Posted on by mwhybark

…and more tweaky goodness…

Ohhh kay. Insomnia drove me to pound on the sidebar build problem, which I may summarize as build once, use many, in order to speed build times.

My ideal solution would be to include an MT perl-generated file into the pages at build time, but MT does not allow the user to easily set build order. Furthermore it does not offer an inbuilt file-include tag since include functionality is so easy to get via SSI and PHP. It’s not a deal-breaker.

THEREFORE, experimentally, this site is now served with SSI and server-parsed html. The old html pages will remain in place. However, their links will rot after a while, I imagine, until I can do some fancy Apache stuff to transform incoming *.html reqs into *.html reqs.

Jimmy James whould know what to say here: Guzizah! (hmmm, must search for WWJJD…)

Posted on by mwhybark

KG, at sea

KandJ.jpg

Well, this week I’d intended to introduce a new, exciting concept to the blogosphere, which would take the world by storm and yield articles in the Economist (I said I’m SORRY! Geez!) and the NYT, but instead, since I’m too busy (writing assignments, a trip next week) I’ll share with you the very first fan-submitted Ken Goldstein of the Week!

Mr. Goldstein is seen here appropriately modeling what I (a baseball ignoramus) believe to be a Seattle Pilots cap, as he demonstrates mastery of the tiller upon the bounding main. Accompanying him is the source of the charming photo, the lovely and talented Jahna D’Lish, a long-time friend of Mr. Goldstein.

Friends, acquaintances, and relatives of Mr. Goldstein are very strongly encouraged to send your KG-related imagery and memorabilia to me at my email address, mike@whybark.com; if I can sort it out from the spam, I’ll get back to you, promptly!

Thank you all for your support. Together, we can bemuse Ken into a sort of tizzy.

Posted on by mwhybark

Postal Humor

homelandsecurity.gif via boingboing, a pointer to a US Post Office site which features what Mark refers to as a “scary logo”; personally although the recently floated news concerning such things as a citizen informer corps and other institutionalizations of a surveillance culture do not please me or increase my sense of security, I don’t find the logo scary.

Someone who works for the PO was making a political opinion known – one which coincides with mine. Hope they don’t get in too much trouble.

Posted on by mwhybark

Everything is in order, for now.

… and I just know you are fascinated to hear that the latest round of site fiddlin’ is just about wrapped up. For the curious:

  • I added domain-restricted searching via Google to the sidebar. Google seems to pay attention to my site, so it seems to work fairly well.

  • The drop-down archive menus are now sitewide.

  • In a related matter, I added the appropriate new secondary category archive flags (KG of the Week, Monday Art, Blimp Week) to the appropriate entries and cleaned up some incidental duplicates.

  • I added the sidebar to all of the ancillary pages.

  • I made the category archives navigable, and edited their format to increase load speed.

  • I’m still futzing with “Recent Entries” on the archive pages; currently the “recent” list is, in fact, what’s recent within the appropriate category. I think I have a brute-force workaround in place but I believe there’s a better way.

  • Last but not least, I’m working on a “recently discussed” link area for your easy reference, currently viewable only on the main page.

*phew!* man, the rebuilds are starting to D R A G, though. All those queries and page builds for pore ol’ l’il perl to crunch thru… good camel, good boy.

Hunh, you know, what I *should* do is build the sidebar once into a flat text file, and have the pages call it in either at page view (via PHP or shtml SSI) or (this is somewhat preferable) at perl-munging time. Hm, yes, that’s the way to do it.

Posted on by mwhybark

Last King

Elvis.jpg This is the final image in my long-running series of the King. I painted it for my wife as a birthday present the first year we met.

Most of my images of the King were created specifically as birthday presents. I don’t think I ever really spent a lot of time worrying about why I was interested in working with his image, but I often create works in extended series. In fact, I’m engaged in such a project right now. A virtual Otter Pop to the first person who correctly identifies that series.

Posted on by mwhybark

Old. No doubt. Old.

So, I was lying awake idly wondering how old our newest neighbors are. One’s in the community college down the street, one works doing IT stuff. Good, considerate neighbors. Twenty-something.

Then I realized that persons who graduated from high school this spring, as tradition dictates, will be mostly eighteen years of age sometime in 2002.

I graduated high school the year they were born, 1984. In what appears to be some sort of coincidence but which is in fact a mathematical property which applies to anyone that thinks about this, they are, this year anyway, half my age.

What can the world look like? No Watergate. No Vietnam. Hell, they were born the year the Mac was introduced to the market! Four years of Ronnie, but I’d be surprised if he generated memories. Four of GWB the 1st. Maybe some vague impressions. Eight of Clinton; coincident with adolescence, even.

Eight years of a bad economy, eight of a good one, and two character builders so far.

(Note to kids: what political party controlled the white house when the economy was your friend? Note to DNC: do you guys even exist? For god’s sake, DO YOUR JOB! Oh, never mind.)

And then this matter of 9-11. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be an eighteen year old today, I think.

Every political stimuli I was exposed to by the time I was eighteen clearly demonstrated (Vietnam! Watergate! Central America! Iran-Contra! October Surprise!) that American politicians are nemesis, liars, with no respect for democracy, human lives, the rights of man, or the constitution.

So far, seems unlikely that kids have seen the mask stripped, and less likely as time goes by and more FOIA requests are remanded by GWB the 2nd.

Posted on by mwhybark

OBOY!

Any time a high-falutin film critic identifies a film as distanced or mannered, and then in support of the claim, complains concerning the lack of attention to realism within the film, I’M SOLD.

In this week’s New Yorker, David Denby’s review (warning: not a permalink) of nearly released Tom Hanks flick Road to Perdition manages to not only do this but to condemn the filmmaker’s aesthetic, citing Erwin Panofsky’s dictum “shoot unstylized reality” (more fairly excerpted in Denby’s piece) in support of this goal.

After I read it, I realized that he opens the review with a reference to the greatest of the Coen brothers flicks, Miller’s Crossing, which, it would appear, treads similar terrain. Of course, stylization and lack of human sympathy are what they get docked for too. As at least one of my readers knows, that’s why I love ’em.

One more thing to note: this weekend I was looking for more comics to review in a big, mostly superhero-oriented comics store. They have lots of unbought titles that date as far back as 1998 in genres that interest me: um, if comics had “shoe-gazing emo” or “historical documentary speculation” or “mannerist genre homage” racks, that’s where I’d look most of the time.

As it was, I wasn’t sure my editor would print (er, post) reviews of five-year old dog-eared books by publishers that went out of business two years ago, so I didn’t pick any up.

I did look at, and consider, a beautiful, moody graphic novel, of 30’s gangsters in Chicago by nobody I’d ever heard of. Guess what? The book was sold directly as the basis of this film. Now I gotta look it up. Here’s a review of it when originally published.