i went to check out some pics from a friend's party last weekend, and realized that he'd "revamped" his site blogger-stylee, and had undertaken a very cool writing project. 100/day being the name of the site, i assume (i've been so busy house shopping i haven't had a chance to talk to him about it) that his goal is to write at least 1 100 word post per day. The cool thing is, this being a writing exercise, he's not doing the typical blog dealie, he's actually crafting a story from 1 100 word post per day. i haven't had a chance to read it all (see: aforementioned busyness), but the posts i have read have been quite good, and each one really pushes the story along, in that allotted 100 words.

i like this idea quite a bit, because like him, i'm also an aspiring author, but unlike me, he's actually a productive one. check it out from the beginning.

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i don't remember if i've mentioned it here yet or not, but my band Lucifigous Prick–which was a three-piece, then a four-piece–is now a three-piece again. we realized that the addition of the drums was taking the band's sound in a direction that we didn't want Lucifigous Prick to go… which is not to say that we didn't like the new sound, but it just wasn't what we wanted to do with LP. we toyed with the idea of breaking up or going back to a three-piece, until we realized that we could have the best of all worlds if we just split stuff into two separate projects. So now, we've got the original Lucifigous Prick line-up, and… the new band, which, after 4 months or so, still is unnamed.

still unnamed, and "in the studio" nevertheless. we're currently recording our 10(ish) songs under the able guidance of Jason Loewenstein, and have, in fact, gotten them mostly in the can already. pretty much just vox & mixing left, then we'll be ready to put out whatever it is we end up putting out under whatever name it is we end up stumbling upon.

in that vein, i thought i'd bounce a few ideas off of you guys. i had a previous list that i seem to have misplaced, but i was just thinking of some new ones last night, perhaps you all can pitch in and give us some more idee-s. oh, and the band's sound is still dark (not goth, not death metal, but dark) but more heavily rock centric than the Prick.

some possibilities:
Emergent Intelligence
Emerging Intelligence
Emergent

Construct
ConstructDestruct
DestructConstruct

Study of Human Behavior
Studies in Human Behavior

Anthropomorphize
Anthropomorph
Anthro

Extravasate

Go the Spoils

By the Victors

Obfuscate

(from Medical terminology/disease names)
Criduchat
Tinnitus
Hyperacusia
Dysacusia
Bradyacusia
Vestibular Schwannoma
Otitis Externa
Acoustic Neuroma
Cotard's Syndrome
Aphthae
Catarrhal
Epitaxis
Gleet
Scrofula
Scirrhus
Scrivener's palsy
Worm Fit

(general rules for suggestions, no numbers, no use of the words "black" or "red", no use of "day" or variations thereof. phrases/cliches should be obfuscated or subtle)

well, that ended up being longer than i thought, especially once i started looking up disease names… still, i invite you to weigh in, perhaps make some other suggestions.

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this'll just be a quick entry to point out a couple things…

1) in light of the "IE gets blowed up real good" bug apparently triggered by the recent bipolar revamp, i've unflipped the switch and gone back to the crappy frames version. if anyone knows why a little CSSP/DHTML might be causing IE to hack up a lung, i implore you to please come forward. for testing purposes, the XHTML valid revamp version is still available.

**update**: well, it looks like i've nearly licked the kick'sploding IE thing. apparently, i didn't do too much testing in IE 6 during initial development, probably thinking that IE5 and 6 rendered more similarly than they do. i still need to do a little layout clean-up work (especially on 1.5) for IE6, but otherwise things appear solid once again.

the culprit? stupid proprietary DOM stuff in IE. document.body.clientHeight was causing IE6 to puke, so i just amped up my browser detect, and called document.documentElement.clientHeight for IE6 only. seems to have done the trick.

those of you IE6'ers out there, please pound on one or all of these (jh - b15 - sp - org) and let me know if you're still seeing crashes. i'd be much obliged. ** end update**

2) in other news, the "latest images" functionality of the gallery scripts is coming along nicely, though it seems with each new feature i complete, i think of five more things that could make them even better. what this means is that, eventually, i'm pretty much going to have to do a ground-up rewrite of the scripts. yippee.

in honor of the new functionality (as partially implemented) check out the pictures i took over this past weekend, when i went home to p'town to visit the fam and see my sis and my awesome little niece. be sure to check out the rasnake/old_homestead gallery, as there are several kick ass shots of stuff in and around my parents house. (sometimes, i actually think i'm a good photographer)

anyway, hit that link quick, as it's only good for 10 days–one of the limitations of the latest images feature (as it stands now) is that the number of days images are counted as new is set globally. i'm planning on adding a bit where you can specify a date, a range of dates, or your own number of days for which to show images. should be fun.

