Sir Grump Munch

November 18, 2004

Domestic life means more updates

I've been slowly updating some of the content on this site that has stood still basically since the site's inception in 2001, (read more below). I've also added a couple of new movie reviews below, for Day of the Survivalist and The Killing Fields. Soon I will write one for Hell Riders, a terrible biker movie from the 80s starring Adam West (from Batman) and Tina Louise (from Gilligan's Island).

I'm a little torn about how to proceed with managing all the photos I'm taking and collecting. I finally splurged and bought the $16 license for WebPics, which is a pretty decent program for most purposes, if a little lacking in certain features of design fine-tuning. I could just build a new CSS sheet for each feature and have the best of both worlds (sort of), but lately I've just been letting it do its thing and not re-editing the code after the fact. It does okay, especially with 200 photos. I'd never want to make a feature with over 10 photos again without automating the image output somehow. The problem is, the WebPics galleries don't exactly match the rest of my site, and I'm super-concerned with "brand image;" I don't want to confuse people. I'll figure it out eventually, it's always a good start to build from. Meanwhile I've got about 500 photos in my "Signs" folder, none of which are on this site. That's almost ten times the quantity of what has remained the most popular section of my website....imagine the popularity (and more random e-mails from strangers) I could have when they're posted!

I can't describe how much I hate iPhoto, I'm going to delete it just on principle. Fucking retarded photo management system. Not built to handle quantity, totally counterintuitive filing system (let's do it by date, not by any logical grouping of subject...and make a new fucking subfolder for each new day...that's a good way to fill up the harddrive with bullshit and ensure that I can never find anything!)

Here are some of the fruits of the last few nights' labors:
Gallery of flea market photos from Paw Paw.
Gallery of photos from Dave Johnson's wedding last fall.
Gallery of what I'm going to do to my scooter's front fork.

The impetus for some of those was a general update to the Paw Paw page. Also added some new photos of my amazing cats to the cats page. I also updated the photos of homes page, and may add a Webpics gallery of the house my dad just sold (lived there from 88-04). Updates to the MCAD friends and Norfolk sections to follow soon as I comb through more photos. I realize now that many of the pages on my site were built in about 2001 and have NEVER been updated since. It was a motherfucker of a task to put the site together initially, I got kind of burned out on it and focused my efforts on other things. Now it's getting embarrassing and I'm trying to make up for it slowly but surely. May even add in some post-2002 design portfolio work at some point, but it's not very high on the list.

Speaking of work, I just realized that it was five years ago (on the 15th) that I moved to Virginia and started working for PETA. Amazing how time flies, I was just 22 then, a young buck with his whole life ahead of him.

You should read this piece about religion and its role in local/world affairs. Funny stuff.

This is also a very compelling article: Peak Oil, Stolen Elections, Energy Wars. Don't let the overlarge photo of the author scare you off.

Orded myself a new phone, which I expect to receive tomorrow. It's not a flip-phone, but I don't really care. It's much better than my old Gameboy 1.0 piece of shit Kyocera 2255 (the screen keeps randomly dying out and fading to illegibility, it kind of reminds me of a goddamn Etch-a-Sketch, because I try to shake it to make it work again. Switched providers from Sprint to Verizon (not a fan of either company, but Verizon seems better in Chicago). Love those lofty-sounding made-up company names, the are so many of them nowdays. My dad's company was called "Centris" after the merger (and before it disappeared). Then there's "Corus" bank, and I loved it when Virginia Power turned into "Dominion."

Sorry for the scattered thoughts, I wrote this in bits and pieces over the course of the last 4 days.

Posted by pj at November 18, 2004 10:52 PM