Category Archives: website

Meta; eBay; Paypal

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Setting up this site has been monumentally more difficult than I had ever thought it would be. I still maintain that I am a pretty good html programmer, but the thing is that the language of the internet seems to have expanded far beyond my html understanding. I have used some other stuff like CSS in the past to help me to achieve my ends, but when I started programming JAVA I just did not keep up with the evolution of things. Also, I had never tried to set up a website from a base directory which would allow the use of cgi scripts. I did use cgi on the web pages, it was just hosted through a third party that had a really user-friendly layout, as such I am stuck here in the dark thinking that I may just be the least intelligent human on the face of the earth.

In other site-related news, I am no longer going to put the actual time (like hours/minutes) in the updates. The reasons for that is quite simple 1)It is easily a couple hours off by the time I actually get this thing posted. 2) Unless you live in the state of Arizona that is not what time it was posted anyway. 3)There are roughly three people in the entire world that know the address of my website, anyone else who sees that time stamp will be seeing it looking through my archives. 4) If you really want to know what time it is you would just look at the bottom right of your computer monitor (perhaps elsewhere if you have modified your screen settings).

Finally, with the site related stuff, I am not going to update any page other than this one until I have a better understanding of the SSI that I should be using. As it stands I have about 28 pages that will have to be altered, and that seems like a lot, but if I were to go ahead and start doing some of the other pages that I want to do, that number could double or triple over the weekend (when I have a lot more free time).

Wow, I think I just managed to get the point across that you should never view my site…ever. That was not what I was going for, but damn it, I made a point!

I have taken the liberty of breaking my typing into two sections, the first being my bitching about myself and my lacking ability at webhosting, and the second being this, where I bitch about pretty much everyone and everything for no damn reason. The purpose of the first section would be to get you to send me a pipe bomb, the purpose of the second section will be to get you to go ahead and send it to someone else.

Biggest Bitch of the Day:
eBay allows people to insert Paypal logos in their ads. But the logos that they insert are all provided by paypal. The end result of this is that I received a negative feedback from ladybug3603 for a non-payment, when the truth of the matter was that she had listed a paypal logo, with the visa/mstercard/disover/american express logos. I took that to mean that the seller would accept credit cards. She didn’t. I would have left the transaction without a sour thought, then she left me negative feedback…That pissed me off…(I have like a 98.8% ebay rating with over 240 transactions, so when I get a stupid one, them is fightin’ words).

Her explanation of it was that I should have asked whether she accepted credit cards. My response was that If you do not accept credit cards, why do you place words such as “pay me instantly with any credit card through paypal” in your listing. Her response was that she had nothing to do with that being put in her listing. Now, I knew that she was lying, since she obviously did make an agreement with paypal to let them update the listings, but I took the high road and just sucked it up.

Every negative feedback (of the three that I have) is very similar. Why it is my fault that they put the quote “pay me instantly with any credit card through paypal” in the listing? And then when I will not pay any other way (credit cards limit your liability for fraud, and make it far easier to recover the money you did pay out, if you get shafted) they leave me negative feedback. I think that these sellers are all corrupt. They may not be ‘trying’ to screw you, but there must be a different motive for what they do.

Another eBay issue is the sellers that do not post feedback until the buyer does. I will not ever leave feedback for a seller that does not post feedback for me (as a buyer) when they get the payment. If they do not post feedback immediatly, that means that they are in fear that the wares that they sold you are absolute crap. They want to hold the feedback thing over your head to keep you from posting a negative for them, since they can reciprocate it. I must re-state that I will never post feedback for these sellers (even if whatever I bought was 200% better than advertised), because that is just missing the point. If you buy something off of ebay and yoy pay for it immediately, and you do not get immediate feedback do not leave that seller feedback at all. Even if you are very new to eBay and trying to get your numbers going, the only seller that you should buy from again is the one that left you feedback when he/she received your payment, all the others are either dubious or selling absolute crap that they mis-represent, don’t tangle with those folks.

