11.09.99

New music!

Posted in General at 12 pm

Finally a band you can really sink your teeth into:

Girl you know there’s one thing that I love

but it’s not you I’m thinking of.

I want the ultimate cheeseburger…

They’re the hot new group of the new century. And to think they met at a Jack-In-The-Box resturant:

<http://www.meatycheesyboys.com>

Big kudos to JITB for making such a hilarious campaign and going ahead with and entire site to support it. When I found this last night, and started going through it, I was laughing my head off, clutching my ribs, and giggling for the next hour. The heart roll-overs are just so over the top.

 

11.02.99

The New Look / ITEC

Posted in General at 6 pm

I’ve finally changed the majority of the Journal section to the new palette of colors. It’s a slate blue that I’m looking at. What do you see?

Today I went to the ITEC expo and looked through the booths. It’s a yearly trade show that I’ve gone to a few years in a row now. I’ll probably go back tomoorw to take a closer look at a few of the booths.

It’s interesting to see suppliers, and vendors and competitors all thrown together. Good stuff.

 

11.01.99

Nick Cave and the Web Sites

Posted in General at 1 pm

I’m thinking of getting rid of all of my Nick Cave web sites. I might keep Bad-seed.org and remove the News section, and finally finish the history section, but I may skip that altogether and use the domain name for something else entirely. I think it’d be a great place to put Dwelling and FPO. It is a pretty cool domain name, and I really ought to use it for more stuff.

Plus Nick’s finally going to get his own official web site (finally) at: <http://www.nickcave.co.uk> and I’ve got to say that one of the reasons why I started Bad-seed.org is simply because there was no domain dedicated to Nick at the time. Now that there are and there will be an official one as well, I’m thinking I can lift that burden off my shoulders and let others have fun with it.

I’ve offered to give Skin the Cave Inn, if he wants it, but I think he’s got other things on his mind. I think the Cave Inn would fit well into <http://www.kingink.org> and even if it doesn’t he can make over the whole thing.

Otherwise I’ll sell the Cave Inn on E-bay. 🙂 Who knows, it might fetch a pretty penny. Someone could certainly get a lot of traffic out of it.

 

Thoughts on Time and Shopping

Posted in General at 1 pm

The phrase ‘Time Machine’ came to me one day recently. It seems like it’s been given a poor definition ever since HG Wells used it. Instead of a vehicle for traveling through time, what if time was actually put in motion because of ‘time machines’? I’m imagining some massive Gear and Sprocket equipment, giant flywheels, like somthing out of ‘Metropolis’.

Or maybe it’s a small golden pocket watch, and only because of an old woman who faithfully winds the watch each night, only for this one unknowing act does the spring and wheel of time continue.

Short story fodder really.

Camworld had a great link to a page for best practices for shopping carts. It’s basically a formulation of everything that I’ve been trying to put together but this is a wonderful, well-illustrated article on this. Check it out at: <http://dack.com/web/shopping_cart.html>

10.30.99

More RAM

Posted in General at 6 pm

Oct 30 Sat (08 PM)

I just installed some moe RAM on Amy’s Dad’s Mac. It’s up to 40 megs now. Quite a chunk for an older machine like this, ad a very noticible improvement over the 8 megs, and 8 mgs of Virtual Memory.

Now he wants a new modem and a zip drive. Gotta say that I think a whole new machine would be better, rather than sticking with this Centris 660av.

Amy and I had a nice time sitting and talking in the park blocks down by PSU. It was a beautiful day, more like mid-Septemeber than the last days of October.

 

10.26.99

It's in progress

Posted in General at 6 pm

Oct 26 Tue (06 PM)

Look for a new revision of this site coming soon. Nothing major, just some color changes to make the whole site work together better.

Also, I finally have my account at bad-seed.org set up with new aliases. If you send a message to <mailto:page (with an ‘at’ sign) bad-seed.org> your messge will drop directly into my pager. The actual address that this gets forwarded to is very ugly, so I’m not bothering to publish it here. But this new addy should be easy enough for you guys (who might want to) to remember or reconstruct from memory as needed.

Turns out that my bad-seed.org account still has about 40 mb of disk space, so I’m considering moving either ‘For Placement Only’, Dwelling, or the Cave Inn over there or some combination thereof.

