Vulgarity?

May 25, 2003 Daniel

Okay, here’s a question aimed directly at Brian Lewis, Steve Smith, and Scott Morash. Is it appropriate to use vulgar words in the posts? Morash, of course, has the F-bomb in the title of his page, but he hasn’t updated it in like three years, so I don’t know if his vote counts. I don’t recall Lewis ever using curse words on his site, but he does have those pictures from New Year’s a few years back when people got naked. I don’t think Smiz has ever used curse words on his site, but he did recently feature Timco’s Mardi Gras pics.

So my friends’ sites have nudity, but no overt swearing. Is one more acceptable than the other? Or is it okay to cross the line, just not on the front page? I think I’ve sort of used that as the thumb rule. I posted some swearing back in the day with “Roommate Smack,” which I’ve been thinking about putting back up on my site. I’m a little leery about putting up swearing, but if it’s not on the front page, maybe it’s okay. I mean, these sites aren’t intended to be viewed by children, and they certainly aren’t intended to be viewed by anyone’s parents … Still, if you type “Dan Premo” into Google, you’re gonna find this page. So what kind of face should I present to the world? (***Update: typing “Dan Premo” into Google today gave me the raised by coyotes page on the RIT server. Same with Yahoo search. WTF?***)

On a different note, because of the whole spam thing I don’t put my current email address on any web sites. Putting a mailto: link on a web page is an invitation for spam. However, I recently read a suggestion to spell out addresses in a pseudo-phonetic manner, like “brian hyphen lewis at abc hyphen gay dot com.” A spider’s probably not gonna pick that up, but if someone actually reads the page, they could nab your address. What to do, what to do?

Rant

May 19, 2003 Daniel

The new Apple iStore ads suck worse than previous Apple ads, which is saying a lot. Females should not be allowed to put poetry and/or song lyrics in their buddy info. Summer should be longer than winter. If you feel like the world owes you something, maybe it does. Shaquille O’Neal drops his shoulder on everybody, and his jokes aren’t funny, but he gets calls and people laugh because he’s big. Last year Jason Kidd was the NBA’s real MVP. Maybe Michael Wilbon is right, and hockey should just be called “goalie.” It’s a travesty that it costs money to listen to “The Jim Rome Show” on the Internet. DSL should be available in Chipmonk. The United States should probably have switched to HDTV by now. Everybody wants to rule the world. Eminem should focus less on D-12. It’s the economy, stupid. If big airlines were run the way that small airlines are run, they wouldn’t need government money to bail them out. Summer should still be longer than winter. Nintendo should drop out of the console business. You shouldn’t believe everything you hear. Java is a lot like C++. It’s time to format c: again. The New York Mets are a train wreck. File-swapping is not the record industry’s only problem. Dan Brown is getting married. The Matrix Reloaded is good. Rule of thumb: plural words are usually not “apostrophe – s.” Books will survive the digital revolution. Chip ‘n’ Dale are not intimidating. I want a 24 inch HDTV. Finding a job sucks.

Jetta Pics

May 16, 2003 Daniel

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.

Rome is Burning

May 1, 2003 Daniel

I keep meaning to address this in a post. Jim Rome is coming back to ESPN with Rome is Burning. I assume that The Final Word is no longer on Fox Sports Net. I always liked Romey’s radio show better than The Final Word. I wonder if Rome is Burning will be better, worse, or more of the same? It can’t be any worse than Mohr Sports. And at least ESPN decided not to bring back Beg, Borrow and Deal (which originally was called Beg, Borrow and BS).

I went to Rome’s web site a week or two ago because I wanted to listen to the radio show. You now have to pay to listen. What a bunch of crap! Here in A-Town, none of the (three) local stations carry The Jungle, and AM stations don’t carry all the way from Buffalo or Rochester. I’m pissed. But I am looking forward to watching Rome on ESPN. I wonder if Jim Everett will be Rome’s first guest.