Song remkaes

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

It turns out that I had a SNAFU and a FUBAR going on the entire time I have been doing these updates. I only found that out because Flux had mentioned in an email that he could help me get my table working properly. I did not know that I had a problem with the table, so I fired up Netscape (which I rarely use) and yep, you could not see a single word that I had written. I spent the majority of the afternoon taking care of that problem on the site pages, yet did not take the time to fix the previous updates, and likely never will. Also, just because of the sheer amount of time that it will take to redo all of the poetry pages, those have not yet been updated either.

On the up side, I did add a Mission statement to the page that I feel is well worth a look. One other thing that is site related is that I scrapped the demon background that I had been using for a really long time (six years or so) on the free site. I didn’t really like the look of it for the purpose of a ‘real’ website, and I was only using it on the front page anyway. It is amazing how much your taste can change in only a few years.

For some strange reason I am feeling the desire to bitch about musical artists right now. I guess the reason is not really all that strange since I am forced to listen to K-lite while I am at work every day. I do so despise the music…

It seems to me that for the last several years there have been a lot more song remakes than ever before. I can not be sure of that, of course, since I only recognize the songs as remakes when I am familiar with the original song. There are a lot of songs that I thought were original when they were released in the ’80s that I found out later were remakes of oldies. I am no authority on the subject, but paying for this domain gives me a license to bitch about anything…The power…

The thing with the new song covers is that they are mostly re-making songs that were at least top twenty material when they were originally released. Take, as a for instance Madona’s cover of Don McLean’s timeless song American Pie. (sorry I could not find linkage for the original). I saw an interview with Madonna where she said that she really felt strange about re-making such an american classic, so I will give her props for that.

Then you have the remakes of Don Henley’s timeless song The Boys of Summer , where one of the people actually substituted their own band name where it says “I saw a Dead-Head sticker on a Cadillac”. That is just wrong!!

Then, when I am listening to “Uncle Kracker’s” latest version of the rock and roll classic “drift Away” by Dobie Gray, I just hate music in general.

Out of nowhere comes “the Counting Crows” version of Big Yellow Taxi If you have never heard that song beforehand, you are not alone. I had only heard it because I had a hippy teaching music in my school back in the day. I just give this group props for digging one out of the trash can and getting it into the adult contemporary top 40.

It is much easier to re-do a verified hit than it is to turn a folk classic into one.

Meta; Childhood anecdote

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I got an email today from one of the few people who have the address to this site. He offered me a bit of constructive criticism, he iced it over so well that I wasn’t really sure if it was actually criticism at all, but my logic prevailed and I saw his point(s). I have added them to my mental library and I will try to remember them when I start repeat the errors that I knew (even before he pointed out) I was making.

The biggest thing that I took from this email was not something it said, but something it made me remember. I have always had some pretty strong opinions on things and I often would write up rants to post on the free sites that I used to maintain. What would then happen is I would realize that some of the content was too controversial to post on a free site. The difference between the user agreement on a free site and a site like this is monumental. Here as long as I don’t post kiddy porn I am golden, on free sites an image of myself holding a cigarette could get my site banned. So the few rants that I did post were as edited as your average government area 51 files (by me for fear of retribution).

Unfortunately, I do not have anything really worthy of a rant today. What I do have is a story from my childhood that I had not thought about for about 18 years. I am sure it won’t make for captivating reading, but it is a story that I have never told anyone and for some reason I am feeling an urge to write it down. Bear with me.

I have to include a brief intro here which will really do no justice to just what my mother had to overcome to raise us as children:

My parents divorced when I was quite young, either six or seven, and my mother had never had a full time job. This was back in about 1981 I think, and the job-market for divorced mothers was not exactly booming. Minimum wage was set at 3.15 an hour and that was what she was working for when she took her first job. The only house that she could afford was one that was on the farm where she was working, it did not have indoor plumbing. Well, it did have a sink and a shower, but it did not have a toilet, we had to use an outhouse -try that in December in Oregon sometime-.

