Author: jae

working mindnumbingly on the mars thing. there’s things i need to get around. like implementing additivity into certain functions, so that overwriting files won’t be needed. the problem is that some things are only required in certain templates… such as an additional layer of content in IE (to get around M$’s shitty implementation of CSS alpha filters). presently, they’re only really needed in a couple of the templates. but when someone adds a template, and it might need to change or add to the function that decides whether or not this additional content gets served up, the function either needs to be overwritten… or a detection system like i already have needs to use includes to inject extra variables.

the short version of it is that this shit is getting mad complicated.

my brain is getting numb from all this god damn logic.

this post is only for weenies and rockers and those who are worried that they’ll never find their own voice in their respective Art.

it just now this minute occurred to me that maybe i really am a good guitarist after all…! that maybe the reason why everyone else i know who’s ever heard me thinks i’m ‘great’ is maybe just because i have my own thing going… i hope i don’t sound too vain or anything, this is just something that occurred to me just now because i heard Pink Floyd’s “Time” on the radio just now and tried to air guitar to it… and failed miserably, even though i know that song note-for-note, forward and backwards.

i HAVE always noticed that i seem to play Gilmour’s solos very very differently from the way he himself plays them, and i never could figure out why. i get the notes, but my rhythm is completely different. and yet it works really well somehow… it’s like i’m playing it the way i hear it in my head, see?, and that just happens to be not exactly how it actually is. but it still somehow manages to sound, to me, very Gilmourian… very much like the actual, original solo (and here’s the epiphany: maybe it DOESN’T sound a bit like it at all!? but works anyhow!?). which is to say that it can’t possibly actually sound like him to anyone else, and yet it still captures the same general feel or vibe of the melody. i don’t know how to explain it. i’m like that with a lot of classic songs. i play them my own way. i never really gave myself any credit for that before; i just figured i was fucking it up… even though i was still satisfied that it always came out the way i actually in my head wanted it to. which… geex… means that i’ve actually all along been doing what i WANTED to do: have my own style. that is just weird, man. just weird.

and if i could be a god, then that means that you all are definitely gods.

also something cool: my gouty (debilitatingly painful) finger is on my fretting hand. so i try extra, extra hard, believe me. most of the time, i play with just the two goddamn fingers. somehow, it works out and doesn’t really sound noticeably thin. so i rock, and that’s a good thing to know, should i ever decide to inflict this thing upon others.

the point of this whole entire rambley post (who the hell said i was succinct?!) was that the holy grail of musicianship, or of ANY art form for that matter, is reaching that point where you have decidedly staked your claim to something… and the easiest version of that, for a musician, is to have one’s own style, which is still so difficult that for most people, it’s a serious, lifelong battle against mediocrity, and sadly, most lose that battle.

so i guess it’s very possible that i may have crossed that hurdle after all. like years ago, without ever having realized it. and that’s just fucking profoundly cool and (believe it or not!) humbling.

this whole entry [probably] takes up more than three inches of your screen, so that means that most people didn’t actually bother reading it, and that’s okay by me. i was just having a little bitty epiphany. go on with your reading now.

this is what i want to jam into your pussy.

yeah, i want to stuff my dynamite into your sweet little pussy…

you know you want it.

ooo! & did i just hear you moan??

happy birthday to metaphorge!

and an early happy birthday to wirklichkeit!

re: development of MARS s.t.s., a templating engine/CMS, which is taking huge jumps forward, esp. with regard to author2author compatibility (i.e., far less work involved for owner-users, and end-users notice little or no difference)…

miraculous! somehow, i got the new skin detector to work with setting up the selector jumpbox, even adding the preselection to the name of the current skin… and the old cookie worked well, because i set up a default value for the skin, in case the name has changed (which it has).

this is my to-do list:

• find & set defaults everywhere! (partly done)
• set default for bad/renamed/outdated cookie (skin name)
• identify ways around hard-coding of extra skin needs (“if ($skin == “skinname”) {

  *perform action such as setting up special additional content as in for IE w/ CSS alpha filter causing < readable text*;

  }

• redo the browser-sniffed additional/dynamic CSS so that additional rules can be included per new skins (or find a way to do this)
• known files needing skin-name arrays to be dynamically set via readdir() include switcher and selector files
• complete at least one skin to drop in and see if it REALLY works (not just for already-existing skins, which it should, since most of the skin info is now ghostly and the server now writes it in rather than it being hard-coded into the source) (damn this PHP shit is cool!)
• bug test like a mofo!!
• have a beer or five (when i’m done with current phase)

sorry for the geek-quotient, folks. i hope somebody’s getting something out of this. this PHP stuff is really a lot easier than you might think. after all, i’m arguably borderline retarded, and i’ve been relatively successful at it.

a deliberate fiscal crisis, engineered by the Bush administration, in order to cut popular programs? pshaw! never happen. or is it happening right now???

