I was just thinking today, about how email and real conversations compare. As much as I like conversations, I can easily enjoy them as much or more so on email or internet forums as I do in person. I guess I just came to that realization after it popped into my head why:

When we talk to people in person, let's say at a party, we always have our stories to tell, and we want to tell them. It goes both ways though, so while you tell your story, your companion is trying to tell theirs. What happens is that both attempts to relate stories end up colliding, and unless one side backs down to the position of "listener," both sides get jumbled and ultimately lost. An extreme form of this would be arguments. Both sides would like to get their points across, and neither side is backing down to let the other.

In steps email to the stage. What does email allow you to do? You can have a conversation with someone and you can play both the listener (or reader) and the talker at the same time. You can belt out 4 paragraphs of story, and feel good about it because you were able to get it all out without an interruption!

Now, this is not to say email conversations are best, but this illustrates a place in, at least, my life that email conversations can be quite useful and benefit both parties.

*takes off the thinking cap before it burns out*

In an effort to replace some sanity and structure into my life (hehe), I've taken to reading a book that I bought at least 2 years ago and never got to: Lila by Robert Pirsig. Pirsig is the author of one of my favorite books ever, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, so this book has been one that I'm looking forward to finally wading through.

Last summer was spent in San Francisco doing some work and basically experiencing the city as a whole. One of the things that struck me the most was the level of homeless people in San Fran. It is one of the bigger problems in that city, and it was something that got me thinking a lot.

Our office was just west of the "nice" downtown area, in the Fox Warfield building I believe. The streets are pretty busy, but they're usually just as busy with homeless and downtrodden as they are with business people. There were many late nights spent waiting for the bus a few blocks away amidst more homeless in the dead of the night. Sometimes I would walk home at 1am or so after playing some games for the evening, and you tend to see a totally different side of the city.

During my walks or while waiting by the busstop (never sitting in it, they're never clean, and there's a guy that seems to have staked out that stop every night as his home), I tend to look around, observe people (though not too closely), and think about homelessness. I suspect it has got to be one of the most empty and forsaken feelings one can feel. Actually, I jump ahead a bit...let me back up.

A lot of people will lash out at homeless people with "why don't you get a job?" or other similarities. Sometimes they are handicapped or disabled in some way, which is an obvious reason they aren't in the job market. But really, the question that should be asked is, "How did you get to be homeless?"

I never had the gumption to actually pose this question to anyone on the street (if I was one of them I might be bitter and sensitive of the subject), but I could pretty much surmise that is comes down to turning the question around, "Why am *I* not homeless?"

And I thought about how easily I could become homeless, how easily I could lose a job, or not find a job, have my car stolen, or break down completely, be stranded in San Francisco, or other unforseeables. What would I do if I was in that position? What would keep me off the streets?

In a few words: friends and family.

When there are hard times, many people tend to lean on their friends for both financial and emotional support. Many times, if the friends are absent, or you are in a new situation, the family is the last safety net you have; the last place you can find necessary support to continue to function in this not-so-free country.

On those dark nights I would look around at many of those people and I would wonder how they became homeless. Did they lose their job and their lease? Did they have few friends who could or were willing to help them? Where is their family? Why did their family not help them?

The reality is that I could easily become homeless at any given time, any given year. The question though, is "do I have friends to lean on, or family who is willing to support me?" I hope so.

Not much to do today, so I've trimmed down some more sections of my webpage. I've eliminated about 5 of my papers (2 of which made little sense ot of context, 2 of which were just plain boring, and the other was basically the same as another entry), and I also shortened up the books section and gaming sections. I do, however, still want to give information about myself, so I am leaving parts up, just cutting them down to digestable chunks.

My javascript project is done and the Web Color Palette (WebCP) is finally finished. I really like how it turned out, and plan to extensively use it, since it is a pain to trial-and-error color schemes on any page. Feel free to use this javascript either on this site or snag it for your own. I'll keep an open version here on this news page on the links to the lower right, but another protected version may go into my web admin system.

Normally death is not that funny a thing, but sometimes, some people are just made to die, it seems. The Darwin Awards has been an ongoing page dedicated to honoring those people who die and thus help cleanse the gene pool of idiots. Basically, everyone who earns a Darwin Award or mention, is someone who died insanely stupidly. It always makes for an interesting read, especially when people do things like juggle grenades or something else completely stupid.