The divorce agreement between my parents was really pretty simple. She wanted sole custody of the three children, he wanted every material possession. She agreed to those terms because at the time my father was a very abusive alcoholic (later he was just an alcoholic and gave up on the abusing, but at the time I am damn sure it was in my best interest that she agreed to those terms.). Anyway, my father was on temporary disability at the time due to an injury at work, so his child support payments were set at 124 dollars per month for three children. None of this has been exaggerated, we were dirt poor.

Now to the story from my youth.

Where we were living at the time, the school did not have a cafeteria, the kids would either eat packed lunches or go to the restaurant across the street that had the $1.50 a day student special. We, of course, had the sack lunch. The lunch consisted of a sandwich (which was literally two pieces of bread and a single slice of deli-sliced meat), a few corn chips, and some Kool-Aid. That was what we could afford, so that is what we ate, but it often left me feeling really hungry by the end of the day.

I missed the bus home from school one day. We lived about a two hour walk from the school, and it truly seemed to take about 3 weeks when you were actually walking it. I was so hungry by the time I left school that I really thought I might die on the way home (in a 12 year old’s mind a lot of things can be fatal though, where was rhetrospect when I needed it). We didn’t have a phone at the time, and even if we did I didn’t have the dime I would have needed to call.

I began to trudge my way home, after only a few steps I figured I may as well put my jacket into my back-pack since I was certainly not going to be that cold after the two-hour walk. Shortly thereafter, I could see the ‘Bay’s Family Market’ IGA store approaching. My first thought was that I could go in there and see if anyone I recognized was shopping (that was pretty likely with the size of the town, like 4500 people), but I didn’t recognize anyone except for the store clerks. I hung my head down and started to make my way back to the door, when my stomach began to growl, then I passed the display of Tortilla chips. I bet you know where this is going…

I walked for about an hour wearing my jacket and a back-pack with a whole bag of tortilla chips in it. I was so scared that my mom, or the store, or anyone would find out, that I was crying the entire time I walked. About 2/3 of the way home there was an underpass (for water, not cars, only a few feet wide and a few feet high), I went into it and gorged on tortilla chips. I doubt that I even ate 1/3 of the chips, but I was so full that I could not eat another. I curled the top of the bag over, then left them there in that underpass. Feeling full, but very guilty, I managed to make my way home.

My brothers were both there when I arrived. They were both also quite hungry, but had eaten a slice of USDA cheese (which was meant only for sandwiches, not for eating plain -in our house, unfortunately we didn’t have any bread at the time) to sate them. They looked like they felt just as guilty as me, for eating a slice of cheese when they were really hungry (mind you, it is not that mom wanted us to be hungry, but we had nothing, and the little that we did have could be used to make meals, unless the ingredients were eaten prematurely). I wanted to tell them of the bounty of tortilla chips that I had left under the underpass, but I was still so in fear that I would get in trouble that I just went into my room and cried some more.

When mom got home from work, she made some ‘home made bread’ and a soup of nothing but broth and barley. It was enough to sustain us, but it tasted like crap compared to the bounty of chips that I had left there on the underpass. I wanted to tell her about the chips, I wanted us to all be able to eat them, but I knew it was wrong to steal them, and so did mom. I bet that if I had told her what I did she would have made me take that bag back into the store, apologize to the owner, and offer to work off the price of the chips. Then I would likely have been grounded.

Well, this has probably been a bit depressing for anyone who may read/have read it, so I will just say this. It was so much a part of my being to know that taking that bag of chips was wrong that I didn’t even look for them in the underpass when I missed the bus the next day. I have never again seriously thought about stealing anything because that just leads me to thinking about crying in my room when I could as easily offer the forbidden items to my family.

Long story short(er), I think that even though she had to go through a lot to raise us, mom sure did a hell of a job of putting in the morals. She also had a few great quotes; “Just because we are poor doesn’t mean that we are filthy.”, “Poor people aren’t all beggars.”, “Shut up and sit down you deviant little son of a bitch.” – I especially like the last one, since she is really insulting herself…Unless no one knows who my real mother is…

Meta

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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.