Bring out the gimp!

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In this case, unfortunately, the gimp is me. I’ve been holed up in my apartment for the past few days, nursing a banged-up knee — hence the lack of much in the way of updates here. Bleah.

Thursday night went out with Chad, Casey, Casey’s girlfriend Jen, and a friend of Jen’s named Steve to a bar called Neighbours just a couple blocks away from where I live for their 80’s night. Very fun place — it seems to be a Seattle version of the old Wave in Anchorage — a gay bar that’s been deemed ‘safe’ for the straights to hang out at. Was a good night, but at one point I was dancing on a platform, and when someone got a bit too close to me I backed up, and fell right off the platform. I caught my knee on the edge of the riser as I fell, and while I didn’t really realize it then, apparently I damaged myself pretty decently — by the time Friday rolled around, I could hardly walk. Very frustrating, and led to my primarily holing up in the apartment for the weekend.

Luckily, I didn’t have to do it alone. Laura, a friend of mine from Anchorage is off on vacation and had a couple days to kill in Seattle, so I had said she could crash at my apartment. She came in early Friday morning, her friend Jenny came in Friday evening, and they took off Saturday around noon. Then Saturday afternoon my friend Aliena (who Kirsten, a friend of mine up at UAF, had introduced me to) came by, and we spent a very pleasant night kicking back at my apatartment and watching movies (as she’d been kind enough to bring up a small TV and VCR so we didn’t have to just stare at the walls all evening). Aliena crashed at my place, took off about noon today, and I decided it was time to head over to my computers and wade through the backlog of messages from the past few days.

One other cool thing, however — there’s a cool little theater just a couple blocks away from my apartment (The Egyptian, at Pine and Broadway) that was playing Run Lola Run at midnight on Friday and Saturday, and I got to go see it Friday night. Quite cool, having only seen it on DVD before. Apparently, the Egyptian does midnight movies on a regular basis, which could be all sorts of fun — next weekend’s is A Clockwork Orange. Whee!

In any case, I need to get busy getting my resume ready to go as I dive into the local job market….

Final fantasy, sleeping in a shoebox

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Okies — first off, if you’ve been looking forward to Final Fantasy at all, go see it. Eye candy — lots of eye candy — and it’s well worth catching on the big screen for the full effect.

Spent the night in the Shoebox last night. First off — as soon as I can afford it, I need a bed. While I can deal with sleeping on the floor, it’s not the most comfortable way of doing things. Ah, well…details, details, right? Oh, and I need to see if I can get the neighbors to refrain from turning up their stereo quite so loud at 6am. Other than that, not bad. :) Anyway, got my stereo hooked up, so I can listen to music, and then got stalled on unpacking anything else, when I realized I don’t have anyplace to put anything. No shelves, no tables…oops! Guess things are just going to need to stay in boxes for a bit longer. Felt kinda silly when I realized that.

No biggie, though — I’ve got my music, got books, and now comes the big challenge — hitting the streets in an attempt to find a job. Fun fun fun….

In the shoebox, off the ‘net

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Okies — I’m in the apartment! Rented a U-Haul van today to get all my stuff over from Casey’s place and into the apartment. So…while I’m in the apartment…I’m currently without a way to get my computers up and running (my monitors are still in Alaska, coming down with Rick in a month or two, I can’t get DSL until I get my first phone bill, and I don’t have a modem built into any of my machines). In the near future, then, my online activities will pretty much be limited to stopping by Casey’s place to check e-mail when I can, hopefully once a day or so. Hopefully I won’t have to do this for long — if I pick up a cheap monitor and modem, I’ll at least be able to get dialup access at the apartment — but for the foreseeable future, I won’t be online much at all. So it goes.

A shoebox, a dragon’s kiss, and Kate

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Shannon Apartments, Seattle, WAFirst off — and most important — I’ve got my apartment! I called Melvin (the landord) at about 5pm today, and he told me that I could come on down and get the keys. Immediately I headed out the door, swung through Radio Shack to grab a telephone, and rode the buses out to Capitol Hill. Talked for a few moments with Melvin, then took my first steps into my first apartment in Seattle. Woohoo!

Shannon Apartments, Seattle, WAI’ve got pics up here to share of the apartment and the building. It’s pretty sparse at the moment — everything I own is still in Casey’s garage — but hopefully I’ll be able to rectify that fairly quickly. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to get everything over there just yet…but I’ll find a way. I’m still at Casey’s for the moment, as I didn’t get anything over to the apartment tonight, but things will start moving that direction soon enough, I’m sure.

View from insideIn order from top to bottom, here’s the pics I’ve got — as always, you can click on the thumbnails for full-size versions. First off is the building itself — the Shannon Apartments, with my outside door circled in red. Next is just a closer view of the doorway — you can’t see them in this photo, but on the left and right of the entrance are doors into two other apartments — the only other two with street entrances. The next shot is standing in the inside doorway looking out towards the street, and the last shot is of the inside of the apartment (affectionately deemed “The Shoebox”) from the outside doorway. Fun fun fun!

This is all of itI caught Kiss of the Dragon tonight. In brief — it’ll be an entertaining rental, but not much more.

Had one interesting little tweak to the night on my way home, though. I was crouched down at the bus stop at 1st and Pine waiting for the 18 to Ballard to come by, when a guy comes jogging down the sidewalk. As he passes me, he flashes his hand in front of my face and yells “Boo!” It startled me and I jumped a bit, but he just kept running by, so I didn’t figure it was much more than that — was even a little amused, so I laughed a little. Apparently that was the wrong response, however, as when he heard that he stopped, turned around, and stood right in front of me.

“Yo, loco, what’d’you say?”

I didn’t bother standing up — I figured if I stayed crouched down and let him loom over me, it’d keep him in psychologically in a position of ‘power’, where if I stood up, I’d have been taller than him, and more of a threat.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No, man, what’d’you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

At this, he turned to the man sitting on the bench next to us. “Hey, what’d he say to me?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

The guy paused for a moment. “Oh.”

Then he patted my shoulder, shrugged, and started running down the street again.

Wierd…but still kind of entertaining, and at least I didn’t get thumped.

Then, just a few minutes later, who should I see at the other end of the bus stop but Kate and her boyfriend Duncan! Rock on — Kate’s been one of my favorite people for years, and I’d been wanting to track her down for a bit. So I wandered over and got her attention, swept her up in a big hug, and spent the rest of the time waiting for the bus (which was late, by the way, something about some big all-star baseball game that I’d probably know more about if I cared at all about sports) and about half of the ride home talking with her. Was very cool.

Incidentally, she and Duncan had both just watched The Score, the new Ed Norton/Robert DeNiro flick, and said it wasn’t that impressive. A bummer, as they’re both good actors, but got a rental recommendation from them on that one. Ah, well.

So that’s my excitment for the day. Now — let the moving commence!

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….