paintedlines

Web 2.0 may be a bullsh*t term, but damn - the results can be fun, if not a little more than pointless

There is a new arms race these days, and for once we aren't talking nukes folks. It's a race to see who can make a website act like an application without installation. At the moment its over maps, something so simple till you add the phrase: Web 2.0.

The big players are all over this, with Yahoo, MSN, and Google going at it. For a long while Google was way ahead of the pack. With their web-base Maps and the desktop Earth app, they far out strip the others in function. But lately Yahoo Maps has been catching up and MSN has come out of nowhere.

Under the the heading of Microsoft's new Windows Live initiative , the Live Local mapping feature seems to beat the others (into a bloody pulp) when it comes to image quality and the drill down level. Now, I am no huge fan of "The Evil Empire" although I use their products, but I think they are on the right track with this one.

One of the features is that you can place your own push-pin markers on a map and then using the permalink option , be able to link back to that map with your comments intact. Be warned though, all of your comments are stored as part of the actual text link - so the result is huge: (spaces inserted so the line would wrap)

http://local. live.com/ default.aspx ?v=2&cp=40.387031 ~-79.8 64662&style=a& lvl=19&scene=2365 104&sp= aN.40. 387670_ -79.866440 _Wh ere%27s% 20the%20WipeOut%3f_ Yeah% 2c%20so%20they%20put%20 the%20new%20ride%20 there%20 -%20so%20wh ere%20did %20the%20o ld%20one% 20go %3f~aN.40.385752_-79.865408_More%20en trance%20 work%3f_So%20ju st%20how %20old%20i s%20t h is%20sat- shot%3f%2 0didn%27t%20t hey%20just %20redo%20this%3f~ aN.40.38 8873_-79.86 6416_No%2 0Aqua_Ironic %20that%20 much%20o f%20the%20p lace%20looks%20like%20a%20parking %20lot % 20in%20the % 20off% 20se ason~aN.40.3859 58_-79. 864657_D rip%20Drip _Anyone% 20esl e %20ever %20get%20the %20feeling%20you%20 end%20up% 20leaving%20t he%20park %20with% 20motor% 20oil%20 in%20your%2 0hair%3f~aN.40 .387531_ -79.865105 _Bunch-o -hot%20air _The% 20glory% 20that%2 0is %20fib erglass%2 0vocanoes% 21%20%20... %20by%20the%20way%2 0my%20wa tch% 20is% 20s till%20 wet%21~a N.40.38784 4_-79.86 2680_Not% 20so% 20Gaint %20Wheel_Well% 20is %20is %20wh ere%20it%2 0us ed%20to %20be%2c %20gave%20 way%20to% 20the%20Arrow360%20... %20hey%2 0that%20sorta%20rhy mes~aN.40. 388922_-79. 867508_W arning%3f_L et% 20me%20guess% 2c%2 0the%20 Whip%20w as%20actu lly%20plac ed% 20ove r%20a%20 rad ioact ive%20waste% 2 0dump%3f

And, yes, Google Earth has this - but this version is web-based. Oh the possibilities! Since I'm gearing up for Amusementparkapalooza 2k6, what better than a snarky tour of my home town park? Yep take a short statalite-view stroll through Kennywood with me - your personal tour guide!

And yes, I admit, at the moment, Web 2.0 is rather pointless, but thats a theme of Web 2.0: new, cool, user generated, user modified, user edited, fun to play with, useful - but only of you make a point of using them hardcore - but in the end you can still live happily without them. Well, except for podcasts. I gotta have my TWiT and DLtv!

Its ironic considering I'm typing this @ ZOHO Writer and read Digg everyday! Yep thats me: a jaded, hypocritical tech whore.

Yeah this post was late.

I slept in - its my birthday damn it

No theme today. Just a bunch of random tangents that have been bouncing around my head. Randomness is not considered insanity, as long as you can make it seem quirky. People like quirky, they lock up nuts. It pays, in the long, run to remember that.

In the feeling old department: I read over on c|net that Microsoft is working on finalizing the big revamp of the Hotmail service. I have been beta testing it, so I hope they don't botch it. Anyway, they get into a little history, and mention that Hotmail was bought by Microsoft back in 1997. Damn - I had an account way before that. In fact I remember when the site still used frames and everything was color coded. Back when web design dictated you use every color that the monitor could handle. Sigh, the good ol' days.

Every year new words get added to Webster's such as cybrarian and metadata. This year my vote goes for: Amusementparkapalooza. Only problem is that the word can't really have a definition. Its more of an experience. The best I can offer a is visualization of the idea. Bars down ... clear!

