Author: jae

…my solution to everything is to chop up the PROBLEM into little tiny pieces and reinsert the pieces where they fit as ANSWERS.

i’m realizing in a very visceral way that doing the whole menu wrapper thing is really, actually, finally and ultimately going to require the use of two wholly seperate and unique routines.

it’s a lot simpler than that, i know. but still! i have to do two versions. that’s going to, well… suck ass, really.

also- i’m calling this the “mars s.t.s. ultra plus” edition of the mars engine, in the grand tradition of anime sequels and box sets.

Carl Macek, import me! cut me up and aggressively re-edit me for an American audience! dub me in English!

so there’s been a sticking point in my redesign, and it is this:

mars had one sidebox. transmothra.com will have 3, which are groupable as one.

right? no problem. got it covered. but here’s where it gets tricky (and i’ll try to make this simple):

when i “wrap” an image-based border around a box (as in mars), i do it like this:

include (wrap_top.html);
include (content.php); // for example
include (wrap_bottom.html);

where
“wrap_top.html” might be something like

 <table>
 <tr>
 <td>(top left corner image)</td>
 <td>(top center image)</td>
 <td>(top right corner image)</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>(middle left side image)</td>
 <td>

…then the content gets included next:

(CONTENT GOES HERE)

…and then the “wrap_bottom.html”:

 </td>
 <td>(middle right side image)</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>(bottom left corner image)</td>
 <td>(bottom center image)</td>
 <td>(bottom right corner image)</td>
 </tr>
 </table>

(all of that makes a 3 by 3 table in HTML, where images representing the border around the box go. sorta like this:

	(CONTENT GOES HERE)

…right now, the files that are being wrapped around the content boxes are utterly blank – hence, no border. and as an added plus, no migraine!)

but with 3 boxes groupable as 1, how should i go about it?

so i’m adding a new variable in the config file for each skin, called “three1”, where i specify, for each theme, whether the border will be wrapped around all three boxes, or just around one.

see, the thing is, what you see right now has 3 boxes, all lined up. but with this templating engine, i can actually spread them out all over the page if i wanted. so i have to be able to just have individual image borders as well as one big border around all three.

funny: i’m not sure when i’ll ever even get around to using image borders.

…and this one other Really Important Thing:

when i first heard that Willee’s was going to start doing bluegrass on thursday nites, my reaction was: wtf? this makes no sense! …but then once i got there and Saw, it made perfect sense.

because this is Middle America. this is a Small Town. this is the Heartlands, the Midwest; what people in vastly more cosmopolitan towns like New York and San Francisco call “flyover country.”

and this is what we do. we have Italian restaurants, largely run by people who have more Germano-Scandi-Celt blood coarsing through their veins than Roman. and in them, we have 80 year-old VFW members, who look like Tommy Lee Jones’ older, less handsome brother, playing honky-tonk music on the electric guitar, wearing their gas-station shirts and yellowed blue jeans.

and we, apparently, really like it.

i do appreciate it, i really do… but i also really need to move into the city, where i can take public transportation or walk to a neighborhood bar, talk shit with the artists and the subversives, and come home to an apartment with a cat and a fire escape, where i pass out beneath the dim blue glow of neon lights. it’s either that, or further out into the country. i’m done with Suburbia. i’ll come back here to die, but for now, i feel like swimming back downstream again.

i just remembered what Really Important Thing i had in mind to write about!

my dear friend Leah (Leah Rae Pettit), who i hardly ever mention.

she used to work at Willee’s (am i even spelling that right?), but before that, we worked together at Smiley’s One Price Pizza. she rocked, man. we used to listen to STP and Brian Eno (she still has my Nerve Net tape, but i bought the CD last year anyway) and Stereo MCs. one of my fondest memories, for some reason, is picking her up from some friend’s place one day in my Chevy Nova (the blue one) and taking her to work. luckily, we had several miles to just listen to music and talk and shit. it was fun. i loved working with her. when i moved to Florida, we wrote each other a lot. she’s one of the very few people i ever actually wrote to, and on a regular basis also. she was short and cute and oh so hot and very smart and very gifted and, in short, everything good. somewhere along the line, we lost touch.

i miss working with her.

(the setting:) those were the grunge days, when Pearl Jam was king, and so was Nirvana and Alice In Chains and Soundgarden and STP. and Brainiac’s singer was still alive. New Order made their first comeback record, and it was good. Stereo MCs were rocking our world with “Connected.” i was doing a lot of LSD (and smoking grass). i was horribly in love with Susan Lipps (unreciprocated, as usual), and was briefly seeing this ultrahot 18 year old named Tanya. i also made out with Sandy once, (that’s what she was called then, and she had a mohawk and was thinner), in her truck, back then; she who ultimately ended up staying in my room with me for a week before i left for Florida. but more on that whole bit some other time. i digress.

i really do miss Leah terribly. i don’t know why i never mention her here. i am as fond of her as i am of Melissa, and Cass, and Lisa L., and also Ria, and Kimbley (more on her later as well), and Brigitte, and Trish. she fucking rules so hardcore, man.

