July 21, 2004

• Ah, Hump Day. My production manager has been “sick”  for the past two days. I swear, the place seems to run better sometimes when he doesn’t show up, but I don’t want to “go there”. I shouldn’t talk too much about the people at “WORK”. It’s too small a company, and tempers can get heated when emotions are displayed. Suffice it to say, that I tend to work better with more “inputs” to my job, and when a key player is gone, I absorb some of his “inputs” by default. Since I ran the whole show for the “panel shop” in the beginning, having “nursed” and “structured” the department, I can easily do so again and again, when called. Speaking of being called, it is day three of the second week of hopefully no Jury Duty, and I haven’t had to “go in” this week either. Which is a good thing. The last time I actually had to go to the Courthouse every day to find out if my “group” was being called. Now I just phone in. It is far easier, but I have to remember to make the phone call since it is after 7pm every night. Funny thing about this Xanga blog. I have been overloading the posts with “photos” and ”graphics” and Lord knows I know this causes the pages to load slowly. I have been “pointing” the blog tags to the images on my server, but still, a lot of graphics causes slow loading, and I can’t find the place to “get in and tweak the HTML” to tell the page to load the printed posts first,  prior to the images, or layer the elements on the page, as I can in Dreamweaver. (EDIT: 5:00 pm: I can “save a skin” from the Xanga skins page, and then there is an HTML box for that “skin”, or I can “make my own skin”. But this looks like a lot of work, and I’ll have to “source” the page to get the original HTML, which I could “paste” back in the box on the “skins” page. Hmmmmmm) I got a message yesterday telling me as much, and giving me advice on how to “fix the problem”. The guy who wrote the post had a 56k modem, and probably an 800×600 display, since he mentioned having to horizontally scroll. I try to take great pains to make sure the screen doesn’t scroll horizontally, and I veiw my pages on a number of browsers and on other people’s computers, but sometimes a “glitch” occurs. I think it’s the composite I made of Linda Rondstadt, which is pretty wide, and I didn’t make the image smaller in the Xanga Xtools so it came out full size on the Xanga page.(EDIT: 5:02 pm: Linda is now smaller and you can get to the larger image by clicking, which is built into the XangaXtools.) He also mentioned that the page didn’t scroll vertically  very smoothly. Well, all I can say, is, I’m trying to present the “best of the AllThingsMike site, and sometimes I get “carried away” with images. I used to make all my “poetry pages” in the “presentation mode” with a graphic, and sometimes music (which I am also “playing” here on the Xanga site, but the URL for the MP3 is on my own server and not Xanga’s.) When I got a comment years ago (pre DSL) that the images were crashing someone’s computer, in which case they could not read the poems, I completely redesigned the ElectricPoetry website to remove all the graphics, and showcase the words. Now, I have finally gotten some readers who enjoy the “Presentations” so I am slowly creating them. I created a whole poem as a graphic recently, the post for “Large and Empty House” a few posts earlier, and liked the results, but might have to experiment some more. (EDIT: 5:03 pm: That’s an image I wanted to “see”exactly as it is. Another problem are the mouseovers on the left “browser pane”. I tried “shrinking them” in the image program in which I made them, and the result wasn’t pretty. I’ll have to see if I saved the “drw” files, and maybe I can make them a little less wide, so they “match” the other browser bars, which I can’t make any wider. EDIT 2: 11:00pm: Well, Just resized all the mouseovers in the browser bar. The words are much too small now, but the width is only 170px, so the column “shrunk” like it was supposed to. Now I don’t think anyone will have to “horizontally scroll.” I just hope people can read the “destinations” on the buttons now that the print looks too small.) I rarely put any images on my Blogger blogs, and all my websites are incredibly graphics heavy. (Because that’s what I “do”) One of the reasons I have embraced the Xangasphere (Besides the comments) is because of the ease with which I can upload a photo/graphic quickly without having to go into Dreamweaver and ftp to the server. I can create whole pages from the Xanga Xtools module. Well, it’s 5:22am and I’m late for the drive to work. Cya.  And now about a half hour and 15 miles later, I can finish my thoughts because I’m the only one here. There are about 7 panels set up and ready to test, so the workday will begin shortly. (EDIT: 5:06 pm: All seven of those, six of another, and twelve more of the first. They were just “switches in a box” so they were easy tests. Still got home at 3pm ) Cancerboy has been working for two days. He says he is glad to be “doing something” again. I know that even on vacations (on those rare occasions when I take one) I feel an itch to “get back to work” close to the end of them. (Of course followed by the urge to take another vacation after about four hours of work.) Joel works for a Honda dealership on the parts counter, and has been off work since March, when he had the operation to remove his colon cancer, because of the subsequent chemotherapy treatments. He is not experiencing great discomfort, and has been mainly lying around the house watching TV. In the last two days, I have finally been able to watch some recorded films from the Tivo. I saw “Judge Hardy’s Children” on Monday, recorded from TCM. One of the “Andy Hardy” series of films (back in the days before television, when “series” were shown on movie screens) made in the late 30s and 40s, this entry is filled with not only “family values” which were one of the series’ strengths, but since Judge Hardy takes Andy and his family to Washington D.C. in this entry, there are plenty of inspiring moments dealing with liberty and American values. This entry is from 1938, and America would be at war in a few years, and the war was reflected in the Andy Hardy series. Mickey Rooney, who played Andy (and was the number one box office star of the day) also had a wonderful role in “The Human Comedy” based on the book by William Saroyan, in 1943, where he reads the letter from his brother, who has died in the war. One of the most powerful moments in film. Speaking of film, the UCLA Preservation Film Series is beginning, and they are going to show Elia Kazan’s scathing attack on television and the media (from 1957) “A Face In the Crowd” so I might go see that one on the ‘big screen’. Andy Griffith plays completely agains type as “Lonesome Rhodes”, an itenerant country boy with a “gee-tar” and a way with words who gains national popularity on television. Patricia Neal stars as the woman who “finds” him in a jail cell singing his songs. A very powerful film that has never made it to DVD or even laserdisc. Rouben Mamoulian’s “Love Me Tonight” (with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald) is also on the program at the Preservation Film Festival. I haven’t seen this gem since film school at USC in the early 70s. I can still remember the opening musical number with Maurice as the tailor riding through Paris in a carriage, with some of the most beautiful black and white photography, and some of the most wonderful music. So there are two films I might catch at the Festival. Healthwise (I call these blog entries “catch-up posts”, and there are no images) I am on “day three” of not drinking any alcohol, as a protest to myself for the amount of beer I drank last week “partying” with my alcoholic roommate. I enjoy the beer as I’m drinking it, but certainly don’t enjoy the extra pounds it puts on my person, and don’t like the bad feelings in the mornings perpetrated by the “great god alcohol”. I am aware there are “hangover pills” which strikes me as another of those “bad ideas” prevalent in modern society. (I can get as sh*tfaced as I want to, and it doesn’t matter, because I take “HangoverEnder”, which makes me “kissing sweet” and “full of vigor”) Back “in the day” when I was a young man with no thought of what the consequences of drinking gallons of alcohol would bring, at least the hangovers told me that what I was doing couldn’t be healthy for me. Nowadays, young people can “take a pill”. I’ve always felt that even though my generation (the “Boomers”) had some great ideas back in the 60s, all the “free love” and “openness” in the 70s led to Aids and the loss of family values in the present. I shudder to think what present society is going to mean to the future generations. (If we last that long.) But enough of this ramble, and back to work.

  • 8:23 am
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