It may just be my own morbidity or one could blame it on the amount of time that I have spent in hospitals, but I am hooked on medical shows. And yes, while ER and Grey's Anatomy are more dramas, so what? I have found an awesome new site: OR Live - Home of Live Surgical Video on the Net. Ok, so the name sorta sums it up, but come on folks, they stream live and take viewer questions right there in the operating room! And today - on my birthday - I'll be watching a live knee replacement! However, if it were me under the knife, I don't know how I'd feel about hearing, right as I slip under, the the AOL Guy:

You've got mail!

The archive is almost done. However, it wont make the self-imposed deadline. So screw the deadline. My site, my rules - poof - no deadline. That was easy. Anyway, look for it this weekend, along with a new contact system that has been waiting in the wings for a while. I had to recode the header for it to work, hence the delay. Hell at this point I'm lucky I'm still blogging regularly. The rest of the site will drop, well when it drops.

Now if you would please excuse me. I have to go see someone get thier knee sliced open, pulled apart, drilled, and slapped back together with metal and cement.

Open file format standards. Is that too damn much to ask for? Write once - use forever!

In my quest to archive my past on the net, I have come across the decaying ruins of more than I ever remember building . Floppys full of files and backup disks littered with designs for Geocities websites I'm not even sure I ever got around to actually loading. This was back before Yahoo bought them, when your address was a paragraph long and contained a "regions" - mine was Olympus , and a four number extension!

On the content side of things, I have recovered a decent amount of work. So far the list includes: six magazine articles, the bulk or my first blog (which isn't much) and twelve pieces of poetry. A good base, but that isn't even a fourth of the poetry I wrote.

Recovery of the lyric may just be the most difficult. Whereas I could just find the original sites or backup Word files for the newer works, the poetry is the oldest and therefore, poses a challenge . Much of it was written and stored on an old Brother word processor . The trick is getting Windows to read the old 3.5 floppys and getting the data off.

Alas, it doesn't end there, even if you are lucky enough to read the disk, you then have to open the files. And like all things - the Brother used a proprietary file format. And although its based on the TXT system and Windows can read the raw file, the result simply is not worth using due to all the junk characters that would have to be cleaned out. Take a step back, and bask in the glow of that early 90's technology!

Being the pack rat that I am and living by the mantra : "Never throw anything tech related away" - I started to dig in my "box 'o crap." Though the word processor was long gone, or at the least, permanently buried in the basement, I still had the collection of disks that came with the system. And lo, and behold, among them was a conversion program. The Holy Grail: convert right from Brother formats to Windows!

Well as it turns out it was more like the "Whole-y Grail" - a DOS program. This ancient piece of code, ran on my system with no problem but that was the extent of it. The newest version of Word it could spit out was 2.0  For some context, Vista, whenever it ships, will support the Office 12 - meaning that there have been 10+ versions of Word since the Brother software was written.  But, given the circumstances, this would have been fine, had it be able to read the floppy with the files I wanted. And of course, it wasn't able to. That would be too easy!

So I'm basically back to where I started, well, that and I now know where all my file are, even if they aren't really useful or accessible. I guess I'll just have to input by hand from the archive copies that I printed out on that noisy daisy wheel printer a decade ago.

Now where did I put that damn binder?

Is collecting one's past in an archive narcissistic or just morbid - and do you care - should I?

While setting up lotC, I filled in the tabs at the top with possible subsections - "archive" being the last. Initially it was only mean to be a space filler. But over time I started to develop ideas of what I could do with that area. None have been very solid, that is until last night.

At first I figured I would use the space as a place to post older info and things of interest. Things that have been on the net long enough that they really aren't worthy of a blog post but still worth a look now and then. A digital "dead letter" office. In the end, I realized that the name really didn't fit the idea so that was scrapped.

The thought of the area being an archive for something stuck with me. That, coupled with the notion that I would soon be hitting my tenth year as an active citizen of the net, lead to a more narcissistic purpose for the section. If it was to be an archive, why not an archive of my own past work? Bingo - it's so simple.

Now for the criteria
• Only works of text
• Only work that was written for the net or at one point had been on one of my previous sites
• There will be not editing for content - the original work will be posted

Now one may ask: There can't really be that much material? And in a way you might be right, but since this is, at its root, an exercise in ego, I don't really care. But there is enough to warrant the section. If my math is right, and looking at the sign-up dates for my oldest accounts bares me out, in the ten years I have been online there have been: four past attempts at a personal website, two stints as a regular columnist for a net magazine , a blog that lasted under a month and a period where all I did was write really moody poetry.