**update 12/21/2004** more fixin's have been added to the gallery scripts, adding some of the stuff i mentioned above, and that gallery link above now targets a specific date (rather than xx days ago). still no UI for all the new gizmos, but i'll get to that soon-ish.** end update**

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I got this swanky new laptop, which you may or may not recall, and it counts among its nicer features a DVD+/-RW drive. which means i can create DVDs. which is nice.

since time immemorial, i've captured my favorite TV shows (read: Star Trek) to tape, and always dreamed of a time when i could have them in some more high-quality (and physically easier to manage) format. to this end, i've dreamt often of a massive home media server to which i can record and store every TV show or movie i'd ever want to re-watch.

in lieu of multiple terabytes of network attached storage, the writable DVD thing might be a good way to begin building the collection. but how to capture the TV shows onto my computer for writing? i don't have a TV Tuner card, nor will i be getting one any time soon (see: "pending marriage"), so i had to figure out a reliable method of getting stuff i wanted onto my hard drive. enter pealco [via boing boing] (for me), and engadget (for you). the engadget piece is a bit more involved and hand-holding like with the whole setup, not that you need that, but just in case. it's mainly just because the engadget how-to is new, so it's the one that prompted this post. but, i've been using this setup for two weeks, and it's pretty swank i must say.

now i've just gotta design some DVD packaging material for my Enterprise DVDs, and i'll be all set. someone else has already designed seasons 2 & 3 so i just need to knock out 1 & 4. i doubt i'll get as detailed as that guy did, but who knows. depends on how the creative juices flow. i also figure i'll start with the most recent episodes and work my way back, since Paramount's talking about releasing official DVD season one box set sometime late next year.

i don't watch much TV, but what i do watch, i'm serious about.

Popularity: 5% [?]

first off, before i get into the boring bipolar related stuff, let me point you in the direction of ghost town studio, the most recent issue of which features an article and images i put together. it's a very interesting little news piece about the Sears/Kmart merger.

in other news, and to the matter at hand, i've just discovered (inadvertently, i might add) that that annoying little firefox bug where scrollable DIV elements, or rather, DIV elements with their overflow properties set to allow scrolling, wouldn't scroll with a mousewheel (or equivalent widget). the scrollbars would work fine, of course, but it would be heresy to knowingly release something that refuses to work with the one really major improvement in HID design to come along in the last 10 years.

anyway, that nasty little bugger is fixed, at least in the latest trunk builds of firefox, and so should be fixed forthwith in the upcoming minor point releases of firefox 1.x of course, if you go to download the stock ff1.0 today, you'll still get the non-scrolly divs, but in a few weeks or a month's time, it'll all be history.

so, i told you that to tell you this: sometime soon, tonight, tomorrow, sometime this weekend, or maybe even next week, i'm going to flip the switch* on those "major improvements" i talked about way back when. so now's definitely the time to go back to that post and knock the crap out of those pages to see if they fall apart too badly. MC Seth-yo did some extensive cross-browser testing, and aside from some completely understandable though thankfully infrequent failings, the designs really held up pretty well. (of course, that may be selective memory talking, and when i go back to look at those screenshots he did, if they're still up, i may be in for a shock or something.) anyway, soon these changes will go live, the world will rejoice, and you, if you're really really annoyed by not being able to scroll with Mr. Mousewheel, should be encouraged to get thyself to mozilla.org's firefox ftp download area and download a copy of the latest trunk build. right now, the latest trunk still reports as being 0.9.1+, so be warned. latest trunk builds can be squirrelly, not as stable as the normal release builds.

also, i'll very very shortly (tonight) be installed an MT plugin to close old comments (we've been getting bombarded by comment spam for a while, but i've been to lazy to install additional protections on top of MT-Blacklist), so if you've been itching to comment on a post from 3 years ago, you better get on it.

**UPDATE**: the switch has officially been flipped, f'real.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Clinton's DLC sent out a message today about a "reform insurgency." and have to say i agree with them on pretty much every point.

and jennifer, in her comments on the post-election post (which i'm still pushing to get people to read and comment on, 'cause talk=good), mentioned two other worthy organizations we should investigate and invest our time & money in.

Democracy for America
Black Box Voting

but my number one recommendation to get yourself politically involved, even in a tertiary disconnected sort of way, is to donate to and join the ACLU today! To become a card-carrying member requires only a $20 donation, but please feel free to donate as much as your little pocketbook can stand.

and now, back to our regularly scheduled silence.

oh yeah, and by the way, i turned 31 on monday, so thanks alot for the birthday present America… was there a gift receipt in the box? it's a lovely president, i'm sure, but i might want to exchange it for something else.

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here's the text of an email i just sent to several news organizations, in support of Kerry's victory in the debate last night:

needless to say, i thought Kerry did a great job, and i feel more confident now than ever that things will work out alright.

Now, don't get cocky Kerry! i'm betting it's your race to lose, not Bush's. Keep the pressure on, keep bringin the fight to 'em.