ROUND ONE:
Can I ask you more than 1 question? I’ll put them in the comments

how big is your you-know-what?

deep deep down, in that little kid part of you, do you want to believe that God really exists as the perfect figure we all believed innocently at one time?

If you could go back in time to your birth and live your life over, how would you live your life differently?

have you ever done anything sexual with someone of the same sex? if so, did you like it?

Will you grow your hair out all long again? *big puppy eyes*

ANSWERS:
Can I ask you more than 1 question? I’ll put them in the comments
yup!

how big is your you-know-what?
six feet, seven inches.
nah, just kidding. pretty average, i suppose, at something rather like ~6-7″.

deep deep down, in that little kid part of you, do you want to believe that God really exists as the perfect figure we all believed innocently at one time?
GREAT QUESTION! it would prolly be nice, but i’d still have my questions. how can one live without doubt? how can anyone believe anything blindly? i may be an idealist, but i’m pragmatic enough to not put too much faith (if any) into anything i can’t see or touch, etc. …so, i think i’m happier accepting that i don’t know anything about god or the cosmos and toying with theory, rather than believing in any sort of absolute truth, because i’d just HAVE to question myself. (i used to be quite the little fundie when i was a teenager, and that’s what happened – i learned to ask myself the deeper questions, such as ‘am i right?’, and ‘how can i know for sure?’

If you could go back in time to your birth and live your life over, how would you live your life differently?
i’d do just about everything differently. who doesn’t like variety? besides, i might actually get something right that way. i always think it’s stupid how some people claim they’d live their whole lives the exact same way. how utterly boring (not to mention arrogant), and it tells you so much about their real personalities. i’m sorry i can’t give an example, because i really would do so much differently that it’s hard to pick just one (or ten) thing(s). i know that the most important thing i would have done would’ve been to PAY ATTENTION IN SCHOOL and NOT DROP OUT OF COLLEGE. but i’d also do a lot of other things differently as well.

have you ever done anything sexual with someone of the same sex? if so, did you like it?
of course! and, er, not particularly. when you’re eleven, and you suddenly find yourself with interesting bodily changes, you experiment. i’d like to know who hasn’t. but it was far more clinical than anything. enjoyment wasn’t a goal; it was more a case of ‘let’s see what happens when we put this together with this!’ …and for the record, it never even came down to touching or anything. just a mutual lack of clothing and a lot of looking.

Will you grow your hair out all long again? *big puppy eyes*
damn straight i will! am, even!

i’m keeping all my answers public as a sort of test of my bravery.

today:
bought pack of lights. (shut up!, i don’t have to explain myself to you!)
went to Willee’s Italian restaurant on Main St., Nuke Our Lyle.
at Willee’s, band billed as “bluegrass,” but actually C&W. all songs about Jesus and heartbreak. thank god for that OTHER kind of gospel music. white gospel music just SUCKS BALLS.
went to doggie training at Petsmart.
by now, pretty certain that cute girl in class is single. happened to follow her all the way to rte 571, where she turned left and we turned right. Tipp City, i guess. she threw a cigarette out the window of her car and it exploded on the nightroad in flat hail of ember sparks. i hate that, but at least that means she’s not a nonsmoker.
had many strange and startling esoteric revelations i wanted to write about, but forgot them all.
just kidding. i forgot what else i was going to write, but i’m sure it wasn’t that important.
now must chop off filters of cigarettes to further cut back on my nicotine intake. will not throw away rest, as they come in useful for situations where i can’t roll (like driving).
will get around to answering poll questions in a sec.

(only you can see or change your question, so make it good! i won’t say who asked what.)

p.s., use comments to ask more questions. post anonymously if you want. also, if you change your mind, you can always go back to the poll page and fill it out again.

prototype

page one: splash page. click enter.

to switch themes, click on a box in the upper right. the currently selected theme will be highlighted.

the main menu is dead, but the top two links on the “related links” box work.

in the “random friends” box, a plus or minus sign will expand or collapse a full list of friends (needs updating; send me your URL!)

the placement of any of the boxes can change, depending on the theme selected. you may notice that in the black theme, there are three sideboxes to the right, while in the white theme, there is one large sidebox to the left.

should work well across most modern browsers; will probably break down on older browsers. for best possible results, use Mozilla for Windows and Safari for Mac. these two browsers are by far the most standards-compliant browsers out there.

meat-thing.com/proto

note: selecting a theme will place a cookie on your computer. the only info i collect is the name of the theme. it has a 1 year expiry.

according to my ashtray, i’ve smoked ~10 cigarettes, including 2 or 3 from last night.

on the redesign: successfully converted the style switcher from the jumpbox variety to icons. now it actually refers you back to the page you were on when you switched, no matter what your user agent’s HTTP_REFERER string says (or doesn’t say). and as long as i make the icons, and put them into their respective folders, it will STILL automatically detect and insert them, so i don’t have to code anything in every time i make a new style.

bonus.

the content injector thing: how it works

the content files look like this:

$links = array(
 '<a href="?page=home">home</a>',
 '<a href="?page=two">page two</a>',
 '<a href="#">link 1</a>',
 '<a href="#">link 2</a>',
 '<a href="#">link three</a>'
 );