The dates of the work to be posted don't quite fill a decade, since, in the last few years my output for net material pretty much died. But as I said, there is enough and much of it people have really never seen before or have never connected with me. Its sorta fun to look back, and see how I have changed or not. And part of that fun is in tracking down everything that I have written . Old floppys, emails in folders I forgot about, to hunting sites that no longer exist in the Internet WayBack Machine. Its a challenge worth undertaking.

Anyway, look fior the Archive to go live soon. It will be the next section to go live. And probably the only new addition to make it in under my self imposed deadline - that i have no chance in Hell of meeting. Oh well - moving on...

While lotc is shaping up to be my digital future, I don't want to forget my digital past. Its not that these things will ever go away, few things once on the net ever do, it would just feel good to have the fragments organized and available, if only for myself. People leave few tangible lasting thing behind - my words may not be much, but there is a good chance they will far out last me

When you move into a new home, you typically take something of the old with you. Why should a website be any different. Clean slates are nice, and all, but they are only as clean as how much you choose to erase.

...or is it that when you can finally do things they never seem as fun when you had to be sneaky 'bout it?

Last night I watched the Daily Show, and the Colbert Report like I normally do. Finding myself awake and in no mood to sleep at midnight was no shock, and I had to swap out the laundry anyway, I had reason to stay up for once. So I scanned the guide and ended up watching Logo.

As it turns out I was able to catch The Advocate news magazine . I had been wanting to see it since it launched, but seeing as there is only one digital cable box in the house the chances are slim during normal human operating hours - hence the after 12 viewing . Anyway, it actually wasn't bad. For a network that could so easily slouch into a 24/7 tacky camp fest, it was a good balance of 20/20 style reporting and Entertainment Tonight star-f*cking. Happily it was heavy on the "Barbara Walters" side of things. Plus they interviewed Sandra Bernhard, so it couldn't be all bad.

Yet as I watched, I felt something I really haven't been conscious of for a lone time. I felt as if I was in middle school again. That it was Friday night, the night my parents bowled. My sister and I had the house, but more importantly, the tv. A tv we could watch with out the parents hovering. A tv that had HBO!

There wasn't a Friday night that the Tv didn't glow with the unscrambled glory of channel 5. (After TGIF was over, of course ... "Not the Momma!") Filling our heads with the latest R-rated film, or the newest show like Dream On - this was well before Sex and the City. And if one was really lucky, a Tales from the Crypt , or the crown jewel - Real Sex. And this was back when the series was in the single digits !

I sat there feeling somewhat like that again. And I can't really place it. It wasn't porn. Its wasn't even HBO, which is rather mild these days. It was Logo and The Advocate (which I actually have a subscription to - but thats for another post.) Nothing to be scared or ashamed of. Yet it was late at night, and I found myself turning down the sound not in fear of waking anyone, but almost to make sure they didn't hear what was coming from the screen.

I was up, it was there, and no one was around. It was the setup of old. Maybe it was just the nostalgia of the moment and I just went with it. Maybe there is still some paranoid fear that I haven't really dealt with. But its a good feeling to look back the next morning and know that, while it may have felt like the past, I don't have to live like a middle schooler any more.

My life, unlike the HBO of old, doesn't have to be experienced when no one is around, and while I still maybe cautious with my actions, but I no longer need the pretext of bowling night. The tricky part is testing that concept outside of the confines of my over active skull.

Sweet Jesus I hate -insert name of random web-based scripting language here- !

So, I get the blog moved over. Thats good. Then I find that the lotC header/nav is only loading on the main blog page and the archive pages (not the single post pages) so they are disabled for now. Thats bad.

In an attempt to get the PHP of the headrer/nav to get parsed into the HTML of the single post pages I messed up how the domain loads. I should have known not to toy with the htacess file. So now you need the whole address to get here -> www.lotc.info Damn it - I cant win

Just when you think you have everything worked out. Ironic, to say the least

Got the header to load right on all the blog pages. So the single post pages are back online and functioning. The main page on the other hand is still a lil wonky. However I did contact 1&1 (my host) so I'll see by morning if the bug is fixed. And while waiting for a resolution I updated and added some new lines to my "mast-tag of snarky-ness" and fixed all the lil spelling errors due from typing late at night

One issue solved only leads to more questions that lead to more issues, and so on and so forth

And so, with this post I launch the new look for PaintedLines. Its more of a refinement of the original than a radical departure, but I like it. And yes, this is infact, the skin I have been bitching about for while now. Seems these things are easier to build than impliment. But none the less, it up. Woo.

now for the problems: As you can see, the promised additions arent up. Frankly, I'm having a hell of a time fitting the blog into the pre-made site layout that I have for lotC. (ie: the header and menu) I may have to break down, and re-think the linking and layout to get all the sections to work well together. But god, I hope not!

