am still far from a publishable author, I might well never be, but I would like to think that I am now able to at least tell a story that doesn’t make the average reader vomit in disgust. That is, of course, debatable.

I am going to leave this where it is, there are a few files that I want to get uploaded and stories to write. If, in 100 years, someone is digging through these archives and is disappointed by the the fact that I managed to coney 0 information in this update, tough titty.

Meta

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Well this is quite interesting. I guess there must be a god, and microsoft must own his ass. I babbled almost incoherently about microsoft yesterday, and though my site still has not been found by search engines, and according to my stats has only been viewed by three people, I am having some really strange issues with the content that I posted yesterday. Of course there is no way this has anything to do with microsoft, it is just a slap of Karma I guess. Well, not even that, as it turns out, I had somehow managed to save an html file as a unicode text document by mistake. So much for conspiracy theories or divine retribution.

I am curious to know how long it will take fot the search engines to find the site. I don’t really know how they work or how often they update, but it would be nice if I were to search for a string of text, that I put in with the intention of getting hits, to show my site in the results. Why else would I have made reference to free live streaming animal sex videos? I clearly have no intention of putting anything like that on this site…at this point…

On a completely different subject. If there is anyone out there who happens to be digging through these old updates at any point, and you can answer for me a question I would appreciate it. I have a floppy disk that has several witles stories and a couple of horror stories on it. I put it into the drive -after it had done nothing but collect dust for years- and read/edited the stories, then saved them back to the disk. Every file opened perfectly, they saved no problem. Yet, the next day when I put the disk in it says the device is not accesible. It still spins freely, there is no hang-up with the sliding silver part, I didn’t spill any maple syrup on it, what could have happened to it in the fourteen hours between it working and not working? That may be rhetorical though.

On to various musings about site creation. Yesterday’s update was the worst ever. That is not really saying much when there are only like five altogether, but I think I set the bar so low that I may never be able to reach that level of absolute crap again, that is of course debatable. My only solace is the fact that I am the only one in the entire world who actually read it. So I guess what I am saying is that the purpose of this site is so that I can post absolute crap that no one except me ever reads. That would make a hell of a mission statement then, wouldn’t it?

I am going to create a page to link to from the rent sign on the sidebar. I had never seen anyone put up anything like that on the internet (the rent sign) so I want to have a page there just in case anyone is actually curious enough to click through and see if it is legit. I really doubt anyone will actually click it, so I am thinking of making the page it links to just a humorous type thing. Possibly offering to put there ad there for a penny per second, just to see if anyone realizes that that is like 864 dollars a day. Or maybe even just go for the gusto and just offer to put an ad there for a Million dollars per month (with the fine print saying 2 year minimum contract).

I don’t really think it even matters what I put there, it seems to me that the only effective internet marketing is for porn, and I wouldn’t want to put myself in the position where it was necessary to actually have a link to some strange porn page on my site. Now if that was a voluntary link that would be completely different. But I am quite sure that if I tried to use my ‘rent box’ legitimately that it would result in nothing but porn. Of course that is all very far down the road, like when there are more readers than just me. It is just fun to toy with concepts while the site is all so fresh and new.

I think that may also be the reason that these updates are just so rambling and incoherent. There are so many things that I want to get to, and so little time to do it. I, of course, don’t keep notes relating to any ideas that I may have, so that leaves me just babbling about it here, when if I just started doing whatever the idea was I would probably have it completed by now. It is strange how that works. Even stranger is why I continue to do these updates when I know that no one else is reading them.

I guess that is just about enough babbling for today. I still hope to get another witles story posted today, as well as completing the for rent page.

Meta

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Well, I got off of work late, my time, so I was not able to accomplish a whole lot, but I did get the entire poetry page up and running. I also spent just enough time there to make sure that all the links were actually linking to actual pages. For some reason, I also added notes to the bottom of a couple of the poems, I think that was mostly because I could 1) remember what had made me write them in the first place and 2) It would help to explain my totally F’ed up mind.

I was hoping to get a whole hell of a lot more done as far as getting some more of the Arthur Witles stories online, but I am very poor at sight-typing. That same principal applies to why I have not yet gotten any of my short stories online.

