Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Buses are fun

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Just got back in from catching Cats and Dogs out at the Cineplex Odeon downtown here. Quick blurb: quite entertaining, and well worth a matinee showing.

Was an interesting ride in, though. There are various repairs still being done around town from the earthquake last February, and they’re currently closing down the Ballard bridge (the most direct route between Ballard and downtown Seattle, and the route the #18 bus usually takes) each night, forcing the bus to take a longer route. Not normally a big deal, except that it gave me that much longer to listen to some woman who had this amazingly stereotypical ‘New York Jewish’ accent rattle on and on. Another reason to actually like the fact that I grew up in Alaska — I don’t sound like that!

My stuff, Hank, and my apartment

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My stuff is here!

I got woken up this morning to the ring of the doorbell as my shipment of almost everything I own at the moment got delivered. I ended up with one pallette to be shipped — a grand total of 1,075 lbs. — and when I stood next to it, it looked like it was about 7 ft. high. Lots of crap, basically, but it’s my crap, and it’s the crap I wanted to keep.

My stuff after I unwrapped it.Looks like I won’t be into my apartment until tomorrow evening, rather than tonight. A bit of a bummer, but nothing too huge. When I talked to my landlord the carpet people were in the midst of getting the new carpets down, but the new locks hadn’t been installed yet. So, I call tomorrow afternoon to see if everything’s good, and hopefully will actually get a ‘yes’ this time.

And lastly — Hank! I put in my first online order for a DVD the other day, so that I could get ahold of the Heny Rollins DVD I babbled about a while ago. It showed up in the mail today, and so I’m now the quite happy owner of Henry Rollins: Talking From the Box/Rollins Goes to London. Talking From the Box I’ve actually seen before on videotape with friends back in Anchorage, but Rollins Goes to London has apparently not been released before, so that’ll be a completely new thing for me. Very cool…hrm…guess what I’m watching tonight?

It works!

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Woohoo! Finally got it all figured out!

You’ll notice the new(est) look to the site — finally found a layout I liked, and was flexible enough to work sitewide. Spent most of the day in front of the computer working on it, and now the majority of the pages are converted over to the new design — all that’s left are the pages of the quotebook, and the various pages showing off my artwork.

In the process of mangling things today, I did manage to completely hose my old messageboard/guestbook, unfortunately. However, I decided as long as I had to change things around to find something else, so now I’ve got some new, much more full-featured software running that side of things. Not sure where (if anywhere) I’m going to take that in the future…we’ll see how things go, as always.

That’s been my day, however, so not much more to babble about. Was thinking about seeing AI again tonight, but then got caught up in pfutzing around here and completely lost track of what time it was, and now it’s too late. Ah, well.

Tomorrow should mark my moving day, if all goes well. This may mean I’m not online quite as often until I get things more set up in the new place — I’m currently a bit short on monitors, so may be leaving my ‘puter over here at Casey’s for a bit — but I’ll at least stop in to check e-mail and the like as often as I can. But hey, I’ll have my own place. Yay!

Headaches

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Argh — I’m really starting to wonder if this whole site redesign was a bad idea. Between the fact that I’m learning how to correctly code CSS-based layout as I write this, and the bugginess in the current version of Internet Explorer (Exploder?) for Mac OS X, I’m never sure if something isn’t working because I screwed up, or because IE decided to tweak out on me again.

I think that I’ve got things so that they should be visible at the moment — at the very least, the page displays correctly under Opera for Mac OS X — but with IE crapping out every time I make a change, I’m not entirely sure. Keeping my fingers crossed, that’s for damn sure….

But, I’ll keep playing with it…hopefully I haven’t completely broken my site for anyone out there.

Yet.

Site design: why CSS?

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As I’m currently with a fair amount of time without a whole lot of neccessary things to do, I’ve decided to explore one of the ideas I’ve had bouncing around in my head for a while. I’m redesigning the site (I know, I never got around to finishing the last redesign — but I found some tricks midway through) to comply with current Cascading Style Sheet standards. While I’d been using CSS for a while now to standardize and simplify the formatting across the site, this is my first foray into using CSS for the actual site layout.