One problem I have is that here in C-Monk, we don’t get cable TV because we live “on the other side of the Indian Reservation.” Until I was in 8th or 9th grade, we only got NBC and CBS. At that point we got Primestar. We didn’t get MTV until I was in 11th grade. A few years ago, DirecTV bought out Primestar, so now we have DirecTV. It’s a blessing, but if you want it in more than one room, you’ve got to pay additional charges each month. So, if we want to watch two programs that are on at the same time, that’s too damn bad. This is a problem because Rome’s new show is on ESPN at 7 PM, and my dad watches … Jeopardy … each night at 7 PM. Pardon the Interruption replays later each night on ESPN2, and I hope that Rome is Burning will also have a later encore. But as of two minutes ago, I couldn’t find a single mention of Jim Rome on ESPN.com. WTF? Anybody know if they’re going to replay it nightly?

My Plan to Bail Out the Record Industry

April 30, 2003 Daniel

Well, I guess Steve Jobs is going to save the world. Apple just opened up the iTunes Music Store. “Only” 99 cents per song download. I mean … this issue is getting old. People who have attended college in the last five years know that we will likely never have to pay for any music ever again. If you have a fast enough connection and a DVD burner, you soon won’t need to buy a DVD or a video game ever again.

Hmm. Video games. Maybe the music industry should change the music standards every five years or so. You know, how Nintendo, Sony (and Microsoft) release a new video game system every five years. Make the quality so much better that players released just five years previous become totally obsolete. So you can get all your music for free, but if you want to listen to it in your car or in your stereo, you’ll need to upgrade the critical digital audio component. Cost every five years? $200.

For this to work the technology would really have to innovate every five years. And that’s a problem, because will the average person really ever appreciate the difference between, say, CD audio and DVD audio? Probably not. I mean, if you compare the quality of a VHS movie to a DVD movie, you can tell the difference. They’re saying now that blue laser DVDs will bring an even greater leap in picture quality than DVDs brought. I’m not sure I buy it. To keep consumers buying, the collective entertainment industries are going to have to not just improve what’s already available, but actually add new features. Video games are very close to reaching the point where technical innovation no longer matters. PS3 games will look better than PS2 games, but will PS4 games really look any better than PS3 games? What then?

In Fahrenheit 451 households didn’t have televisions — they had video walls. People could have video on one wall, or two, or three, or all four. I think TV will eventually get to that point, and movies and video games will have the luxury of playing catch-up to technology for a while. Still, it’s taking forever to switch from NTSC to High Definition Television. And once we switch, no one’s going to want to buy Super HDTV or whatever ten years later.

This conversation could really go on forever. People are always going to want something better. And they’re not going to want to pay more for something that’s just as good. The problem with music is that it’s just audio. At the same time, that’s why people love it. You can read while listening to music, you can run or work out while listening to music, you can drive your car while listening to music. Music is separated from books, from video games, from television and movies because it is so portable. And because of new technologies, it is literally transportable for free.

I’ll bet you’ve heard an argument for file swapping that sounds something like this: “If you wanted Stephen King’s latest book, you wouldn’t want to buy a box full of his last ten books. But if you want Eminem‘s latest song, you’ve got to buy an album with is latest ten or so songs.” Eh. You know what? I don’t know if it holds up. You can buy singles. Still, they are usually on tape, which isn’t as good. But does anybody want to keep stacks of CD singles? No. One of the things I like least about CDs is the space they take up. Yeah, they’re flat, but stack ten of them and you’ve got a nice little bundle that will tip over pretty easily. In the digital world, buying a package of data is inconvenient. You don’t want the packaging — you just want the data. The problem is, you can get the data for free. It’s like the cow/milk line — why buy the package if you get the data for free?

