I don’t know if anyone noticed. Hell, maybe no one on Earth noticed.

But I changed the font on HC. It used to be Arial, now it’s Verdana. For a few days I didn’t know what to think, but today I think it is better, and I’ll be keeping it.

Sup Hoss?

Finally. Historical Context at danpremo.com. No more pop-ups. No more ads at the top of the page. No more ads at the bottom of the page. No more ad frames. No more Tripod. I refuse to even link to tripod.com.

My new provider is 1&1. Lewis referred me. I asked Morash for the name of his provider, but 1&1 offerred the best deal with a domain registration included.

Of course, the honeymoon is already over. When I downloaded all my files from Tripod and then uploaded them to danpremo.com, the site didn’t work. Turns out my package does not offer support for Server Side Includes. No SSI? Are they serious? I mean … it’s SSI, not BackOffice.

Anyway, for now I’m basking. If I haven’t done it by now, I’ll be stripping the old site and turning it into a link to the new site. Then there’s the real old site … I have a soft spot in my heart for it. It’s really very much like an old stuffed animal that is faded and falling apart, but that I just can’t get rid of.

So Emily Zekan, my best friend from high school, tracked me down last week by searching for me at RIT’s web site. She found my RIT email address. Argh … I was going to put my RIT address up here, but I don’t really want to check that address any more. So … this is my address … infer it, take out the spaces, and leave out punctuation: logic bus at yahoo dot com.

Today I formatted a page to view the Jetta pics. Tripod refuses to list the contents of directories, I guess. That basically means that I’ll probably never get around to putting any more photos on this web site. Tonight I’m going to try to get a server side include working for the links, even though I know Lewis doesn’t like server side includes.

I guess this is something like version 4.0. This time I was going for something a little bit simpler, a little more relaxed, a little bit classier. The design process was definitely more relaxed. This design took one evening and one morning from start to finish. That time also included a lot of ideas that got thrown out.

I spent most of the time redoing the chipmunk. The problem there is that the original drawing is black ink on white paper, and this new site design is white text on dark background … so I had to do something to ensure that the outer edge of the drawing was distinguishable from the background. I trimmed in an outer white line. I almost went with a halo effect, but I think it distracted too much not only from the text, but also the subtle color changes in the background.

The Dan Premo and Historical Context title text is handwritten. I pasted my name together — a capital “D” from here, an “remo” from here … but for Historical Context I wrote one that looked particularly good, so I took it as is.

The navigation and body are in the exact same place that they were in the Orange Juice version. I copied the CSS from the previous style sheet.

Again, I think this version looks better than the last version, and it should load faster to boot.

Just looking at the page tonight, thinking about (another) redesign. I do that a lot — look at the page and think about redesigns. I like the positioning of the various text elements, but I don’t know about the colors, or the curved separator between the gold and blue. The idea was good in my head, but I didn’t implement it exactly the way I wanted. The latest thought is to go to a dark blue background with white text, and have every other element be either one of those two colors, or a mixture of the two. In the last couple iterations I’ve tried to maintain certain levels of simplicity. The Green Version had almost no visual scheme, but I made the logo out of a sketch. The current version has a visual scheme, but the only explicit graphic is the chipmunk in the top left corner. I like the chipmunk. If I do go to the more or less “all one color” scheme … I may incorporate more images that are based on sketches. Stay tuned.

Flying dream update: Sometime since the last post, I had another flying dream. I think writing about the dreams actually caused me to have another one. In this one, I was conscious of the fact that I had been dreaming about flying. It was a weak reality check, I suppose. It was difficult, but I still managed to get off the ground, just like I often do. I flew above the trees in my back yard and, sure enough, from the top down the forest looked exactly like I thought it might. I believe that upon waking up, I had one of those “Don’t tell me that was just a dream” moments.

You know, I write this in Notepad, and I always put a <br><br> at the end of every paragraph … It always makes me feel like I’m typing “brrr” because it’s cold or something. Br. Br.

Anyways, possible site redesign coming soon.

What the dilly, yo? What up, dog?

A new update exactly one month to the day since the last. What the hell happened? I come back to A-Town and stop posting? Unacceptable.

Sometimes I get ideas for posts that I think would just be great but then I completely forget the topic later. So I think to myself, “Try to remember when you had that idea, where you were, what time it was … try to associate yourself back into that same idea.” But it hasn’t been working lately. This fact convinces me that I get most of these “great ideas” either in dreams or when I am very nearly asleep. This theory means that the ideas probably weren’t really all that great.

In related news, I have had vivid dreams the last several nights that I could remember quite clearly after I woke up. (Does it ever occur to anyone else that the only difference between a vivid dream and a non-vivid dream is how clearly you can remember it after you wake up?) For a part of one dream I was a bird learning to fly for the first time. I managed to remember how birds take advantage of warm updrafts, so … I took advantage of warm updrafts. I think that for some reason a large percentage of my dreams involve me flying or floating. I have dreamt of travelling through a mall by floating several inches above the floor. I’ve also had experiences in which I wake up and very distinctly recall the sensation of weightlessness or falling. In the flying dreams, the sensation of flying is similar to the sensation of weightlessness.

You know how when someone is trying to lift you, you can shift your weight so that it is more difficult for that person to get you off the ground? Or, inversely, when you stand on your toes it is possible to shift your weight in such a way to facilitate this? Recalling these flying dreams … it’s like my brain knows how to get me off the ground, but I just can’t … complete the equation. It’s slightly maddenning.

Maybe it’s the fact that, because you’re laying down, your feet aren’t experiencing the normal gravity pressure, so your (my) brain translates that into flying/weightlessness.

As long as I’m talking about dreams, here’s a good one. Sometimes I’ll be dreaming that I’m walking, and I will actually try to move my legs, but they’re under the sheets, so it feels like I’m tripping. Then, instinctively, my legs snap out in front of me as I try to “get my balance.” That usually wakes me up.

Got the new page up. It took some work. I don’t know if the new page is great, but I think it’s an improvement over the Green Version, which — strangely enough — is still functional. When I started the project of recreating the site I had something a little different in mind. In fact, the “codename” for the project was Orange Juice. Take a look. It’s scary.

You might notice that I changed the links a little bit. I added links to Oblivion Diaries, WCIFT, and Digital Cluster F***. The link to the homepage is now covered by the Historical Context link because I’ve once again taken to using that moniker for my posts. Let’s face it — the name is just too good to waste.

I also added a small blurb that sits under my name. It loads randomly based on several possibilities.

Unfortunately, I’m still forced to hide the Tripod advertisements. I’m seriously considering plopping down $20 or whatever it takes if it means getting rid of the advertisements. Anyway, you still may occasionally see a drop-down menu floating mysteriously near or even in front of the blurb text. When this happens, I suggest you hit the reload button. (Edit – Ad-free sites cost $4.95 a month. A month! But I had the option of getting stuck with pop-up ads instead of inline ads. If you hate me for serving pop-ups, let me know.- DP)

So that’s about all for now. Let me know what you think about the new design. I would put my email address up, but I’m paranoid about companies scanning web sites for email addresses. I saw a very clever solution to this problem – an image of the text of the email address. Not clickable, maybe not convenient, but very effective.