Previously, I’d been using a table-based system to lay out the page. It works — and in some ways could be considered a de-facto standard across the web at the moment — but it’s kludgy, makes the code difficult to read, and is a royal pain when facing a site update. By switching to CSS-based layout (the basic framework was found at Glish), my code is much leaner, and once done, I’ll be able to make large, sweeping changes to the site when I decide to redesign in the future by editing a single .css file, instead of having to recode every page on the site. Much, much nicer.

There is one downside to this — certain browsers (either older browsers [Netscape 4.x or previous, or IE 4.x or previous] or browsers still in development [such as OmniWeb for Mac OS X] will not display my page correctly. If you’re using an older browser, visit the Web Standards Organization upgrade project to see what browsers are available to you. If you’re using a current browser that is not standards-compliant, write the company to request compatibility with the currently published standards.

Of course, what this means at the moment is that if you start bouncing through my site, there are currently three different ‘themes’ to the pages — the older blue/green layout, the grid-background I was recently working with, and this CSS-based layout. I’m hoping to get the entire site converted over to this new style fairly quickly, however — this main page was just the matter of a couple hours work, and now that I’ve got the tweaking finalized, the rest of the pages should fly by fairly quickly.

So that’s it for now — a bit of work in front of the ‘puter to give my skin a rest from the constant flirtation with sunburn that I’ve been playing with for the past couple weeks. Ta ta for now….

Back again!

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Woohoo! We’ve reconfigured a few areas of the network here at Casey’s house, and it seems that things are back up and fully functional for me again. So, as things go here, I’ll do my best to return to updating my pages on a regular basis. I know, I know, something of a shock after about a month of near-nonexistent updates…but I’ll try.

Things for me are still in something of a holding pattern at the moment. I got word from the landlord of my apartment complex that the carpets are scheduled to be installed this Monday, so I should finally be able to get into my place Monday afternoon/evening sometime. I’ve made the requisite calls to the telephone and electric companies and am all set up there, so should be good to go as soon as I get the word from the landlord on Monday. I’ll be sending out the mailing address and phone number to those who need it in the near future.

Internet access options for me are still being investigated. I’m hoping to get set with a DSL line, I just need to get in contact with the local ISP‘s to see if my apartment has that as an option. I’m assuming it does — I’m going to be living right on Capitol Hill, just about 20 blocks or so uphill from downtown Seattle — but I’m not entirely sure yet. In any case, Casey has graciously allowed me to keep my webserver at his place until I have things up and running at my apartment, so the server shouldn’t be going down again at all, however there may be a couple weeks where my online abilities are severely limited until I get my own connection up and running. It’ll all get straightened out eventually — I’m just glad to have friends down here who are able and willing to assist me in all of this

In other news, I’ve been playing a lot with my digital camera since I got it. I took some time recently to stitch together some panoramas I’d taken. The first three were all taken before I left Alaska — from top to bottom, the Inlet as seen from Earthquake Park in Anchorage, a view of the Palmer hayflats where I hit a bonfire with some friends, and Jewel Lake, a popular destination in South Anchorage.

Cook Inlet, Anchorage, AK

Bonfire Panoramic, Mat-Su Valley, AK

Jewel Lake, Anchorage, AK

The fourth shot was taken at Gasworks Park here in Seattle during the 4th of July celebrations, about an hour before the fireworks display. I wanted to try and capture the sheer mass of people — later reports placed it at around 6,000 people just at this park (and it was one of two major fireworks displays within Seattle). I think it came out pretty decently.

