YAY! Finished my Christmas shopping three days early! (Dec. 22nd) How about you - did you finish yours? I bought my last gift for the season today (although I may stop and buy some cards at Rite-Aid tomorrow (but I won't tell if you don't). The house is all decorated and we're happily feeding all the employees of Dominion Power. Although I have icicles under the new deck this year, I think I'll be adding more lights at the end of the season (when they go on sale this weekend, that is!). It would be nice if gaudy light displays had a purpose when it was nice and warm outside. I hate putting up lights in the cold.

I'm playing with a three column CSS based layout that I found on the net. If you'd like to see the layout while I work on it, click here. Once Tripod is done fixing their MIME tags, I'll finish up the page and put it out.

Looks like Tripod hasn't fixed the .htc file MIME type on their servers yet. When they do, you'll notice that I'm playing with a feature in Stylesheets and DHTML called DHTML behaviors. It allows you to use CSS to apply scripted actions to a tag, just like you can assign formatting and colors to tags. The reason it doesn't work yet is that the htc MIME type is text/x-component, and Tripod sends the files out as text/html. This breaks the functionality and makes it not work. I'm sure my code works because I've tested it from IIS and it works fine, and I've tested it from my local file system and it works fine there, too.

If the web site looks funny, it's because I'm playing with Stylesheets. Part of the re-learning process for me. I'm thinking of playing with Javascript next term during my class, and I thought it'd be fun to implement some Javascript functions into a stylesheet. Maybe make all the links on my page rainbow-flash when you mouse-over them. The stylesheet would change how the tags' default actions operate. To learn about Stylesheets, I've consulted the WebMonkey, specifically, Mulder's Stylesheet Tutorial.

Good morning. It's an icy morning here in Virginia, but the schools are open (slightly late) and the air is not too cold. We should see some melting here, I think. All but two gifts from my Christmas shopping are done. I still have to mail some, but I actually brought the package with me today so it should get done today. I hate the winter season, but I like Christmas well enough. We've done the tree and some of the lights (although I need to put up a few more lights on the front of the house yet...I've had bad luck the last 2 weekends, what with schoolwork and the snow. With school out, and no snow this coming weekend, I should be fine, eh?
For the site redesign, I'm looking at a three column approach with a DHTML column in the middle. The only concern right now is how Google and the other search engines will pick up the different topics that I've planned. Were I to do a frames site, I think the engines would be able to pick up the content I switch into the middle frame. With DHTML, I'm not so sure. Any thoughts?

The ads are gone. Long gone are the days of the free ride, and I'm just catching up. Tripod has been good to me for years, and I've decided to bite the bullet and pay for the web hosting I enjoy. With the ads gone, I'll be able to design my page the way I want without worrying about popups and inline ads. Since I'm taking a Javascript class next semester, I may want to apply some of the knowledge to my own site. I'm also thinking about doing an RSS feed and posting more often (and more useful info).

Technology sucks. No, seriously, folks. More specifically, digital technologies suck. Here's a pipe dream for you - digital video capture. I have a firewire (i.link/IEEE 1394) card in my computer and a Digital 8 camcorder. I tried transferring data via the digital interface into a variety of products (doesn't matter much since they all use the same Microsoft OS-embedded driver for the video capture.) The first time I tried it, it was going good. I got 10 full minutes before I ran out of disk space (had specified the wrong drive for the temp file - dumb me). So, I changed the disk drive setting and tried again. It froze, within a second of capturing the video. Restarted the OS. Restarted the hardware. Rebooted, reinstalled drivers, restarted computer, camcorder, etc....over and over. Spent hours on it. Note the 1AM post time. This sucks big time.

Here's the problem with digital technology, folks. It only has two states - on or off - working or not working. You don't get a fuzzy capture, but when it's not working 100%, you don't get a fuzzy capture, if you get my drift. At least with analog technology, when something wasn't working, you'd get at least partially to what you wanted. Here's a prime example. Take a VHS tape. Take a penknife. Now scrape off a 1/4" of the material from the tape. Play it in your VCR. Note the manifestation of the error. Now, take a DVD - one you'll never want to watch again. Take the same penknife, and just nick the sucker. Put it in your player, and watch the error manifest itself, and possibly halt your player for a full minute or stop the movie altogether when it can't figure out what to do.

