I’ve been working on a song…here’s a draft version of a clip:

arcanta2.mp3

It repeats once for context. The first part’s where the main action of the song’s going to happen, and then the key change is the bridge to the next part.

I can’t seem to prevent my stuff from sounding Casio-demo-buttony, though. Still not sure how to tell this software to fill the sound out better.

Here’s what I’m workin’:

a1 thus far

Idea being, captions will be on the left, and you can view either one at a time, or all at once. What do you think about the pic size? I’ve increased it again, but I’m a bit concerned that the pic probably doesn’t fit on an 800×600 screen, what with nav bars and whathaveyou.

Ugh, also,  for some reason the up/down is not very responsive in IE, and the formatting of the caption options bar is fine on every browser I’ve checked, except for IE. So the one browser I care the least about has problems, and of course it’s that browser that most people are still using.

I had one before for A1 editors, but there were problems with the code that I couldn’t work out, and I let myself get intimidated out of figuring out what the problem was. But it’s a crucial part of getting A1 working, and I couldn’t bring myself to put more code on top of other code I didn’t trust. Therefore: a year of procrastination.

I think I got it working now, though, with some internal improvements that are making me happier with it. I’d appreciate it if interested persons would test the process for me:

http://www.spinnwebe.com/user/

Make an account, login, change prefs, logout, I dunno, just click around and see if the thing works the way you’d expect it to work. There’s supposed to be a “logged in as X” tag in the header at upper right when you login, but if your browser doesn’t reload the css, you might have to do that manually for it to come up in the right place (go here, click reload).

Known issues and other comments:

1. The pages with forms aren’t organized very well, they’re leftover from the previous site and I haven’t updated their css yet.
2. At least one person got the verification email like hours later, but since he’s the only one so far, I think it’s probably on his end.
3. Unfortunately this is going to mean the blog will require a separate login than the site. I considered hitching my own code on to WP’s login code, but that makes me nervous, because doing that means I have to check that my code still works with each WP upgrade, and my track record for that kind of thing is lousy.
4. Huh, speaking of the blog, the tag doesn’t show at all in the header here. Odd. It’s there if you click to non-blog SW pages, though. Found that.
   

Also, about pictures: apparently my spam filter is being overly aggressive, and I almost missed some. If you send any, please make the subject “A1 pictures” so I can find them easier if they keep getting caught.

Okay, I’m about getting sick of my WoW addiciton, and need to get some coding done soon. I could use some new pictures for A1-AAA…I might have some, but I have no idea now. In any case I could probably use more. If you have any pictures that need some captions, please email ‘em to me (“spinn” at this domain).

It’s been a while, so here’s what I’m looking for: not pictures that are wacky or goofy in themselves, not pictures that are posed or have people looking at the camera. I prefer candid pics where people don’t know/care they’re being photographed, with a couple different areas that can be the focus of attention. Send them the full resolution you have (up to a meg or so), becuase I’m not sure what the final format will be, yet.

Well, I finally got something together for the site, sorta. There’s very little here at the moment, and the layout’s kinda bland, but I really just gotta get the thing moving. I’m going to beat down my perfectionistic side and just get some stuff back online.

But mostly, I promised to have a book review down soon, so I hope to have that up tomorrow. I didn’t want to do that as just another blog post.

Two SpinnWebe things: first, I started a guest run of Scribs that will go to the end of the month, on the theme “getting ready for halloween“.

The other one’s more significant for me: I got together a standard header for all my active (and sorta active) sites and put it at the top of all of them. This is part of the reason why I haven’t been getting SpinnWebe together–I wanted to have this standard thing first, so when I make page templates I can make it a standard for all new pages. right now it’s just some cross-linking and a shill for my Dreamhost referral, but I wanna get it Ajaxxed up so it’ll show last updates on request, and whatever else I feel like throwing in.

Sam linked me what may be about the most obtuse geek joke ever. This is a geek joke so geek, I had to fight my way into it.