…which then gets separated into the main content box, the "related links" sidebox, and the "more info" box, via the insertion of variables $links and $info. it’s that simple.

due to the power outage, i didn’t have enough time to work on stuff, so i still can’t really show anything off just yet. not quite ready. i still need to do a couple other things first.

i hope two of my LJ friends can work things out.

come to think of it, i hope all of you can work things out. and everybody else, too.

i’m working things out.

the power just came on here. we’ve been primitized since about noon. i mostly, more or less, spent the day just laying on my bed, curled up on my side in the blue light of my open window, listening to Joan Armatrading with my headphones on. in a way, every day should be like that.

to do:

i can’t wait to hear the new Tears for Fears and Duran Duran albums! i honestly have pretty low expectations, though. most bands that reunite like that don’t generally have anything particularly amazing to add to their bodies of work – especially when their older material was already so incredible and groundbreaking. still, the return of these two great, great bands will be much appreciated!

now, if we could just get all those awful hair-metal bands on the washup circuit to disband again….

got some good graphics now for the new site design. it’s looking pretty gnarly. i just need to put in some code so that it’ll work right on IE and then i can show it to you. after that, i think i’ll just concentrate on converting the old pages to the new, cleaner format. and then make a couple more skins.

hee hee, with this thing, i can pretty much mimic the style of every site i’ve ever done, and then some. and give visitors the choice of which they like best.

~wheeeeeee!

p.s., the new background for the black skin is really cool. the page looks perfectly black, except that… well, you’ll see tomorrow.

my friend Tony mentioned the other day about going to King’s Island sometime soonish. i think that’s a great idea.

i’ve got the basic engine for the prototype site pretty much done, more or less. now i’m going to do a couple graphics for it and see what happens. it looks much cooler now already.

it’s 11:30pm here, and i haven’t even smoked 8 cigarettes yet. a rough estimate. i think i’ve smoked 7.

anyway, that’s pretty fucking good, for someone who used to be notorious for smoking up to 5 packs in a day, and has since then cut back to about ~1 pack a day.

i’m still dead broke. DEAD broke. with a client who owes for the past two months of my webmastering services. i barely charge them anything at all, but now i really REALLY need that cash.

i have been Mister Accomodation to people in the past. i will not be so accomodating henceforth. that goes for everything.

“No nation can be neutral in the struggle between civilization and chaos,” Mr. Bush told members of the American Legion gathered in St. Louis for the group’s convention.

yup. thank our mighty Lord Jesus for the chaos in Iraq. because we, as Good Christians, cannot let the scourge of civility, no matter how frail, continue in lands that are not wholly controlled by our Blessed Corporate Interests.

i just wrote a love song.

er, hate song.

it’s pretty.

it’s called “she’s everything.”

everything i abhore, even.

i wrote it on a-caustic guitar.

doing some more tweaking of the redesign prototype. it’s not live, but i can assure you that it’s a lot less dead than it was before. i now have random quotes. i’m considering, instead of having a list of friends’ sites, having those randomized as well.

i also got the “related links” functioning. it’s super sweet, because each page of site content, like mars, contains no actual HTML (or rather, it needs no actual HTML). this is because it’s dynamically inserted into the page via clicking on a corresponding link.

e.g.,
you click on “about”
a file called “about.php” gets loaded into the page.
everything else stays the same (although the page does refresh)
in “about.php” is simply a bunch of plain text.

the COOL part is that now, i have a set of links that i write into the content file, which get inserted, via the wonder of PHP, into a completely different area of the page. which happens to be, literally, wherever. it could be at the top right, or the bottom left. it all depends on the currently selected layout.

yeah, i know. the other thing had that, too. but the menus were in separate files. this has it all in one file. makes it so much easier to maintain.

i still have a lot left to do. i have to make a couple more dummy content files, just to see if they’ll load up properly (i’m quite sure they will). and i have to figure out how best to “wrap” the sideboxes, in case a certain skin may want to put a border around them (‘all at once? or seperately?’ seems to be the question du jour.)

i also have to insert some other highly-secret code junk in to make the layout-switching jumpbox stay where i want it to across different browsers.

i want the new Al Franken, Neil Gaiman, Mike Moore books (when they come out).

i also want Robotech: Macross Saga, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cosmos, and Cowboy Bebop box sets.

and a decent mic preamp, a condensor mic, a new solid guitar body, a new acoustic, a decent velocity-sensitive synth, outboard compression, and a slew of other stuff.

i applied recently for yet another really groovy job that i’ll never get but really really want. and another. and am still waiting to find out if i can get hired on at [Yellow Springs employer], or else whether i’ll just have to be happy to take yet another low-paying, mundane, stress-enhanced job that’ll doubtless make me manically suicidal.

and once more, for the weekday LiveJournallers: how do you like my decade-late return to the world of fiction? (and thanks once again to the kind folks -ya squishy lil’ dev’ls, ya- who read and commented already!)

these jeans are so tight that you can tell i’m a Jew from a hundred and fifty paces.