Monday, May 31, 2004
Pictures of my vacation are now posted. I enjoyed the west coast. The bay is beautiful, and the air is so wonderfully dry out there. New York was the same as it always is, and although I may have ambivalent feelings towards the city, it is where my friends and family all live. Thanks again to my hosts for their airbeds, couches, and hospitality.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Twisted steel, flaming wreckage, screeching breaks, a thundering collision. It happened so quickly, there was no time to react. A reckless driver, seemingly oblivious to a red light, hits oncoming traffic. My car stopped at the light, me waiting patiently. I hear the two cars crash and turn to see them skidding my way. My body tenses up. Boom! A green truck is slamming into my car door. My car is pushed onto the sidewalk. I am thrown to the right. My foot comes off the break. Now my engine is racing, but the car doesn’t move. The transmission won’t shift out of drive, and the engine is getting louder. The key turns off the car but won’t come out. I am dizzy when climb out of the passenger side door. The silver car that passed the red light is on fire in front of me, the smoke makes me cough. I reach in the car and get my messenger bag, open the glove compartment, and pop the trunk. In the trunk is my suitcase with all the things I would need for my vacation. Should I go? Am I hurt? How will I get to the airport? Will I still make my plane?
The police come with fire extinguishers and put out the fire. Within minutes a fleet of tow trucks arrive. My car is towed.
Somehow, dazed and battered, I arrive at the airport and am off to California. The car is totaled, but I am only slightly injured. I can’t help wonder how this event has affected my karma. Was it bad luck that I was in an accident, or was it good luck that wasn’t hurt too badly? Could it be both, was this event neutral? How should I feel about it?
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Expect light blogging in the week ahead. My vacation starts, my contract ends, and I finally get to visit the west coast. A big thank you to my favorite hockey player for letting me crash. To my crew in the city, I’ll see you Tuesday.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
“When Mr. Lincoln was elected to Congress, his opponent was a Methodist preacher who kept accusing Mr. Lincoln of being an infidel. One night during the campaign the preacher was giving one of his hellfire sermons in a church when Mr. Lincoln walked in, and sat in the back. The preacher decided to trap Mr. Lincoln. So he shouted. ‘Those of you who expect to go to Heaven rise!’ Well, Mr. Lincoln did not stir. The preacher then pointed his finger at Mr. Lincoln so that everybody would know that he was there. ‘Those of you who expect to go to hell rise!’ Mr. Lincoln did not stir. So the preacher said to the congregation, ‘All those who think they are going to heaven and all those who think they are going to hell have risen to their feet but Mr. Lincoln has not moved. So where, Mr. Lincoln, do you think that you are going?’ At that, Mr. Lincoln got up and said, ‘Well I expect to go to Congress’ and left the church.” From Gore Vidal’s Lincoln page 91.
Sunday, May 16, 2004
The new site is up! Everything is here except for the music page. The development of the much-promised MP3 player is on hold while I work a few things out. There were a few technical problems getting the new site up. First the MP3 player development was hampered by incorrect documentation for ActionScript.
Apparently you can’t use a sound.start() method with an offset time argument while setting the sound to stream. In simple terms you can’t specify where a streaming sound file starts, it can only begin at the beginning. Meaning you can’t make a pause button for a streaming MP3, only a stop button. If you preload the files instead of streaming them you can do both, but then the songs don’t start playing right away. This could be my error, it’s possible I am doing something wrong in my proof-of-concept file. I will have to post in some ActionScript forums and see what the experts have to say.
The other tech problem that came up in implementing the new design was browser compatibility. Going all out with CSS positioning should in theory make things easier than having multiple nested tables, but that’s only a theory. In practice CSS implementations differ less by browser than JavaScript implementations, but they conflict in a much worse way. In JS the problem is just each browser has a different way of referring to the same elements. In CSS they take the same references but react differently. Plus the differences between IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 are huge. This is really bad because you can’t install both versions on one system letting an individual do testing.
Since you are reading this in gray text and a blue background, I obviously solved most of the problems. Say hello to the spacer DIV, only slightly less annoying than the spacer gif. It’s funny how much things change while staying exactly the same.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
If I haven't already told you via AIM my days in buffalo are numbered. Now
that my contract at HizBic is up, my return to civilization is imminent. Oh subways how I've missed your shinny metal glow, your noise, your relative cheapness as compared to car insurance. Will I go back to NY? Or will I take the plunge and move out to California with all the crazies? Who knows, certainly not me. What I do know is this will be the fifth time I have moved since 2002. That's a lot of packing and unpacking. One thing is for certain, when I move it will be to a place that I already have some friends. No more starting from scratch, moving to a place where I'm a complete unknown. If my dream-job of designing musical instruments/software came along I might go someplace random. As long as that place isn't south of the Mason-Dixon line, I can bear it.
Many changes coming to this site. First, a redesign should go live by the end of the week. I am pulling out all the stops and using only CSS positioning. No more nasty nested table layouts. Second, I intend to reincorporate the flash based MP3 player that I built for the original
Sindicate site, that will now host my own music. I am interested to see what reaction this generates. Will people who don't want to here the music be annoyed they are forced to turn it off? Or is this now an accepted web practice? Would the regular readers of my blog be more annoyed by the music than folks who visit only once? Perhaps this depends what you think of my music, so I guess we will find out soon.
Last night I was listening to some of my old musical creations trying to decide which ones to included. Some songs age well and I still like them, others are just awful. I am tempted to include the jokingly bad stuff, if only for sake of comedy. If I want to be really embarrassing I could include mp3s of Josh and I jamming at 12, or worse my college bands demo.
Random note on the subject of CSS-positioning: It strikes me as odd that if its purpose is to remove formatting from content, that the order in which elements appear would affect their display. Shouldn't you be able to change the order something is rendered in with CSS? Imagine you want to move your copyright div above your navigation div, and still have them both relatively positioned. Shouldn't a tool that purports to separate content from style allow you to easily do that without editing the order of your content file?
Monday, May 03, 2004
Given Jessica's recent missive about the dangers of dating online, I though I too could share some gripes. Friday I received the 8th picture-less response to my profile this month. What is wrong with these girls? Would they have written me if I hadn't posted a picture of myself? If not, why would they expect me to act any differently? Not having a picture is like announcing to the online community that you have no self-confidence, that you believe you are ugly. Many beautiful women think they are ugly and fat, many of the less attractive girls think they are the spitting image of the goddess Aphrodite. What makes a girl sexy is her confidence, it is not your skin it's your comfort in it. It's possible a girl without a picture can be pretty, but there is no way she can be sexy.