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

The layout issues are also the reason that the blog is still on the Adelphia server. There is no point in moving it till the site is ready for it - and lotC just aint at that point yet. That and before I move, I have to reformat past posts to bring them up to date with the new code. But the blog works fine, for the moment, just where it is.

So whats next for the blog?
• formating the old posts
• moving to the lotC server
• a new contact form
• integration into the lotC layout
• and a bunch more stuff that the new layout can do that you havent seen yet!

Oh, just don't hold your breath. If I have learned anything since taking the dive into my own domain, its this: If you build it fast and only for looks, it will break when you try to make it function. And that holds ture to most thing beyond code. Einstein isnt far off base at all

But its time to wrap this up. I have been trying to make the new skin play nice w/ lotC for hours now. And since its late (check the time stamp) I think ill pack it in, maybe the solutions will hit me in my sleep!

Sorry this isnt a "post" ... cuz I say so

Time frames suck. I hate having to follow them, um, because ... they kill my free spirit. Yeah, I'll go with that. Sound just as good as any other excuse. And yet I seem to set time limits for myself despite my own personal hate for them - go figure.

So, why isnt this a post? Well, because I say so. Its just that simple. This is a rant, scrawl, or if I want to be an egotistical ass: a journal entry. The web is open that way - anything "is" whatever you make it and choose to call it. But in the end, the real reason this isnt a post is simple: In my last post I said I'd have the new skin up. Well as you can see if you are reading this - it didnt happen.

So instead of scapegoating or coping to slack or distraction , I simply redefine the terms. Nice how that works, huh? I said the skin would come with the next post, and since this isnt a post - no skin. Damn, I should really be in politics, I have the slime-covered bullshit-act down pat!

Anyway, part of the reason but none of the blame lies with the fact that I got a call around 11 last night. (I do most of my web work at night) It made me jump a tad since it has been a while since I had received a call that late. Not to mention that it came from a number I had never seen before. I was almost tempted not to answer, but since I was up anyway - what the hell.

As it turns out, it was Ross, crawling out of the woodwork. Sadly, it took me a beat or two to realize who it was. Like I said- it was night and my mind was in code not conversation. And partly due to the fact that he has a new number - the boy finally has a cell again. Initial confusion aside, it was good to hear from him. Had been about a month since any sign of life. Which is rather ironic considering earlier in the day I had hung with Tim, and commented on the lack of contact.

Its either a small world or Ross has some freakishly powerful mind reading abilities. I'm inclined to err on the side of freakish ability - but thats just me.

Its a short po... I mean rant, ramble, scrawl, whatever - as I am still trying to recover from the trip down memory lane that was last night - while going through Tim's old yearbook. Damn it, I have spent way too much time repressing most of it for it all to come flooding back. Well that and the fact that most of the things I wanted to comment on as we reminisced would have made him to uncomfortable, so I chose not to say much beyond being a smart ass.

Yet he can look back a saying anything he wants about the past from who he "did" - had the option to "do" - or wish he had "done" - so much for fairness. Hell, so much for even bothering to be out if I can't even express anything around friends.

But the real question is: Is it his issue for being uncomfortable or its it mine for worrying that he is?

I just can't win.

Or in the words of Eric Hunter: "I though coming out - it would make things easier..." Except I dont have Lea DeLaria to hug me in the end... Where the hell is my Angie? Now taking taking applications for middle-aged lesbian sidekick...

the break was a bust - back to KACK

and then the Easter Bunny rose from the dead

Maddy will tour, but not Pittsburgh - sigh

Javascript and PHP play so well togther...

Some ideas include:

• Format options: One would be a large whitespace/font layout (based on the current theme) - the other would be more compact (based more on the Jr design) The option to switch between the two would be up to the user and not forced from the server site.
• Link open options: The ability to chose if you want a link to open in a new window or the current one. And if possible, an option for Firefox users to open links in new tabs.
• ServerSide refreshing of the feeds: In the current beta, if it has been 30 minutes since the feeds have been updated, the PHP backend updates the feeds the next time the site is acessed. This can slow load times. So the program will be set to check for updates on a regular basis, without having to be triggered by a visitor.
• Way down the line: (AJAX like fun stuff)
• Live user feed control: Giving the user the ability to change and pick and choose what feeds are displayed, with the possibility of adding thier own feeds through RRS links.
• Protopage extentions: The ability to move feeds around the page and order/control where and how they are dispalyed. Proto is some damn fun stuff to play with - but time will tell if bothering with it will be worth it in the long run - but it stil looks cool!
• Total and Complete Control! ... psychotic laughter

* Update *

Son-of-A... one bad ; took 3 hours to fix