Even with my not-so-modest collection of 3+ gigs of mp3 songs, listening to them over and over can get annoying. Same can be said of a decent 100+ cd collection. So I've long had my eyes open for some real quality online music outlets; something I can keep on all the time and never really get tired of. I have three main musical outlets right now. First is the Ambient Music link to the right that goes to Echoes.org. Obviously, it plays excellent ambient/new age music, though lately it is including a lot of acoustic guitar and other more classical pieces. Second, just today I found StarDog Radio which plays alternative music. It is much better than radio because there's no ads, and it basically plays radio tunes (although not all the tunes would be found here in Iowa...)! And lastly, I had been listening to a winamp streaming show of techno/dance music, but I cannot find it right now. If I find it again, I'll pass on the link because it was pretty darn awesome.

Here's what I worked on today: WebCP.

This is not close to being finished yet, although most of the logic is already complete. That big blank space on the right, someday, will host a rainbow of colors that you can click on to automatically place them into the test area. I chose this project since it is something extremely useful for my content admin engine, and hopefully I'll have it more integrated in time. As it is, give it a whirl, even though it is still buggy...

I am still trying to increase my knowledge one week at a time. Last week was php. This week was supposed to be ASP, but a last minute substitution call has gone out to Javascript. Javascript is both pretty cool and pretty annoying. Those advertising popups windows are many times controlled by Javascript. Also, Javascript heavily uses those popup things that ask for your name just so a page can greet you by name, or bring up an alert with something like, "BOOKMARK THIS PAGE NOW" with an "enter" button. Those implementations are ever-annoying, but you can still do lots of neat things with Javascript. For instance, changing images on your page, and making the cursor different colors. Also, the whole concept of the MouseOver comes largely from Javascript. I am beginning to plan what I can do to practice and become familiar with Javascript. So far, I would like to redesign my front and digressions page with some Javascript features (just for fun).

The best thing about Javascript though, is that if you see a script or page that uses it, that you like, you can immediately view the source code and learn how that author implemented Javascript (much like how most people *should* learn HTML...).

My ASP project is being sidelined for now. Seems our webserver is not set up on Windows, so ASP is not terribly happy. Then again, it's Microsoft...

Went to see The One tonight, Jet Li's new movie. Talk about chock full of special effects! Very nice. I'll just say: "The Matrix + The Highlander + tongue-in-cheek." That sums it up perfectly.

Well, my pages are all converted to CSS now (and viewable in Netscape, IE, and mostly in Opera) and also converted to support php. My web page admin backend is mostly complete I believe, and I will take some screenshots of it later and post them here. All I am doing now, if trying to manipulate the code more to bring the line count down (an advanced way of learning a language since you get to learn all the shortcuts and other techniques) and make it more secure.

My next project is already slated as delving into ASP, Active Server Pages, and VB Script/Javascript. I do not know what sort of page or set of pages I will make with it, but I am already reading up on the syntax and form of the languages.

This picture of some possessed kittens could really give young children nightmares...heh. http://www.konstruktiv.net/kitty_02.html (no longer works).

I've fully begun work on a back-end "program" for editing and managing my web site content. I've begun with the "easier" still life section. I can already open up the admin page on my web browser, read in all the comment and image files, pick which comment file I want to edit, and edit it. This is all done without opening notepad or even FTPing any files up and down! I also can open the text file for the still life links page (the first page with the list of all the picture links) and edit that as well. This just means I have to FTP the image to the web space, and that's it. The rest can be edited with my browser! Wahoo!

Pretty soon, even page with any type of dynamic content on my site, should be accessible via my browser.

The still life section of my page is back to 100%. It has been updated with php and css layout as well. In fact, I cut my webpages from 30 total pages in the still life section, to just 2. I still have a separate text file for each comment under the pictures, but hopefully I figure out how to change that later. If nothing else, I can maybe put in a web-based admin system to edit the comments if I feel like it. Hell, I could put in a log in/edit program for those people who have pictures up to put in comments on their own! Neat.

That little line of items in the header of this page (yeah up there ^^^), is what can be called a "cookie crumb trail." It's like following your way home using cookie crumbs...or at least, lets you know where you've been, kind of like those horrible Family Circus cartoons where you follow the dotted trail on all the unexciting things he does in one square block.

Anyway, I have updated that part of the page using php. Now, instead of putting in the header on every page, each page will soon just access a single text file which embeds some php up top. That php will dynamically read where this page is in the site, and create the appropriate cookie crumb. Right now I simply use a long if statement which reads in up to 5 variables set on each page. Hopefully I'll never have to update the variables, otherwise making the header automated was a waste of time. All in all, another advancement in my familiarity with php!