So, in a moment of self-hate, I decided to go look up some statistics, and yeah. Alexa puts xkcd somewhere around 9,000, and Scribs somewhere around 900,000. I had figured that people look at the art and decide it’s no good, but the popularity of xkcd makes me think this isn’t true. We both have relatively simple sites, he’s been doing it for less time than I have, even.
What am I missing? I guess it’s marketing, I haven’t really gotten Scribs out there a whole lot, but I’m not sure what he’s done that I haven’t.

Unconnected to my last post, though I’m sure it looks like it must be: the first panel of today’s Scribs actually happened, the second only happened in my head, and it diverges sharply from reality from then on.

When I’m finally getting around to getting some SpinnWebe structure together, it’s a bad time to start reading about Ruby on Rails development.

I like PHP, but it sounds like RoR is pretty cool and easy to program in; but do I stop and take the time to learn it? Or go with what I’ve been working with? I hit this question in various forms in many places in my life, and most of the time I grind to a halt while I delay making a decision.

ugh. Dunno what to do, now.

I got amusing.org working again; it’s updating Monday to Saturday. And, since I’m planning on having SW update notifications handled via RSS feeds, I’ve set it up with its own:

http://www.amusing.org/feed.php

And! there’s a separate metafeed on spinnwebe.com that combines Scribs and a.o updates. The neater part about this is that I made it a general SW-feed-generation thing, that I’ll be able to use for the site in general.

We picked our first cherry tomatoes yesterday. They were like tomato candy. And they were probably just a touch underripe, even; can’t wait for the full ones. Looking at all the growing buds, I may have to upgrade my yield estimate; 17,000 seems a little under.

Also, I vanquished my water problem…the basement sink wasn’t draining, and the kitchen sink drains down the same pipe so it wasn’t either, and our washer drains into the basement sink, so basically half the house facilities were down. Bought me a $30 drain router and spent about 5 disgusting hours draining and taking apart pipes, but I got lucky. The clog was apparently somewhere I was able to reach it. Yay me, since it probably would’ve cost at least $90 for a plumber to walk in the front door. But Christ that was disgusting. Not toilet-drain-problem disgusting, but pretty disgusting.

With that taken care of, combined with the fact that the head of my current freelance project is on vacation for a week, I got some breathing room to get some Scribs done. since I’m in the middle of this clipart-themed arc, it takes a fair amount of scanning and image editing, and I haven’t had the solid time to devote to it.

Oh, and the WoW playing, that got in the way, too.

Got a mail from the person who made that Av1d entry–yeah, he was just joking. It’s kinda a shame because it’d be cool to have a secret contest; though it’s kinda neat for me to see someone doing that, for ego reasons.

Ironically I had an idea for a secret contest recently. I’ll try to get that together.

Someone spotted this on Av1d today. Unfortunately, it wasn’t me.

I don’t know if my old index page is significant, but this is what it was, in case the key is related. I have no idea if it is.

Whoever put that entry, though, I know they’re reading this. Whoever you are, let me know if it’s gibberish made to look like a contest, or if you actually put something somewhere. (email to “spinn” at this domain.)

I have to write an auto-updater for Scribs, and I’m having the hardest time getting it done. It’s really simple, too, I just need something to enter future comics and have it update at the right times by itself. But for like the last two months I just can’t get this really minor program done.

It’s some dumbass psychological reason, too. I don’t want to make it easier for updating because I feel like I’m running out of ideas, blah blah. Fuckin’ brain.

I’m just not in the mood to get my site back up these days. I know I will eventually, but I’m tired of feeling this internal nagging to do so. Why’s it really matter if I have it up or not? At worst, I want to get A1 back up because that’s kinda a cool thing, but all the rest of it, I can take it or leave it.

I couldn’t lose it entirely, though. Just too much history in there. But in the meantime I feel like doing something, and given that Dreamhost has this handy blog self-installer that made this really easy, I’ll start doing a blog, what the hey.

I needed a name for it, and the first two words that came to mind were Hegemonic Alabaster. Which I think is a great name, but I had to go look up “hegemony” and given it means “authority over others” and “alabaster” is frequently used as a description for “white”, I didn’t want anyone thinking I was running a White Power blog, so.