Month: February 2004

It takes a lot to get everything configured the way I want. Right now I’m deep in the “ugly” phase, trying to arrange the content to my liking. (So many templates….)

all the big pieces of the site are in place now, using the default templates of their respective applications, and linked from the (mmm, ugly!) home page. I think I have one more major redirect (for media diet), but I don’t quite remember what the old folder name was. will have to look that up later.

next steps:
– strip the default templates down to the bits I like.
– hack oddbook to handle movies
– you know, a design.

found while cleaning my home office, a flip book of “do-it-yourself haiku” left open to this:

Biting the orange
The poem left in her hand
Desire me, she said.

A few days ago, I was talking with a couple of people from a somewhat older generation, and I said something about having been a bit of a goth in my late teen years. (In response to a woman’s son having been rather grunge in about the same time period.) Which didn’t feel quite right to me….

Last night I watched Velvet Goldmine, and I realized that what I wanted to be, back in the early/mid 90s, was a glam rocker girl. The clothes, the music, the elan of the age — as mediated by 20 years — all appealed to something in me: brighter and more dress-up than goth, androgynous, dance-able. There’s a self I’ve buried these last few years who is still happily singing along with “John, I’m only dancing.”

Evading deeper thought on that point, I think I want to get Bowie’s Man Who Sold the World (which I used to have, not sure what happened to it) and some T-Rex (I think Myke used to have Electric Warrior).

something fun and random, as in random phrases from the closest [x] to you:

book: Osteomyelitis is an infection of bone and bone marrow. [AMA Family Medical Guide, 3rd ed.]

CD insert: While most people are in dreamland, many stars shine brightly at night. [Deee-light, World Clique]

something I wrote: epersonae domain host

something written to me: love, Mom [Valentine’s day card]

something at random: 10% senior discount/discount on lunch, dinner entrees/and combinations/(with exception of the Daily Lunch Special) [back of Happy Teriyaki business card]

after looking at the sets in ephemera.org, I took another look at photostack, and yep, that’s what I want. I’ve got it installed already, just need to try it out with some photos…maybe redo one of my albums from last year?

oh, and Mike? thanks, that was just what I needed to do myself.

I’m this way about a lot of things…. I’ve been reading tales of grad school woe and how sometimes you have to know when to say when, but I haven’t been paying attention to those warning signs at home, and goodness knows I’ve had enough times when I haven’t known how to let go and move on.

which is all to say that this week after another co-mini-breakdown and a long anguished cell phone conversation, C decided to withdraw this quarter and to take a leave of absence next quarter, so we can focus on some of the us things we should’ve done before he went back to school in the fall of ’02. neither of us is 19 anymore, and we can’t try to do everything at once, nor to do work/school without the material surroundings that make it easy to do so.

so we’re going to do some things to the house between now and next September, and I’m going to focus on getting more sleep and getting in better shape, and he’s going to work on some personal/academic/political projects that will lay groundwork for things next fall. and we’re going to enjoy each other’s company a little more, and work on working like a team.

(on an oddly related note, I was moved by Derek Powazek’s Justly Married photos…enough so that I’m tempted to buy the poster. I may write more about my (admittedly idiosyncratic) views of marriage later.)

I found a few “emergency weblog”-style entries from the interim page I had up in January, so I’ve added them here. along with the bits bemoaning my old host, there’s an entry on juvenalia and one on my trip to Calif. last month. I still need to post pictures, but that’ll wait until I’ve decided on some sort of album-posting solution.

gradually, I’m working out what I want to do with my eventual site structure and all that…what’s to be on the site and what goes where. I’m also evaluating blog tools as I go, the main question being what system I use for my photos and for media diet.

Webmonkey, RIP: 1996 ? 2004

here’s the complete text of my email to Paul Boutin, in response to his blog post:

When I first started doing Web stuff (c. 1999), Webmonkey was my constant guide and companion.

Tables gave me fits to start with; Webmonkey’s analogy of the divided picnic plate got me to the point where I understood the concept, particularly the rowspan/colspan thing that was so key to the old-school table-based layouts. [ack! that was really an article about frames, which he gracefully corrected. of course, frames gave me fits too, maybe even more than tables. ah, those were the days, when every damn thing I learned was something blindly new to me.]

And I actually printed and spiral-bound their original guide to CSS; kept it at my desk when my old employer added our Web site to my job. I think I still have it someplace in my home office, because I was too nostalgic to recycle it the last time I cleaned out my personal library.

I read lots of other stories, but those are the two that I remember vividly, and they sum up what Webmonkey was to me back then. I fell in love with the Web almost instantly; Webmonkey’s articles helped me figure out how to translate that vague emotion into specific work.

In retrospect, it feels intimately tied up with the way of the Web back then, like A List Apart: a central repository with clever writing, some useful techniques, some “cool” stuff that I’d never use. But ALA seems to have kept moving with the design community, and I don’t think Webmonkey did.

Where before there were just a couple of sites that I read all the time to keep up, centralized like magazines, now the pool of Web design/development knowledge seems to have diffused itself out among the vast conglomeration of weblogs: I read articles/posts scattered across dozens of blogs every week, with a handful that I check religiously every day.

Thanks for the opportunity to share a few memories and to randomly philosophize. 🙂

[address block]

and I remembered in an e-mail to someone else that it was Webmonkey that Tom sent me to lo these many years ago when I first wanted to learn how to make Web pages. sigh…

Absolutely, but it’s all waste, you know. That’s all your tax money goes towards — paying for state employees to loaf on the job. What’s more important is THE CHILDREN. Let’s eliminate taxes and give all our tax revenue to THE CHILDREN.

(Don’t laugh, I just described Washington state the last ten years.)

– Dylan Wilbanks, by e-mail