(note: registration to view this compelling story is mandatory, but free.)

the genius part about all of this is that once the American people finally realize that they’ve been duped and sold out, it will be far too late to rise up against this popular tyranny.

but go back to sitting on your bloated fucking asses, buying everything you think you need from Wal-Mart, reading cheap pulp fiction or Tom Clancy novels, signing up for as much free shit as you can possibly consume, eating super-sized “value” meals, and sedating yourselves by watching Dr. Phil, America. and remember that at least slaves historically get free room and board and aren’t expected to make any tough decisions.

i think the local free weekly liberal “arts & opinion” rag has changed names or something. the new one seems much cooler. they also carry This Modern World, which i adore. (& you can syndicate TMW here and even Tom Tomorrow’s excellent and supremely informative blog here!)

not feeling too good. Pizza Slut can kiss my ass with their fine, fine pie. i KNOW why i feel sick. i haven’t had Pizza Hut for over 2 years now, because the LAST few pies i had gave me the INSTANT shits for some reason. luckily, none of that this time, but still… i feel like my insides have been scooped out and replaced with the satanic equivalent of Jell-o™.

spoken with proppa rock n’ roll swagger (or, in lieu of that, manly bravado), over the strains of v.loud INXS:

“hey, baby… wanna shake what’s in my pocket?“

PHP rocks.

i’m making a thing right now where, instead of having to edit any files whatsoever when adding a new skin to the mars s.t.s., the system itself will figure out the new names and files and directories and take care of (hopefully) absolutely everything for you, behind the scenes.

how it works:
it reads the contents of the CSS directory, strips off the extension (the whole thing… BOTH extensions! – i end the dynamic CSS files with .css.php), and lists the remaining strings in an array, which can then be looped until the proper HTML code is spun out. and v.v.soon i will rename all the CSS files so that they’ll have underscores that i can strip out and replace with spaces… so that on the viewable surface, the proper names of the skins will actually look pretty. i.e., ‘touristbureau’ becomes ‘tourist_bureau’ becomes ‘tourist bureau’.

so all you’ll have to do is drop the new files into the proper directories and go! all new images, CSS files, and any new backend code will be automatically “detected” and -get this!- actually fookin’ actuated on-the-fly!

so far, it’s coming along nicely… what little bit of code i’ve got so far works a charm. am v.excited and optimistic about this part.

still haven’t actually bothered to MAKE the new skins, but after this, it will be a real breeze anyhow.

a cool idea, but definitely a scam to sell you credits. i like how you start with 2, but you need 3 to do the cool stuff. fuckers!

 

 

 



















 
 

 








 
 
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also, when it says in their FAQ:

…what they really mean is this:

which equals

Livejournal may suck lately, but they’re not the main problem in this case.

honorable mention for suckiness:

the fact that their math sucks so bad that it is possible to score OVER 100%… and they make up ridiculous reasons for that, too!

but what do you care? you’re a sheep, just like me, and you’ll still enthusiastically sign up anyway.

so… she’s definitely moving soon… and she’ll be scoping out Ohio and in fact yours truly… and i really really hope that things go as well as… well… as well as i hope. which is really well! i hope! i told her that this is apartment season here, since even though we only have a few colleges (UD, WSU, Sinclair, Clark State, Wittenberg, Antioch, and a couple other smaller ones), a couple of them are fucking GIGO, so students will be moving out all over the place. including Freak Town (Yellow Springs – one time home of Dave Chappelle, Rod Serling, and Robert Anton Wilson (as well as some others, including one or two of the Buffalo Springfield guys))!!

so… yeah. finally… a potentiality becomes an eventuality… and things are definitely looking up for The Germ.

put my car in The Shop this morning, too.

now… to get a job… PRONTO!

[EDIT: this mood icon doesn’t quite capture the mood i had in mind…]

v. interesting.

Ohio Citizen Action just stopped by. that’s the organization that a_fallen_starr (my last potential gf) works for. i wonder if she’s still with them, though… she hasn’t updated in a while. then again, memorial day just passed, so she might be busy.