I’ve read that Paul McCartney had the biggest dollar intake of all musical tours worldwide last year. Paul McCartney? The reason why? Because people who grew up with The Beatles now make up the wealthiest age division. People in their forties and fifties are generally the people who are the most financially comfortable but still energetic enough to leave the house. So Paul McCartney is the hottest ticket in town. And now, people in our twenties refuse to pay for music? What does that mean? Paul McCartney is going to be big for a while. Let’s face it, kids — There’s never gonna be another Beatles. There’s never gonna be another Michael Jackson (before he became white). Teenage and preteen girls will buy five copies of N*Sync’s latest CD because “Justin Timberlake is so hot!” Even Eminem appeals to that crowd. In one song Eminem even says, “I go on TRL/look how many hugs I get.” He may not have intended to appeal to that crowd, but would he be selling as many CDs if he didn’t? No way.

So now we look at current big artists like N*Sync, Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears, and we all want to puke because they are so saccharin and so deliberately crafted to be money-making machines. But people who like those artists buy CDs to “support their artist.” Hey, I’ll admit — I bought Eminem’s last CD to support my artist. I don’t know if I’ve listened to The Eminem Show all the way through five times since I bought it. But if he comes out with another album, I’ll almost certainly buy that one too. But the record industry appeals to the 11-15 crowd because they buy CDs. (God, where am I going with this?)

I’m trying to make one big point here, but there is no one big point. It’s a big picture. Record companies promote artists that aren’t very serious because the biggest CD buyers are 11-15 year old girls, and they don’t like music that’s too serious. So 18-26 year olds think that the stuff plastered all over TRL is crap, and for the most part, we’re right. In turn, we’re more than willing to say “f— you” to a music industry that has largely abandoned us. Therefore, we download rather than buy music we like, sales for our music decline even further, and the record industry invests even less money into the talent we really appreciate.

It seems like the point I’ve reached is that to improve sales, the record industry has to appeal to the demographic with the most disposable income: 18-26 year olds. Hell, I bought all three of Eminem’s CDs even though I had more than enough access to file-swapping services. Lewis bought the Tool CD that had all the transparent pages in the liner (but let’s admit, he would have bought it if the liner was a one-page photocopy). I recall Morash buying Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water (sorry, Chino). Brown still buys NOFX CDs. (Never mind. NOFX sucks.) Of course, there will be people like Smiz … I don’t know if he’s purchased a CD in the last three years.

Anyway, I think the point is that the music industry has to appeal to the 18-26 crowd, and they’ve got to release CDs with 7-10 good songs instead of 2 or 3 good songs, and they’ve got to produce music that is honestly better. Sales might never be as good as they were, but if that’s the case, then cut costs! I used to listen to REM, but they never needed an $80 million contract. You want to talk about artists starving because the slump in sales is making it harder to get new contracts? How many contracts did Warner Brothers cancel after they spent $80 million on REM? It’s the same with US commercial airlines — not making a profit? Cut costs! Stop paying CEOs $40 million a year!

CUT THE BLOAT!

Yahoo! Search

April 8, 2003 Daniel

Yahoo! is doing up a new search interface to compete with Google. Try typing in “dan premo” and scrolling down to result number 8. I wonder what the Washington College professor of political science would think if he saw this?

Red and White

April 7, 2003 Daniel

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.

Redesign Approaching?

April 6, 2003 Daniel

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.

Dreams

March 27, 2003 Daniel

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.

Damn Spider

February 27, 2003 Daniel2 Comments

There has been a spider walking around my ceiling for about four days now. Every night it’s in a different place. Tonight I finally got up to kill it, but it’s directly above my TV, which is about the only place that puts it out of my reach. Damn spider.

One other thing: I thought this would be funny …

<asleep>Night time.</asleep> <awake>Day time.</awake>

Maybe “Night time” and “Day time” should be the tags and “asleep” and “awake” should be the text. I was gonna flesh this out a little but it’s a real pain in the ass to type the ASCII-esque code for the greater-than (>) and less-than (<) signs over and over. Is there such a thing as HTML humor?