January 21, 2010 – 2:36 pm
I am hoping you are now seeing a bunch of animated heads on the title bar of the site. Yes, it's kind of annoying, but I am working out some options for the Flash sections. This little exercise forced me to use Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I need to put them all into Flash and make them a uniform animation yet, but for now I think it's kind of amusing, if only briefly.
The next step is to make the animation operate only when the user mouses over the images. This will use Actionscript, which I am not a big fan of, but since it's a pretty simple operation, I think I can stand it.
One other thing: despite the poweful tools at my disposal, like the mkv to mp4 converter described here, I ended up using good ol' VirtualDub for some of the video editing. What an awesome open-source program that is.
January 15, 2010 – 4:34 pm
Hooray I just updated my WordPress theme a lil' bit. Users may not notice much of a change, but believe you me, I have been tinkering with the code all week and the result is way more awesome on the back end that one could imagine. Don't even try to imagine it, it's not worth even trying.
I'm using the rehash of this old site to force me to learn the intricacies of messing with WordPress. There are times when it seems like it would have been easier to just learn the coding and build the site myself, but then I think, who am I kidding?
More updates to follow as I think up more stuff that I can later list on a resume.
December 11, 2009 – 4:51 pm
Contrary to rumor, she does have legs
This clearly isn't finished yet, but I wanted to launch the WordPress version of this blog after spending all week tinkering with it. Most of the tinkering will be invisible to the reader, but I assure you it's all very high-tech stuff and will no doubt garner me a position as Tilda Swinton's personal webmaster.
After over 3 years using Blogger's interface, I finally switched this sucker to WordPress, which has been a somewhat most, highly time-consuming endeavor. Before Blogger, my site was driven by an ancient CGI (as in Perl, not the thing that brings Avatar to life) script originally meant to be used for site guestbooks (guestbooks?? what were we thinking back then?). That script functioned fairly well, and I would still be using it today but my host changed some setting and suddenly none of the comments would display. Rather than figure this out, I just switched to Blogger. Those comments still don't work, even though they are all still saved on the server. Someday I will liberate them.
For the time being, I will be messing with this layout, I have a couple of simple ideas for the design that are proving especially annoying to bring to fruition. But for now, it's kind of nice to see this old site with a new skin, after 7 years with that eye-straining teal color scheme. But while the Blogger posts have all nicely migrated to WordPress, my CGI archives remain in the old format, so we'll always have those to remember this site's former glory. I'll get around to linking to them at some point.
February 18, 2009 – 4:44 pm
I keep forgetting to blog, or ramble on at length, as the case may be. Now that I can't access blogger from work I rarely post, since when I'm at home I am fulfilled with litterbox-scooping and cat-medicating. Our newest foster cat is actually with the vet right now, we suspect he swallowed something indigestible or he has some kind of virus. I really hope they figure out the situation fast, not only because I hate to think of him stuck at the vet's but also because they charge an ungodly 'boarding' fee for overnight stays. Not to belittle the industry but damn, vets have it made! They can basically charge whatever they want and almost never get called on malpractice. That, and the fact that their charges can't complain about their bedside manor. I'm selling them way short, and if I wasn't so squeamish about guts I'd probably be one, but again, damn!
Anyway, back to blogging, the increased filtration by my company's network finally forced me to learn about aggregators, so now I happily use Google Reader to read most sites; this allows me to read all the blogspot blogs I like, nicely circumventing the ban. Of course it makes your blogroll look like a bunch of spammy emails and you realize that once you strip away the photos and fancy layouts, most blogs are kind of boring. Especially when you can't read the snarky comments, that's where the real action is most of the time. Lucky for me, Brownstoner is still unhindered by my network's prejudices, those guys crack me up.
I should take my site off Blogger anyhow, since they've been deleting people's music posts without telling them. But again, why would I use up my free time doing computer stuff better suited to my hours on the clock? Anyhow, I think I might be able to blog this site directly through Flickr … there may be a lot more pictures on this site soon!
From a post on Brownstoner:
I think jimmy legs is real he's posted for years. The others are all Dave.
Posted by: guest at June 19, 2008 10:56 AM
Whew! I was beginning to worry.
