Ok, so you're not whiny. Well, some of you are whiny, but I heart you all anyway. The sidebar has returned with full bells and whistles. Some elements of the abortive v3.0 design are staying too. I particularly like the tab bar and the archives page. I'll need to do some tweaking yet to sort out what should be on the tab bar and what should be in the sidebar.
Best of all, my page generation times are still pretty snappy. If you're curious enough to view my page source code, you'll see most of the sidebar content isn't there. The sidebar is now mostly just a framework. The content is loaded into each little box via AHAH. Without all the sidebar content, each page generates quickly. But with the asynchronous fetches, you're still downloading the same amount of data and you're using more transactions to do it. The overall time it takes for a complete page to load might have even increased, but there's still a noticeable improvement in the time it takes to load the main content and make that page usable. I think that's a fair trade.
So I suppose rather than being snarky, I should be thanking you for pushing me to solve my problem more creatively.
Pfft. Whiners.
Have you heard of Chinese Democracy? It's supposed to be the next Guns N' Roses album. It's been in production since 1994, which is long enough to turn it into a complete joke. ("We'll see democracy in China before we see Chinese Democracy.")
This weekend I downloaded an album labeled Chinese Democracy. Some of the tracks are studio, some are live. Who knows what version of what tracks will really be on the album, should it ever actually arrive?
Real or not, I am loving the track "Better." He might not be in the band anymore, but you can't deny Buckethead's influence on this one.
posted at 03/13/2007 08:31 am : Permalink
Categorized Geekery, Music, movies, books, TV : Tagged AHAH, Buckethead, Guns N' Roses, site layout
I'm just distracted. The past week has been… a little different.
The Chicken has been home for school for the holiday break, so he hasn't going to bed quite so early. Since I haven't had to get him to the bus stop, I've had extra time to sleep every morning, so I haven't been going to bed so early. Bunny has been home from work with a tweaked lower back. It's definitely out of the norm for us to have so much together time in the evening. It's been a lot like being on vacation, except I'm still going to work. So… not like a vacation at all, I guess.
Usually my blogging times are in the morning, after Chicken is on the bus and before I go to work, and in the evening after Bunny has gone to work. Neither happened all last week, so my blog has been very neglected. Whenever I've had time to blog, I've instead chosen to focus on my newest obsessions, Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II.
These two games, along with two super cool video game chairs, are the Princess Sparkle Pony I'd been teasing Chicken about for a month or so before Christmas. Chicken definitely likes the games, but I'm the one who's really hooked on them. On Christmas day, I started out on the easy difficulty level. I've played so much in a single week that I'm almost ready to move up to the hard difficulty.
Aside from the fun of actually playing it, I'm having a blast just getting into the music. Before this, I'd listened to Incubus, but I'd never heard their song "Stellar." Now I can't get enough of it.
Before this, I'd never known the artist or title of that Pulp Fiction song that was raped so badly for that Black Eyed Peas thing. (Note to Fergie & Co.: your namesake legume is the black-eyed pea. Note the dash. Ignorant Philistines.) It turns out it's an adaptation of a Greek song named "Misirlou" and it's by Dick Dale and His Del-Tones. Hm. Nope. Didn't know that.
And before this, I'd heard of Buckethead (mostly because of his time with Guns 'N Roses), but never heard any of his music. His bonus track on the second game, "Jordan," is absolutely hypnotic. I tried to find an mp3 of this one because I imagine it's obscure enough that no one has heard it who hasn't played the game, but it turns out the version of the song I like was dramatically rewritten just for the game. If you're feeling adventurous, you can go LimeWire it or something. The first 90 seconds of the version I downloaded are very similar to the game, but everything else is completely different.
What's the deal with Buckethead, anyway? His public image is downright freaky. The Mike Meyers/Halloween mask? The KFC bucket?
I think it says a lot that the guy was too weird for Guns 'N Roses.
posted at 01/01/2007 11:58 pm : Permalink
Categorized General, Music, movies, books, TV : Tagged Buckethead, Christmas, Dick Dale, Guitar Hero, Guns N' Roses, Incubus, present, video game
(There are sirens in the neighborhood, several of them pass my office.)
Goat: Lotta sirens today.
Me: Yeah, seems like more than usual.
Goat: Maybe somebody knocked over a light pole nearby.
(The phone rings.)
Goat: Fish, it's your seester.
Me: (On phone) Yo.
Sister: How you doin'?
Me: Yo.
Sister: So do you have a good view of the fire there?
Me: What?
Sister: Turn around and look out your window.
Me: Holy shit! That red house is on fire!
Sister: Dumbass.
Me: Ok, I'm going to go. You're way more boring that this action.
Sister: Ok!
So, yeah. Big ass fire in the red house across the street. No one was injured (not even the family dog), but the house is a total loss. The flames were ten feet higher than the roof by the time the fire department started throwing water at it.
At its simplest, this is not especially exciting. There was a fire. The fire department put it out. Woo hoo. But, oh, the spectacle!
All the streets around my office were closed for almost five hours, which made for a pretty light day. And everyone in the neighborhood stopped to gawk for a while, so the people watching was excellent. Sighted were Unfriendly Black Hottie from the chiropractor's down the street, The Captain (a late middle age guy who always dresses like Gilligan's gay uncle - complete with a Skipper-style hat), Naked Guy (who, weather permitting, wears only cheap flip-flops and raggedy short-short cut off jeans), and the String Bean Mechanic (who looks like a complete dirt bag, but is always so friendly). There were plenty of other gawkers, maybe as many as 300 different people over the course of the day, but none of them are interesting enough to merit a clever nickname.
I happened to be listening to some music on my PDA when all of this was happening. Evil, insensitive bastard that I am, I tried to choose music appropriate to the situation. What kind of music is goes with a neighbor's house fire? I didn't have anything like Bloodhound Gang's "The Roof Is On Fire" or Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." The best I could do is Guns 'N Roses. "Welcome to the Jungle" kind of works. At least it's a lot more fitting than the new Dixie Chicks CD.
My favorite part of the whole experience is that this has been an entire day where not one person has stared at me when I've stood outside smoking. And all my temporary invisibility required was for one family to lose everything.
posted at 06/01/2006 05:46 pm : Permalink
Categorized At work, Music, movies, books, TV, Snippets : Tagged fire, Goat, Guns N' Roses, Sister, smoking
I'm still reading that Klosterman book, Fargo Rock City, so I'm on something of an 80s hard rock kick lately. I've had this craving for Guns 'N Roses so I thought now would be a good time to grab my Appetite for Destruction CD and encode a copy to stick on my PDA.
<groan /> It's always a pain in the ass to dig through all my CDs to find anything. I steeled myself for the annoyance and sat in front the bottom drawer of the CD racks with a mental picture of what the side of the CD case looks like (black background, red and yellow text).
Amazingly, I found it in seconds. Yay me! So I took it over to my computer to make some mp3s, only to find the case empty.
Dammit. I'm pretty sure Michael Douglas stole my Guns 'N Roses CD.
posted at 04/19/2006 08:31 am : Permalink
Categorized Music, movies, books, TV : Tagged Chuck Klosterman, Guns N' Roses, Michael Douglas