This digital transfer stuff just is NOT cutting it for me, or for a few hundred other people who've posted on Usenet. I'm betting there's a few thousand more out there who don't even know what Usenet is and are calling and causing problems to the video capture software companies. Luckily, I also have a TV capture card in my PC, so I can hook it up to the analog RCA video jack on the card, and capture my movies that way. The high quality may not be there, but at least I can get the videos into the computer. And low quality is better than nothing.

People are always wanting stuff for free. I went to look at my web statistics, and I see the search term: use showshifter without paying for it. (roll eyes). If you want to use Showshifter, buy it. Go to their website and buy a license to it. Don't be a jerk. Software piracy hurts the software industry. No matter how you cut it, it cuts jobs. If you don't have the money to buy the product, go out and get a job delivering pizza for a month, and you'll have the money to buy it. Ask for it for Christmas, whatever! If you can afford a computer and a TV tuner card, you can afford to pay for Showshifter. The computer industry is in bad enough shape without freeloaders.

Hello, readers (and all you wonderful visitors from Google and other search engines). School's out for 6th Term. Midterm for one class was a bear, but I did get a C on it, landing a B for the course. I decided not to take the final. I just couldn't bear to sit through another exam like that. So, my midterm was almost half of my grade for the course. I'm trying to set up my account with Visitorville - having probelms with it though...we'll see how it goes. Next term starts in January...Calculus and Javascript - should be a fun semester, no? Christmas is coming, and I've done my shopping for most everyone. It feels good to get it out of the way. Some stuff has happened, but I've not had time to write. Don't really have time now, but, check out SwishMax - the newest version of Swish that came out within the last 2 months or so. It's a good product which I've recommended since it first came out. The upgrades to it include a scripting language. It should stand on its own for doing animated web content, but it's like Flash-lite. It will get the job done for most simple needs.
I'll probably work on the web site over the next month...let's see what motivates me.

Long time no write. It's been more than a month since I've written, although I've had the urge before today. Lots of things I'd love to talk about, but none of it seemed important enough. At the moment, though, I'm very tired because I stayed up late two nights in a row. When you get older, that can really begin to affect you. Last night it was because I was watching 'A Beautiful Mind' - a movie about John Nash, Princeton intelligentsia who decided to live with his paranoid schizophrenia rather than be medicated to the point of uselessness, and his wife who supported him and his decision. It's a good movie, if you like those types of movies (which I do). But, be aware that it's a longer movie and you should give yourself the time you need to watch it (> 2 hours).

The night before it was The Sopranos that had me up - I'm watching the series on DVD from Netflix (the link is from them). I just watched the first three episodes from the fourth season on Monday night. I'm impressed with the show. In the first season it looked like it was going to be formulaic, what with one person dying in each show. All I concentrated on earlier was who was going to be picked to be bumped off in each episode. It was a good idea to stop that later on. The show became a lot more meaningful.

Also, saw an innovative new service on the net, called Visitorville. It's a unique web visit data collection service with a SIMS-like interface, that shows your web traffic in real time, graphically, with people and buses (for referrers). Details on visitors show as people's passports, and your web pages each show as buildings, so you can watch people move from building to building. The only down-side is the price. They want $20 a month for the service. For a small website like mine (50 visits on a lucky month and free web page servicing), it makes no sense. I would recommend they change their business model to make room for the little guy like me if they want to succeed.

I've been watching a few stocks lately, to see if I can find any predictors to recovering companies. A while ago, I made a few predictions, and never acted on them. Putting your money where your mouth is is the only way you'll make money, of course. But I'm shy when it comes to actually putting up vs. shutting up. If any of my estimates come up, maybe I'll mention my stock choosing strategy. A little more research is warranted, though.