I actually have one of those “you talk, it types” programs on my pc, but they lie. I mean if you say, “I like mittens”, that could translate to “alien martians”. That would lead to me just yelling at the damned thing, hoping that I could get it back on track. The problem there is that you can yell at a human and make them jump to doing something else, but the computer doesn’t care. If your pc actually resoponds to those commands then you are a very lucky person (and yes I spent like two hours of my life talking to the damn thing to “set up” my voice commands, and it still doesn’t work). I bet you my dollar to your penny that if Bill Gates walked into the room, it would pretty much shut down and await further instruction.

I have used windows based machines for my entire life (that is the length of life that I will admit to for the purposes of this website) and I know how to use all of the features of it. It is entirely possible that the Mac user has a significant advantage over the pc user. The thing is that the mac does not advertise, or market, quite like the windows based pc does. The windows based system has at least a dozen retailers that put ads online and on the tv, like gateway, dell, and many others. They do not say that they are running the windows OS but you know that they have to be. Microsoft would not let any ad get on the air without their okay.

To be fair, I guess I should mention that the voice recognition software was not an actual microsoft product. But, also to be fair, I understand that if I had a mac, it would be able to read all these ancient files that are on my pc that can not be read by any file in windows. In the ‘coup de gras’ of this statement I just found out that there is something called ‘quickview’ that will make it so that I can see those files…

So, I guess the Microsoft mission statement must be….”We want every customer…but we want to make it extremely difficult for them to find their files…then they have to call us…then we just totally quit supporting their system…this is the way to go”.

I mean, seriously, it is not like I am trying to access the internet using an old ‘Kaypro’ system. If only the people over there at MACINTOSH really gave it a go, I bet they could certainly kill the powerhouse MICROSOFT, or at least give them a damn good run for their money.

Meta

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I actually spent quite a long time yesterday in moving poetry over to this site. What I found simply amazing about the whole process was that I was actually forced to restart my pc twice just in the time I was working on it. Make no mistake, my system really is a dinosaur, boasting a hefty 466mhz processor and 256 megs of ram, but come on. I had to load every page from my free site to be able to view the html source for it, that led to being bombarded with all those damn pop-up things (which I closed) that appear to eat pieces of your system memory even after you close them. I am certainly no pundit on this matter, if I am wrong about that please let me know.

The thing is that I can surf for ten or twelve hours over regular sites, then throw in a game like say DiabloII and play it for a few hours, and still have more system memory left than after viewing about fifteen pages on an angelfire site. It could be that it is just my crappy windows 98 system, but I kind of doubt that, considering that lots of people are still using that OS and don’t have any problems with the actual surfing either.

I do not know a damn thing about java script (that’s how they make those annoying pop-up ads), but I do know about actual JAVA programming though. In JAVA one of the most important things to do is to DISPOSE of content on close. It is a very easy thing to do, in JAVA code it requires only one line ” Public Void Dispose () “. Some sites do not do it though, I can recall having played a few games at SmartGames and my pc just totally freezing just a few games in (I don’t know if they ever did fix that, so you may want to avoid that link). I don’t know if they can do something similar with java script, but it would be nice. To be fair, though, when I went in and blanked my internet history and downloaded files my system got back to an operable state, but why should I as a user have to do it? Perhaps that is why those free sites are far less popular than they were 5 years ago.

Back in the day (I hate that damn phrase as much as anyone else, but it is fitting), my angelfire site had only a banner on each page. Fast-Forward eight years or so and they have about 3-4 ads popping up on every single damn page. I guess that they eventually figured out that no one was going to click on such a passive thing as a banner, and they are correct, we now frantically click on those pop-ups, just on the close button, how this could possibly help them?? Perhaps a couple of people miss the close button and actually load the page?

To be fair to the free sites, I must also mention that they have been constantly adding disk space, easier image hosting, better devolopment tools, and many other features. The thing is that they are adding all that crap to try to draw in more customers to get their friends reading the site to click through the multitude of crap-filled pop-ups that they are adding as well. When I started my first free site, I had only (don’t remember the number at this point, so sue me) enough space to post all of the stuff I wanted there, and about a half a dozen large images, as well as a few midi files. Now that they are offering enough free disk space to hold MP3 libraries (though none actually allow those files), I am sure they probably taking it in the shorts.

I am not quite sure if I am going anywhere with this, so I will end it now. Suffice to say that I do not think the free sites will really be around in another 5 years. That is, they will be around, but no one will ever visit them, with the possible exception of the site developer’s friends and family.