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i wanted to write a post, but i don't really have any (not-so) unique insights or anything to share.

i spent this past sunday in bed for pretty-much 24 hours, interrupted only long enough to get out of bed to throw up, or later, to try to eat, or to just feebly walk around the house because i was sick of being sick in bed. now i think i'm still trying to recover from being in bed so damned long. my brain is tired.

i did find an interesting site last week, http://www.last.fm/. i suppose not an entirely original site, in that it's basically an online radio station, or live365 style multiple radio broadcaster. what makes it interesting, perhaps even unique, is the fact that you can get online, tell it the artists, albums, etc. you like, and it'll suggest other user's "radio programs" to listen to. then, as you listen to the station, if you keep a window open (you can pop up the "portable" player and minimize it) you can tell the site which songs you like, and which you hate.

as you continue to make judgements, the site can make better suggestions, and, in fact, can create a "profile" radio program for you, where it'll pull songs and artists from other user's profiles who have similiar tastes.

so far, it's been picking some interesting stuff for me, though it did throw a Christina Aguilera at me earlier that i had to ban the fuck out of.

oh, and i think they've been getting more attention lately (i found them via daypop, so they're getting linked all over creation, supposedly) so they're still working out some of the kinks (my profile has been telling me i've been listening to "Tool - Forty Six & 2" all day now, so the love/hate marker thing hasn't been functional for me today).

but, you can go in and add individual artists, albums, and songs to your profile "by hand" if you want to take advantage of the "profile radio" portion of the site.

pretty cool stuff.

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i've been hanging out with my sweetheart all night, so i've only got a few minutes to get today's post in under the wire. and what should i see upon ascending the stairs to the technological sauna that is our family room/computer area, but Paul the inimitable Puffin playing some funky weird game based on the struggle between good and evil. i'm sure you've all seen this, 'cause if i'm seeing it, then it has to have been making the rounds… but anyway, any port in a storm is what i always say.

how 'bout this: http://www.emogame.com/bushgame.html

enjoy!

Popularity: 4% [?]

i keep having these ideas to enhance different things around here, and i've always got a thousand projects running around in my head, begging to be let out, so sometimes i get a little caught up in them… some might say obsessive about them.

the first thing i want to point out (and the thing that kind of triggered the whole landslide of enhancements i'm going to tell you about in a minute) is that, in my galleries i've added a directory for images taken with my phonecam. the directory is called, appropriately enough, "phonecam".

this is all the result of, after having fought with it for a while, i've finally managed to get a cable and software to sync my phone to my PC (since Sprint refuses to supply such things in order to make you more likely to buy their PCS Vision services). anyway, i finally got it working, so i'm attempting to be dilligent about taking at least one photo with it every day. now, i'm not promising i'll get a new photo uploaded every day, but i should at least be able to take five seconds to take a picture every day. i've debated creating a sub-folder within the phonecam gallery to house the shot-a-day pics, where i could pick just the best photo from the days with multiples, but i've decided not to do it for the moment. if anyone wants to weigh in, input would be welcomed… i'm not a good decision-maker.

so, anyway, the ability to upload phonecam images brought a couple of gallery script bugs to light, so i spent some time fixing those. fixing those bugs reminded me of some of the little enhancements i wanted to make, and the enhancements reminded me of entirely new functionalities i wanted to add. so, a couple weeks later, i've got the bugs fixed, the enhancements done, and the new functionality added. all while streamlining the code so that i've got a single code-base that works for the bipolar galleries as well as brian's joycamproject.

the bugs were boring, and inconsequential. one of the enhancements was simply adding a pagination function to the gallery pages so that you can now navigate directly to a page, instead of having to click "next" or "prev" to go through all the pages in sequence. nothing really groundbreaking, but a very useful enhancement. the other major enhancement was adding a "fit image to screen" link, so that if the image is larger than your screen resolution, you can force it to resize to fit within your screen dimensions—cool.

the new functionality is much more fun, though really nothing quite groundbreaking either. i noticed on heather champ's site that she's got a "send as ecard" link… well… i thought that was a cool idea. so, a little searching online, a little download of open-source code (phpPowerCards), some judicious yet extensive re-writing of that code, and voilá— x:13design postcards are born. basically, you can just browse the galleries, view an image, and if you want to send a postcard, just click the aptly named "send postcard" link down there on the bottom left.

i haven't taken the time to add any anti-abuse code to the script yet, as for one: i'm not quite sure how, and two: i'm running out of free time at work to do it… but, if anyone has any specific ideas as to an easy to implement anti-abuse bit of PHP code, please let me know. also, if anyone gets spams sent by this script (i'm not anticipating it, but it's possible) then please let me know ASAP, and accept my most sincere apologies.

anyway, get thyself to the gallery and check it out again, like it was the first time.

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