Month: February 2004

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.