Tag Archives: Hit

Site girth expansion

I’ve just finished a modification to the site design. I was starting to feel a bit too confined by the narrowness of the old layout, so I’ve basically kept things intact design-wise, but I’ve expanded the layout to be more suitable to today’s 1024×768-or-greater standard screen resolution. I’ve also bumped up the size of the type slightly.

The only design element that’s noticeably different is the little greenish weirdness at the right end of the photos in the header bar. This was something I spent a great deal of time developing for an old, shortlived design that was part of my quickly-abandoned experiment with running the site on Drupal. I may end up getting rid of it again; I just thought it deserved a second chance.

Now then, if you’ve actually visited this site sometime before, you may find the pages are looking somewhat garbled; sadly that’s the side effect of keeping a lot of the filenames the same; your browser likely has old versions of these files cached. Hit the Refresh button a few times or perhaps clear your cache. I did the Refresh thing, but I had to hit it about 4 times before all of the files actually updated. Sheesh, you’d think I was using a Microsoft product or something, not Firefox!

Nothing new under the sun

Considering that I just finished recording a new CD whose centerpiece is a suite on the theme of the human experience entitled “Nothing New Under the Sun,” I should not continually find myself surprised that my seemingly oh-so-original ideas are, in fact… well, not. Especially when they come to me as a stroke of pure genius in the wee hours.

Case in point: I’m toying with some new ideas for a major overhaul of my personal website (far more than lazily “porting” it over to prefab blog software), and in the midst of setting up my “MAMP” (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL, PHP — OK, so it’s not as elegant as “LAMP” but I am not yet on the “Linux is a legitimate desktop OS” bandwagon) development environment on my new iBook, the name for this new site hit me. It was sheer brilliance.

The Cortex Vortex

It was too good to pass up. And this on the same day when I had hit upon the idea of naming different-sex fraternal twins Franklin and Eleanor and nearly driven off the road in tears of hysterical laughter when SLP suggested the name “Fonzworth” (maybe you just had to be there… but truth is stranger than both fiction and SLP’s sense of humor).

So good, in fact, that naturally there were others in the world who had already found it that good, as well. Granted, there wasn’t really anything out there with the name that was like what I intended to do, but why compete with the villain from Crash Bandicoot 2… not to mention some guy in Quebec? (Do a whois, if you must.)

OK, back to Square One. Hey, maybe that would be a good name! Do you think anyone else is doing anything with it?

Postscript
Not quite the event of the century, but I ran into and spoke briefly with Scott Savol at the Mall of America Apple Store last night.