[edit: ok, i didn’t really mean to come off as, well, that mean. okay, maybe a little at first. i apologize. oy, i’m such a jerk!]

so my good friend Trav called me tonight and we talked for forever. he’s my bro; he and Tony. we all used to be best buds and hung out and smoked dope and got crazy together and have had many many adventures, including the Sordid New Orleans Days, which included (but was not limited to): the running out of money incident, the finding money in my pocket after all incident, the losing found money again incident, the getting stuck across the river in the hood late at night and having to walk back incident, bodily functions night, the junkie who got us all stopped by the police on the way to a drug deal at a gay bar and ended up ripping us off on acid incident, the “best head in town” bartender and the pathetically, speechlessly drunk Mel Torme-lookalike patron who flipped her the bird and almost fell over in the process as she offered to gather up his one million nickels from the bar and call him a cab incident, the my car is on fire pt.I-III incidents, and many others. also among our many crazy adventures was Serious 4-Hit Double-Dipped Blotter-Acid Night of Twenty-Three Dancing UFOs, Missing Limbs (But Floating Fingers), LED Lights in the Grass, Breathey House and Truck, Where’s That Train We Were Walking To in the First Place Through Miles of Farmland In the Middle of the Night Again?, Don’t Piss on the Electric Fence, and My Converse Have Up and Gone All Colors At Once (all in one long, crazy night). also many adventures that have vanished into the thick, brown haze of “what did I do last night?” (and many Strange and Holy Molecules and other uneasy tinctures).

we traded stories and laughed about Ria’s marking Eirit’s letters (Ria’s in Mali) “Jesus Saves” (i’m convinced she was just fucking around) (also Eirit’s Jewish and had a crazy bad experience with one of her pals being “saved” and staying far too long and bugging her to take her to see that crass, fraudulent televangelist/marketeer Benny Hinn, etc.). we also laughed about girls and stuff, and how i’m suddenly, (un)fortunately in [seemingly widespread] favor with the opposite sex somehow once again. he remarked that i used to “fuck girls and then feel bad about it” (“but i’m not even Catholic!”), which was funny as hell but not quite true. i just used to get too into relationships, but now i think i’ve adjusted a bit and don’t utterly put my whole being into things quite so much. it was still awfully funny.

when my grandmother was dying, he was the first person i called in my despair, and he flew from Tampa and was at the door the next day. later that night, my grandmother died and he somehow knew or felt that he should come over and was here no more than 20-30 minutes after that. so yeah, he’s my bro. i love that motherfucker. crazy-ass ex-skater punk. he’s one of those OLD school computer geeks who dropped out of high school and now makes beaucoup dineros running the database for some soulless corporation. moving soon, to a place with a pool and a 3 car garage. he deserves it. i only hope he finds tranquility and happiness someday. sometimes he just sounds like a sad angel when he talks. he’s such a happy and relatively well-adjusted guy, though. but i think he wants more, like everybody else. he’s more agnostic than me, though, so that takes care of that. maybe he’ll figure out his Real Life someday and be truly content. i just hope he trades that Cobra GT for a slower car (like a K-car!) one of these days. he worries me sometimes.

i miss Trav. come to think of it, i miss Tony, too, and he just lives a mile or two away… that rat bastard. i’ll get him!

i’m going to secretly change my grandfather’s dog’s name without telling him, as soon as i can decide between Cutiepie Rascalface and Squeaky Stinkerson (or Stinky Squeakerson) (she squeaks when she yawns).

have i ever mentioned how much i hate making Livejournal layouts? oh well. this one is coming along all right i guess. it’s too bad that so many people are suddenly getting into the translucency thing, because with Livejournal you really can’t do it RIGHT. you can either a) do it so that it works in MSIE/Win, but nothing else, or b) do it so that it works on most modern browsers, but in MSIE (probably others also) the text is dimmed out. with the right script, it would be possible to detect the visitor’s configuration and serve up the best code for any given situation (that’s what i do), but Livejournal doesn’t allow scripting (for good reason!), other than BML and whatever that weird-ass shit they use in S2.

so yeah. i’m making one with translucent <div>s and dimmed-out text. it’s kind of a bitch, because i can’t seem to be able to get the CSS working nicely between Mozilla and MSIE.

and no, i’m not making you a layout. this is like the fourth one i’ve ever even touched, and only the second one i’ve done from scratch.

upgrade to Mozilla, people. you’ll be doing yourself a favor. and sign this petition to get Microsoft to properly support the PNG format, which has been around for eight damn years and allows for 256 levels of alpha-channel transparency.

i am actually wearing a turtleneck today. it’s a beautiful day. just a little chilly. grr. wish i hard a [2nd] warm body here to cuddle up with so i could hang out on the porch and smoke cigarettes and talk about things like ‘possums, the Illuminati, and time travel.

does anyone know of a public-access cigarette machine in the Nuke Our Lyle area? some place where i don’t have to go all the way inside, preferably one that is in fact open even when the parent establishment is closed? i refuse to contribute to consumerism and make some other American work on national and other holidays.

ok thanks stop clapping i need a cigarette.

(brilliant CSS)
from zeldman.com (synd@zeldman2)