March 23, 2008

• AllThingsMike Website Updates

  

  Well, the Easter Holiday is almost over. I spent most of the time updating some of my website. Below are some of the highlighted sections on www.allthingsmike.com. I'm presenting the HTML exactly as onsite, so hopefully this experiment will work. Also below are some of the "archived" website announcements from the new Index Page 2. There were getting to be so many updates I didn't want to delete from the front page that it was getting quite long. Now I'm going to present only a half dozen or so updates on Page 1 and spillover to Page 2. I've re-edited a lot of the sections. As announced in the first section below, I've completed posting the 2007 poems and have added most of the 2008 poems online in ElectricPoetry. More and more I'm referencing the blog and linking to blog pages and blogtags on the main site. And wouldn't you know it, I have just updated everything, and then I uploaded a new folder to webshots called San Gabriel Mountains, with over 250 photos, and now I've got to add it to my front page. Oh well, maybe later. MFN/ppf

  ELECTRICPOETRY WEBSITE: BEST OF THE 70s-90s AND NEW 2008 POETRY 3/08

  As of late March I've written eight poems so far this year. .As the years pass, I sometimes write a lot, as in 2004, or a scant few, like the only 14. pieces I wrote in 2007. So far, in 2008, even though the output is not great quantity wise, at least it's been consistent. When I post an "ElectricPoetry" post on my blog, WhenWordsCollide, I have attempted to include at least one new piece, and it's been working so far. Beginning in mid 2007 I posted "10 Best Of" collections of poems on my blog from the decades of the Seventies, the Eighties, and the Nineties. I still have to collect the 10 Best of the Aughts, and before we know it, the Teens will be upon us. It's interesting for me to note that now my last decade's worth of poetry are all "internet poems" written in a computer Notepad program, and posted for the most part online instead of actually existing on a piece of paper, as most of the poems till 1999 were presented at first. The ElectricPoetry site is constantly being upgraded, and even though I'm a little late getting the 2007 section completed and a 2008 section online, by year's end I do hope to have even better navigation, and some redesign of the older pages and sections to make navigating the site even easier.

  MY OPERATIONS SERIES ON WHENWORDSCOLLIDE: JAWBREAKING IN HIGH SCHOOL  01-03/08

  There are now three selections in the "My Operations" series I've been posting on my blog WhenWordsCollide since August of 2005's "My Left Hip" about my hip replacement surgery back in 1993. The second selection was "My Colonoscopy" from March 2007and detailed the experience of having the "small invasive procedure." In February 2008 I began serializing "Jawbreaking In High School" about my broken jaw and the many operations it took to correct it. Part Two was added a few days later. Other selections in the series will show up on the blog and can be found on the :"tags" page for my blog under "operations".

  THE CLOUDSCAPING PROJECT 01-03/08

  The sporadic California rainy season always provides the opportunity to get out and get some cloudscapes. One Friday evening after work, and right before a rainstorm,I was able to capture quite a selection of cloudscapes with the latest 7.2 megapixel camera, and they are online in my Webshots Gallery entitled "Cloudscaping" Along with the Webshots Gallery, which contains over 100 photos taken that afternoon, right before sundown, I also completed an internet movie called "Cloudscaping"which is essentially a photo slideshow comprised of not only the photos in the latest Cloudscaping folder, but dozens of other cloudscaping photos taken over a four year period, and edited to the strains of traditional guitar music by fellow Xanga blogger Randy Van Otterloo (flatpick46 on Xanga) The video is 6 min. and 21 seconds long. Read the Director's Commentary on WhenWordsCollide.

  BIG WEDNESDAY PROJECT 12/07

  On Wednesday, the 5th of December, 2007, the biggest swells in over two years were predicted along the shoreline of California. I took a day off work to travel up the coast of California, taking photos and video of the monstrous waves and the collections of surfing aficianados who similarly took the day off work to ride the waves. Although the conditions were less magnificent than predicted, I was able to cobble together a 12 minute video showing the swells at a number of beaches, and showcasing some interesting surfing footage.The video is located in my Xanga Video Section HERE. You can also read the Director's Commentary on my blog.

  OTHER SECTIONS FROM THE 2ND INDEX PAGE

  A REMINISCENCE: DEAR MISANTRHOPE: MY LIFE WITH PAT Since I started blogging in 2004, I have written more in three years than in the previous twenty.. I am currently serializing about four autobiographical "novels" on WhenWordsCollide One of them is. "My Life With Pat". It is the stormy tale of a relationship between two people with nothing in common. Spiraling out of control for a period of almost four years, our relationship finally fell completely apart when my gal started cheating on me. Those four years were my only time with a woman, and they were like a prison sentence in Hell. Read about my "instant dysfuncitonal family" in "My Life With Pat.". LITERATURE ON WHENWORDSCOLLIDE: MY DAILY BLOG When Words Collide is my daily blog, updated at least three times a week. The service which has hosted my "blog" since Memorial Day 2004 is Xanga, and it has been around for about as long as this website, but I didn't know of it's existence till mid 2004, when a correspondent who maintains a personal blog there showed me her site, and I immediately fell in love with the concept of the "Xanga Community". I have created 10 blogs on the Blogger service, but I had no idea how to develop a readership. The Blogger website is sort of like Homestead, which hosted AllThingsMike in 1999-2001. There are a lot of blogs, but no navigation system. The Xanga community is just that: a community. Although Blogger now has a "comments" feature on each post, communities like Xanga invented the concept, and the comments allow bloggers to search each other out and get to know one another. The "internet community" I had always dreamed about it here, today, on Xanga.. WEBSHOTS GALLERY: MOVIELAND WAX MUSEUM 10/05 The AllThingsMike Webshots Gallery is my collection of photographs on the internet. Most of the 3000 or so photos in the gallery, divided by themed folders, have only been taken since March of 2004, when I finally bought my second digital video/still camera. I have always been intrigued by photography. I have graduated from a 35mm to a digital and I have not stopped taking pictures since. Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park, down the street from Knott's Berry Farm, and a fixture in Orange County for 43 years, closed it's doors on Hallowe'en 2005. On the weekend before the closing, I took some photos of the exhibits, some of which were familiar from taking about a half a dozen trips there over the years, some new and unseen till now. I have filled two folders on my Webshots Gallery. Movieland Wax Museum, and More Movieland. There is video footage which hopefull will someday be incorporated into a new MikeVideo Internet Movie, which will soon be able to be accessed from the MikeVideo YouTube page.

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