A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging through notes and my devonthink database trying to archive all my past posts (that’s a huge amount of text) and was working on an essay when I thought, “Hey, maybe archive.org has some of my old designs!” and they do, and some of them suck pretty bad and some of them are okay. Some of them I like better than this one.

I wish I had a unique tagline for each era, but I don’t. In a ridiculous and vain practice in self-reflection, some might call it futility, I’m going to review some of my old designs:

• July 2001 and September 2001 | The embarassing ones first: Those are really ugly. Actually the first one is, the second one is just plain. Heh, “hard drive hotdog”, that’s rich.
• January 2003 | There’s so much text on this page! And boxes!
• October 2003 | This is one of my favorites, and not just because it has Josh and Tinh feeding each other sushi on one of the posts. The leaf gives a real Canadian feel.
• December 2004 | The only thing different about this and the October one is the gray background. Boy, what a lazy redesign.
• May 2004 | Another color change “redesign”, the funny thing is, one of the posts comments about it. I really am just repeating myself, aren’t I?
• November 2004 | Whoa, it just got real serious in here. I like how I steal all my taglines from tv shows and movies, though; sparkle motion being from Donnie Darko (not like you didn’t know). This one’s very white.

You can look at all them here, but I think that’s pretty much everything that still exists. This is actually missing a pretty big portion of designs that I had, but those are lost somewhere in the ether (or that fried hard drive at Neil and Lex’s house).

Since we’re somewhat on the topic of reconstructing websites and archives, here’s a Lazy Preservation Study that includes Warrick, a command line utility for recovering website from search engine caches.

Also, I think the Wayback Machine is pretty cool, but I can’t think of any other sites I used to visit that are now gone. Can you?

EDIT: Right, “win” friends.

So, this is the only solution I could find for the Recent Links section to have a comment space. I also have failed to find out how to make the rss and Recent Link archive work, and it’s kind of pissing me off.

DNS must have been down all weekend, so anyone trying to email me in the past couple of days hopefully got a bounce, because I didn’t get anything. I found out this morning that the domain was expired. Luckily, domainmonger keeps a hold on the domain for a while before they release it to the hungry domain thieves.

Long story short, if you sent me anything over the weekend (which I doubt you did), send it to me again. Domain renewed, crisis averted. Real world stuff calls.

If anyone knows why my search box is located outside of the main area, please advise, as I have no time to monkey about with such things.

All my heartfelt gratitude,
Tim

Is my new favorite browser. I’ve been using it a lot at work on a PC, and have now just re-installed the new version on my Mac at home. It’s got all the same functionality that I enjoyed when using Saft with Safari, without any of the annoying “Buy Me” pop-ups (since Saft is shareware), but is completely free.

The extensions are particularly useful and endless (Yes! Mouse gestures!); it reminds me a lot of Wordpress, which I’m also enjoying because of its relative ease-of-use and its ever expanding and robust system of plugins, themes, etc.

Anyways, as a by-product of both of these things, Wordpress and Firefox, I bring you a crazy and absolutely useless and random link called Rapid afterimage. It’s a visual trick, and no, I didn’t bother to read the explanation.

Get Firefox and Wordpress!

I know I said I’d have the last two reviews for you on Friday, and now it’s Monday and I still haven’t gotten them done, but that’s the problem with setting deadlines for yourself, you’re too lenient. I will be getting them done soon, and I just recently watched one of the movies I’m going to be writing about today, so I wanted to take my time in writing about it because there really is a lot to talk about. In time, friends.

As for the show on Friday, it went well as it could have, though my voice was in terrible shape, Rick did a great job accompanying on banjo, and Alison did a great job accompanying on vocals. We sold a CD, people were nice, we played three new songs, there should be plenty more to come and maybe if we keep playing, we could have a new CD. Who knows, this world is crazy.

Anyways, yes, working on reviews. Yes, the site does lull sometimes. And yes, the reviews will be good. Good enough for you?

Because I feel like crap today and I don’t want to spend all day in a coffee shop, I’m postponing the last two movie reviews that I have. I have a ton of writing to do still, and all I really want to do is eat some eggs or something and take a nap. I’m a little nervous I won’t be able to sing tomorrow, which would suck because I would like to put on a good last show for Stuart’s, so I’m going to go home, east some eggs or something, and take a nap.

It should really be more like the last year in film over a week. I’ve been putting together tons of words on films from last year for the past month, and I can’t seem to reign my words in so that I can make a short, succinct round-up of films that were notable for me last year. So, instead, I’m going to be posting film reviews all week long. I have about 10 of them, and I’ll be counting them off in roughly order of preference, starting later today.

My big problem with rolling out a new design is that once I roll it out, everything always seems half-done for a long, long time. I’m working hard at getting it all done, but there’s a big list of things that i’m missing. I realize (brandon) that the etc. page is all out of whack, but it’s also true that that page has been outdated since october of 2003. The new links page is an ever-expanding list of bookmarks I’ve been keeping and sites I visit fairly regularly, unless they haven’t been updated in a long, in which case I have them there as a placeholder until that said person gets back on the wagon and starts updating their site again. If you find other things that you’d like to see updated, or find problems, please leave me a comment about it. I’ve got a lot of projects I’m working on, so thanks for understanding.

In the same vein, if someone could point me to a .php tutorial for image galleries that actually works (that shitty one at hotscripts does not), i’d be forever indebted to you. Or at least for a little while.

There should be an update Circus of the Stars page coming soon as well as a return of the search function, which has been gone for a while. I know you all want to see where you’ve been mentioned on this website. Soon. I swear.

goddamnit. i’ve had 10 or so comments today that were all comment-spam. it seems like they’re getting smarter about getting past mt-blacklist, using html-mark up in the comments so that mt-blacklist doesn’t see that this is comment-spam. i might have to take out html in the comments to thwart this.

so the red sox won. it seems a little anti-climactic now that baseball is over for the season and the “curse” is gone. jesus, if i see one more headline with a pun on derek lowe’s name or references to the “curse” i’m gonna poke my friggin’ eye balls out. manny got the mvp, which was far and away an atrocity when curt schilling was pushing balls past those suckas at the plate. but that’s offense-centric ball for you. he certainly didn’t earn the mvp for his defense.

i’ve been slaving away at the computer trying to get a cover letter done, which is, as everyone knows, awfully tiring and tedious and can bring you to the depths of despair every time you look at that blank page. i’ve barely got two sentences done, and then i probably won’t even stick with those when it comes down to re-writing the final draft. boo cover letters!

anyone think of anything good to be for halloween? speaking of, i’m playing a show in kent on saturday. email me for directions.