Of course there’s also that ‘other’ domain that I’ve got…

Anyway, it nice to see that leaves on the trees are finally starting to change colors. It’s just been in the last week, but I think there’s been all this pent up chloriphyl in the trees that they’re all draining very quickly, changing colors in a very short autumn.

And soon, so soon, the winter.

 

10.22.99

An IMDB outrage

Posted in General at 4 pm

Oct 22 Fri (04 PM)

What an outrage… take a look at this:

This was a banner that I saw on the Internet Movie Database. I can understand registering with the site to get more features, but registering in order to get ‘ease of use’? That’s just crazy.

I’ve yet to see anything, car, web sites, software, elevators, phones, etc. that gets easier to use as you add more features. For the most part, the rates of increase for these attributes are lines heading in opposite directions.

Even besides that issue, it seems like there really ought to be a ‘Computer User’s Bill of Rights’ with Right Number 1 being ‘The right to software that is easy to use with little or no investment on the user’s part.’ Right Number Two would be something along the lines of ‘The right to software that is powerful and easy to use with instructions that can fit in a small brochure.’

The concept of having to pay for ‘ease of use’ does not bode well for the future of the web. It’s a very scary precedent.

To repeat last week’s link for Halloween costume ideas:

<http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/articles/1999/costumes/>

Amy and I have a great lead for another apartment. Cross your fingers for us…

 

10.15.99

Get scary!

Posted in General at 2 pm

Oct 15 Fri (03 PM)

It’s that time of the year again. Last year I had some problems picking out a costume, so this year I present to you, my dear readers, the Halloween Costume Ideas Web Site. Ugly as all hell, but it’s got lots of ideas.

<http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/articles/1999/costumes/>

If anyone wants to download the pages and spruce it up, feel free. I’ll post it back here or point to where you have it. I take no credit for the ideas themselves as I just scrounged them from newsgroups, web sites and mail archives.

Enjoy the season… 🙂

 

I Smell Trouble

Posted in General at 1 pm

Oct 15 Fri (01 PM)

Funny image of the entry: <http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/articles/1999/angel/angel.jpg>

There’s been a bit of a buzz about this new <http://www.digiscents.com/> technology. (Warning: do not go there without a highspeed connection. There’s at least 30 graphics on the front page alone. This FAQ page is better: <http://www.digiscents.com/insidedigiscents/article_faq.htm> )

The gist of the story is that this company is supposedly building a device that can produce smells and aromas on demand. There’s been a number of stories written about it, one in particular from Salon: <http://www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/10/14/digiscents/index.html>

My question is the potential for abuse. The sense of smell (and taste) are dependent upon actual molecules of chemicals landing on receptors in your nose (or tastebuds on your tongue). This Digiscents must actually be combining source materials to make the necessary molecules.

Now imagine you knew that someone had a specific alergy. You write up a ‘smell descriptor’ that produces a chemical that contains all the elements of say ‘wild flower pollen’, and send the description in an e-mail. The victim reads the mail, the iScent creator kicks in and then – surprise – “You’ve got Hives!’

But why stop there. It’s pretty easy to make up numerous noxious and toxic fumes using common chemicals. Just figure out what’s necessary and you can flood the area around a work station with potentially dangerous if not life threatening chemicals.

I know there’s always going to be good and bad attributes of new technologies, but I’m not sure I want automated chemical synthisis built into my computer.

 

10.13.99

PROdX and the spiders from mars

Posted in General at 1 pm

Oct 13 Wed (01 PM)

The site I’d been working on has gone live:

<http://www.prodx.com>

Like I’ve said, the style and imaging is someone else’s but the site works pretty well and other than some margin problems at the bottom of some pages I like how it works.

I’m thinking of changing the tag line for Dwelling to “Eating my own Tale”. It’s a wonderful pun. Gotta love English. 🙂

Tonight’s the third class at PSU. I’m not nearly as prepared for this one as I was for the first. I’m going to take a hour tonight before hand to make sure I know exactly what I want to cover.

Why hasn’t anyone put together and ambient house tribute album for David Bowie called ‘John, I’m Only Trancing’? I mean it’s the perfect title.