As I have mentioned on this site previously, I ripped off a lot of the layout from BlackChampagne. I was hoping to be able to go on without ripping off any more ideas from the guy, but I was thinking that my nav bar was lacking, so I took the liberty of putting in a link to his site, as well as a “why mad” and “don’t care” thing. Those work together, and I plan to keep them like that until such a point as I am able to come up with something unique to put over there.

Fear not, dear reader (me, for the most part), I am well on my way to having other things ready to upload. They will all suck just as badly as what you are now reading, so turn away now if you must.

That leads me to the reasons that I don’t really feel so bad about ripping off his layout. 1)He has actual site traffic. 2)I have put up a lot of links to his site on the page. 3)He is a good writer/author and may someday make a living with his words. 4)He has not yet sent me a pipe bomb.

Meta; Super Bowl ads for Dick pills

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Well, I didn’t get back to trying to move some of the other content over to this site after the game last night, not that I really thought I would in the first place. I did go over to the other website and start looking at the stuff, but that just led to me reading it. Why I didn’t just download the files, then read them as I was copying them over to the new page is beyond me. I am not going to be able to use the current version of the html that they are in because of the different layout that I am going for here, but still if I would have read as I copied/pasted/uploaded I would probably have all of that done by now.

I am wondering if I really shouldn’t have done all of this stuff before I actually made the site active, the obvious answer is yes. The problem with that is that I probably would never have the motivation to do it, and, as previously stated, now that I am actually paying for this site, I think that the motivation may find me. Or I hope it does at the very least. It would be horrible if this site turned out to be like the coffee table that I took apart to sand and refinish about six years ago, only to complete just the top, after which I lost most of the parts and eventually threw it away. Happy thoughts.

I am not quite as concerned now about getting all of the links onto all of the pages as I had been previously. I don’t think that I will actually go back through these old updates to add the other features to the link bars as 1)I am the only visitor to this site. 2)I know where to find all the stuff. 3)If only the most recent update has the most recent links, as well as each of the content pages, that task will not be quite so monumental, even if I put it off for another six weeks. Not that that is my intention, but I do tend to procrastinate.

Well, perhaps after I have lunch of some sort I will get to actually moving some of that stuff over here and adding some links. But, first I simply must rant about something I saw during the game yesterday.

There were a lot of erectyle dysfunction commercials on during the super bowl. I don’t even want to get into why that is wrong on a lot of levels, but I will simply say that most men watching the game would not admit that they had any problem sexually even if they had lost their reproductive organs in a freak limbo accident. I guess the entire point is just to get the product name out there though, and for that it worked, hell I am typing about it.

There was one ad in particular that just reeked of wrongness. That was an ad for Levitra that featured Mike Ditka. Now in the ad Ditka is saying things such as baseball players don’t play when it rains, showing a picture of a light drizzle and people sitting in the dug out. Then It shows a football game going on in mud about seven miles deep, in a typhoon. Foolish things such as that. I guess he does have a point, but the whole commercial just made me question the validity of the arguments.

The obvious reference to baseball is the player for the Yankees (I think, can’t remember his name) who signed an endorsement deal with viagra. Now this baseball player is still playing, and still appears to be the type of person who wouldn’t really need to use it, but they wanted the star power. Ditka, on the other hand, hasn’t played in decades, and hasn’t even coached since what, the ’80s? So the first point I take from that is that levitra is for washed-up has-beens, while viagra is more for your active, youthful dysfunction market. I am not sure that they were actually trying to make that point, but that is sure what I took away from it.

Okay, now the rain. So they are saying that if you use viagra you can’t have sex when it rains, but if you use levitra you can slop around like a pig in the mud? Place any disturbing sexual image you like with that last sentence. I think both of the pills do exactly the same thing, so it seems to me that the reference to the rain has absolutely no point. Just, I guess trying to say that real (levitra) men play in all conditions, where wimpy (viagra) boys can only bang in sunny, dry weather. That is the only point that I can find in it anyway.