4th of July 2001, Gas Works Park, Seattle, WA

I’ve been out to see two movies since I came down here so far — since it’s been a bit since I’ve seen them, I’ll just give brief rundowns of each. First off was Atlantis, Disney’s latest animated flick — another fun one from Disney. Not one of their all-time classics, but very enjoyable, with some absolutely breathtaking animation at times. More recently was A.I., the Spielberg/Kubrick sci-fi collaboration. In brief — I believe it to be an astounding piece of work, quite possibly Spielberg’s best work yet, and a film that, while getting wildy mixed reviews, is very likely to stand the test of time like few other recent films. Very, very impressive filmmaking, and my hat is off to Spielberg, Kubrick, and the rest of the forces behind this film. I’ll most likely post more about it after I’ve had a chance to see it a second time.

That’s the majority of the big news so far. As mentioned earlier, now that things are up and running again, I’ll do my best to return to a more reliable update schedule here. It’s good to be back….

Moulin Rouge

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In happier news, I went out to see Moulin Rouge this evening, and just loved it. I don’t think it’ll be a major hit with the general public, but anyone involved in theater, music, or both should fall in love with this movie. Baz Luhrmann (the director of Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet) is a genius in my book right now. The production was absolutely incredible, absolutely visually gorgeous (there are so many single frames I’d love to have framed and hung on the wall just to stare at), and musically a delightful smorgasbord of songs and styles. I was completely drawn into the entire thing, and walked out of the theater just amazed at the show I’d just seen. Much of it feels to me like it would have made a wonderful stage musical, but by doing it on screen, they were able to do so much more to it to make it even more visually appealing through effects and camera work. The entire movie is a lush, sumptious feast for the eyes and ears. Wonderful, wonderful film.

DVDs: Closets, aliens, and dinos

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I was only planning on one purchase for the week, but ended up with three, as I got a $25 gift certificate from Suncoast the other day. This weeks acquisitions:

The Celluloid Closet: A friend introduced me to this absolutely fascinating documentary a few years back, I’m in the midst of reading the book that inspired it, and it finally got released to DVD this week. It’s a really entertaining documentary about the portrayal of homosexuals in movies over the first 100 years of moviemaking, loaded with some great interviews, and tons of clips from various films over the years, from some of the earliest movies made to some as recent as the early ’90’s. One of my favorite documentaries that I’ve seen, and it’s nice to finally have a copy of my own.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: If you haven’t heard of this one — what rock have you been living under? One of the seminal Sci-Fi films to come out, and one of Steven Spielberg’s best works, this classic also holds the distinction of being one of the few films I can think of off the top of my head (aside from Starman, ET and Contact) to look at alien encounters in a positive light. This looks to be a nice special edition, with two discs — one for the ‘definitive’ director’s cut of the film, and the second packed with extra features.

Allosaurus: A continuation of the excellent Walking With Dinosaurs documentary, this program follows the life of ‘Big Al’, an Allosaurus whose nearly-complete skeleton was discovered in 1991. The skeleton had been so well preserved that scientists have been able to reconstruct an amazing amount of details as to the life of the beast, and it is presented here in the same ‘nature-documentary’ style that the previous shows were. The disc also includes a clever making of special that explains some of how the dinosaur’s life was reconstructed.

This I’ve gotta get!

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I had no idea that this was available at all, but I’ve got to get one one way or another. Henry Rollins has finally just released a spoken-word performance to DVD! I was lucky enough (as were a bunch of my friends) to be able to see him when he came to give one of his spoken word performances at UAA a few years back, and I’ve already got two of the spoken word CD’s he’s released. The guy does a just incredible show, going from fall-on-the-floor hilarious one moment to amazingly heartfelt and serious the next — when it hit the three hour point during his show up here and he was told that he had to wrap it up, I don’t think anybody in the audience realized it had been nearly that long, or wanted it to end.

In any case, DVDFile has a great review of the DVD up here, and I’m going to end up with this. Hmmm…anybody want to buy me a going away present? ;)

Slight page updates

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I just went through and made some slight adjustments to some of the pages on the site (mainly this one, my resume, and my DJ Wüdi propaganda) to reflect the fact that I’m not going to be in Anchorage for much longer. More later…it’s about lunchtime here at work.

Though I do have to wonder…should I worry that most of the people answering the poll went for the sex change option? Hmm…just what do people think of me, anyway?