Category: News

This is a blog I posted to practically daily for 9 months in 2004. I started it a few weeks after I turned 30. I didn’t continue it into 2005. It has languished quite neglected for many years, and has been seriously broken for about 4 years with hundreds of missing pages.

I have resurrected it, not because I intend to continue writing in it, but as a digital time capsule. I am also adding in some of my older websites including my first website I built in college. Not everything works exactly as it should, and there are lots of broken links–though I have linked to The Wayback Machine where possible.

Roadkill on the Information Superhighway (1994-1995)

I created this website as soon as NCSA Mosaic and the Netscape Beta web browsers added support for images. It included a site for one of my favorite bands at the time, The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, and a site for my late-night radio show, The Boneyard. This site predates The Wayback Machine as do many of the sites to which I linked. I’ve been able to restore most of what was on my own site, but almost all of the external links are dead, and many were never captured by The Wayback Machine.

The Donnas: Rock ‘n’ Roll Machines (1998-1999)

A Bay Area punk rock band that I saw many times in concert.

Right Turn Clyde (1999-2000)

A snarky zine about pop culture that my friends and I published.

I feel a bit like Microsoft. To get my redesign done and up I ended up tossing out quite a few goodies I was working on. I figured the major “look and feel” was the single most important thing. And since I’m going back to work this week, I had to get something up or it would languish for a while.

So it’s missing the font resizer that would allow you to choose between small and large fonts, and the style switcher so that visitors could turn off CSS if it wasn’t working with their browser. Also missing are a few new pages like “Downloads” that will turn up one of these days. There’s also a bunch of little tweaky stuff I didn’t get done like moving my affiliations list from the About page to the sidebar and validation of the code with appropriate links.

Despite all that I think the new look turned out pretty darn cool, if I do say so myself. And I was able to put in some fun new things like integrating the site with my photo moblog, and the new sidebar sections—recent comments and interesting links. Plus I have new RSS feed options. Take a look at the bottom of the sidebar for all the XML goodness.

So there you go. I welcome any and all comments. Please let me know if there are any display issues on any browser—I definitely couldn’t check them all.

Well, I’ve finished up with a “quick and dirty” version of what MFTI looked like under MT2.661 with the new MT3 templates. It’s not perfect, but it’s mostly there. (I haven’t put the title graphic back in place. I figure I’ll save that for when I have all the little “bells and whistles” in place.)

I already love the new comment approval thing in MT3. I’ve been able to stop several Casino and P**** Enlargement spams in the short time that I’ve been switched over. It’ll be great when Blacklist is working with MT3 but this is pretty good.

And the UTF-8 default is great too. I’ve had the bandly mangled Japanese name for my website for a few years now, but the text didn’t work right in the old ISO encoding. Now I can use it again. If you can tell me what this means:

怪獣大悪脳

I’ll give you a cookie.

I have noticed that the email I get when a new comment is posted doesn’t display the Unicode characters correctly in the subject.

[Monsters from the Id æªç£å§æªè] New Comment Posted

They are fine in the body. I don’t think it’s Apple Mail causing the problem. It supports Unicode. I’ll have to look into this more.

I have upgraded this site to MT3. You may have noticed that it looks completely different from how it looked yesterday. You may have also noticed that it looks suspiciously like the default templates that come with MT3. That’s because it is. I’ll be changing this soon. The whole backend of the site is different and I had a lot of redirect problems to work out. They should all be taken care of now. If you notice any problems, please let me know so that I can fix it.

With that out of the way I can once again focus on getting the site to look the way I want.

MT3 also means TypeKey comments. You don’t have to have a TypeKey account to post a comment but it will make the whole process much easier. It’s up to you.

Back to work on Monday. Woohoo! Bad news. We’re on a week to week basis. So I’ve got one week of work guaranteed and we’ll just see from there. Hey, work is work. I’m not complaining. And since I can make as much in a week doing sound as I can in a month on the state’s unemployment, it’ll be a nice little cash influx every once in a while until we can get on another show fulltime.

I wish the unemployed versus employed timing was a little better with this extra super bonus hardware trade-in from Digidesign. The offer ends on June 30. I might have to bite the bullet and bring my Mix Plus up to an HD 2 Accel.

Lee is looking to sell some of his paintings. He has some very nice ones of rockstars, and others as well. You can find more information about the paintings and his contact info at his website.

Shirley Manson

Adam Ant

Morrissey

Also: Pregnant For The Last Time, Paris One, and Betty.

Oi! My feet are killing me! I’m back home after much walking around Las Vegas. I have things to say about stuff I saw, and places I went. But not now. Now it is late. Or at least late enough. And I’m tired. And the kitties missed me. Goodnight.

You are now looking at the Movable Type version of my website. After a lot of work I was able to get back to the same functionality that I had under iBlog plus a few extra little features. I’m hoping to add some things in the future. Some of them you won’t even notice–like an interface on my end so that I can quickly add new links. And some more style sheets including one optimized for printing. But all that is down the road. I think the only thing that hasn’t carried over from my iBlog version are the comments that people left for me at Haloscan. There weren’t many. I will add them in over here. Unfortunately the original dates of the comments won’t carry over. Oh well.

Please let me know if you notice any problems with the new site.

I just got an email from my buddy Ben who’s taking off for Japan and Australia tomorrow. His girlfriend and her friend have already been in New Zealand and Australia for a bunch of months checking things out. So they’re reuniting in Tokyo which I’m very happy about. And thankfully we all get to read about it in their weblog, The Adventures of Katie and Emma.

We hung out a bit the other night when we went to see “Hellboy”. (And at some point I’ll finish up my review of it and post it here.) I told him that he had to bring me “ninja stuff” back from Japan.

Today is actually the one month anniversary of the new Monsters from the Id complete with weblog and swivel action kung fu grip.

“So I’ve got that going for me…. Which is nice.”
—Carl Spackler

It is done. After a little bit of wondering where my title graphic when off to and then trying to figure out why there was an orange stripe above the graphic, the Monsters from the Id revised website is done. Please let me introduce you to a style I call:

Halloween

It is inspired by a style called “Zen Pool” from the excellent CSS Zen Garden website. This weekend while I was bringing my site up to date, I created another style I call “Frankenstein” which was basically the same as “Zen Pool” with a different color scheme. The author of “Zen Pool” had a fixed amount of text to deal with for that design. After many hours of messing around, I found that his method does not work at all with my weblog of various page lengths. So I scrapped it, read up a bunch more on CSS, started taking baby steps and wound up with “Halloween.” At some point I’ll probably rework “Halloween” to get a new version of “Frankenstein”, but that will be when I set up the site with user-selectable style sheets.

Of course I did end up putting the obligatory weblog stickers down in the corner of my navigation bar. I swear the blog police knocked on my door and said, “Sir, we need you to add a zillion of these little 80×15 images to your site or we’re going to have to take away your computer.” It was either that or a post by Wil the other day where he gave a link to a sticker generator. One thing lead to another and suddenly I found myself at a sticker archive. I couldn’t help myself.

I’m going to go play with my Colorforms and Shrinky Dinks.