The commercial also fails to mention that the baseball players actually have to play 162 games a year, while the football players play 16. To me that is saying if you need to play the field once every couple of days you had better go with viagra, but, if you plan to have sex once every few weeks, then levitra is the pill for you. Wouldn’t it seem like someone in the marketing department would have seen the potential free marketing this was giving viagra? Perhaps they are trying to imply that viagra is for people who can never perform without it, while levitra is for the occasional limp-dick syndrome. You just don’t know, since they don’t do anything to clarify.

Well anyway, suffice to say that I think that was one of the lamest commercials ever. I would like to point out, though, that I saw a thing on ESPN some time ago about Ditka and Levitra. It seems that Ditka actually has erectyle dysfuntion and is endorsing levitra more to get the word out to other men that the condition is not something that you should be emarassed of. I find that to be kind of a noble thing to do, especially for someone as hard-nosed (pun intended) as Mike Ditka. It must take tremendous courage for someone that is in the public eye to come out and admit to that type of a problem. Like I said about the baseball player who endorses viagra, no one really thinks he needs it. While Ditka has admitted that he does.

Take from this rant what you will. If you happen to be Mike Ditka and you are reading it, I would like to say that I agree with you that erectyle dusfunction is not something to be embarassed about, but that damn commercial was.

Meta

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Well, this has been quite an experience to say the least. I am a pretty competent html programmer, IMHO, but it has been quite some time since I have actually had to go through and ftp client and a bare bones web shell. It is all coming back fairly quickly, yet the progress of adding my existing poetry and stories is kind of going slower than I had hoped. I said in the original message that I posted here a couple of days ago that I was avoiding using frames. This is making the website have a much more professional feel, but it is also keeping me from adding too many things too quickly. I am going to have to go back and add the links to every single side bar on every single page, every single time I add a new link.

I am pretty sure that if I was using some sort of web page creation software that they would have a way to do that on a macro scale with micro effort, but, I am still pretty stern about being a notepad programmer. What this means to you (that being me as my only site traffic) is that there will probably never be any amazing shockwave flash files, or any other such eye candy. You should be thankful though that you never (probably) had to see the site that I put up on angelfire. I will put a link to that here for the hell of it.
If you dared to look at that link, I think that you would kind of enjoy the humble simplicity that I am going for here. I mean man, the amount of images and garbage on that site that does not really deliver any sort of a message at all…Alas, I was young, that was back in my stage of doing things just because I could. Whether or not the things I did were logical seemed to take a backseat to the ability to do them. Fear not, dear reader (that being me) I will soon scrap that entire site and move the usuable content (that being the poetry, and a few of the speaks his mind segments) over here.
Back to the point about the file addition a paragraph or so ago. I have a pretty good idea of what exactly is going to go in my little navbar on the side, I am even doing well to get a directory setup that is easy for me to use. I could, in theory, just put links to all the pages that I plan to have on the site over there, but that would result in a lot of dead links until such a point as I actually got all of them written/uploaded. I have always found it quite unprofessional to have dead links to pages on one’s own site though, and I don’t really know how long it would take me to write a main page for each link that was there. I guess I will find out before long though, as I am itching to get more content on this site than just the one arthur witles story.

Of course I could be doing that now, but instead I am typing about it here. That way, thirty years from now I will be able to look back at this page and say to myself, “Dear God, did I really not have anything better to do?”

One other thing that I will mention here, for no particular reason, is that with site hosting comes a unique email address. I had never really looked at that as a reason to set up a site, and now that I am monetarily obligated to maintain this site I guess I better go ahead and take advantage of it. I have used only web based email for a very long time, and I have done well with it. The major ones all have integrated anti-virus software that help to put my mind at ease. Of course, when the shit hits the fan and I get every virus from here to hell and back it may change my view. I actually tried to open a message through a web based email server (who shall reamin nameless until someone sends me a hefty check to endorse them) that I KNEW was a virus, and it would not let my system download it. Now that is the kind of security I want from an email server! As it is now, I am going to go back to using the base Outlook Express for receiving site email, though I will definitely NOT be sending any mail through it. I will also not be adding any addresses to the book there. Hell, to be frank, I might not read most of the messages for a horrible fear that they are virus infested, but, the upside is that I can forward them to the tried and true web based email that will scan them for me first (he says as his tower is slowly melting).

Well, damn, now it is time for the big game, I have not got a damn thing done that I was hoping to, and I don’t know if I will be coherent enough to give it a go later.

Oh well, there usually is a tomorrow.