Yesterday I heard that Bob Bogle, lead guitarist for the long-running instrumental group The Ventures, has died. I taught myself to play drums by pounding on a pillow along with The Ventures and The Monkees. I probably had half a dozen Ventures albums and played the grooves off of them. The first 45 rpm single I ever bought was “Walk Don’t Run ’64.”

Posted by pat at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some recent website projects I’ve done:

FacilityRepairman.com—a quick one-page site which is just what it says it is. Allen Foley had done the design in Photoshop and needed it converted to a live website.

KansasCityShooters.com—another quick site. Larry Brewer has been doing video work in Kansas City for years—check the logo crawl at the bottom for a small sampling of his extremely impressive client list. A couple of potential clients needed him to have a web presence for one reason or another; hence this site. He uses the slideshow from slide.com because he wants to be able to change photos himself whenever he feels like it. For similar reasons, he did the logo crawl in the Vegas video editor and gave me a Quicktime movie to post—credit where credit is due. FWIW, I would have done it in Flash, which would have been a much smaller bandwidth, but again he wants to be able to change it any time he wants, and I respect that.

A much larger project was the redesign of Kinisue’s Tropical Boutique. We had originally put the site together last fall, but as Cindy (Kinisue) learned more about her business, selling tropical jewelry through boutiques and at shows, she wanted to make some changes. Also, the site uses the free open-source Zen Cart shopping cart software. Zen Cart is designed to run the whole site, rather than an add-on to a static HTML site, so that was a major consideration in the redesign. Cindy considered adding a slideshow from slide.com as well, but didn't like the associated advertising. Besides, I already had the Flash slideshow set up, and it’s a matter of only a few minutes from the time I receive a new photo till a revision can be posted.

I suppose it doesn’t hurt to remind people of the web design work I do—my work comes 100% from referrals—but really I’m posting this to help search engine rankings on these sites. Every link helps! And besides, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the services of these clients, so I’m happy to do a little advertising for them.

Posted by pat at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am shocked and appalled that Dr. George Tiller was killed today. In church, no less. When it looked like he was almost through with all the trumped-up legal charges, somebody just shoots him. And I'm sure that person thinks of himself as “pro-life.” I'm just sick about this, and so angry I can’t see straight.

Posted by pat at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was checking the calendar page of one of the bands I play with, and saw an entry with a line break in the middle. That was weird, figured I had better fix it, and opened up the page in Adobe GoLive. I found 240 paragraph tag pairs inserted in the middle of that line!

I figured out what happened: sometimes Mikey likes to try to get my attention by jumping on the desk between my keyboard and the laptop. He must have sat on the Enter key on the keypad while GoLive was in Layout mode, so each repeat was counted as a new paragraph. I remember I came back to the computer and shooed him away. I had done whatever I needed to do to the page and uploaded it without looking. The browser will only display the first of a series of blank paragraph tags, which in this case was a very good thing, because it had probably been online close to a week.

Even cats think they can do web design these days….

Posted by pat at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

OS X’s Widgets are addictive, as I’m sure everyone but the newest Mac user already knows. Even though I don’t go particularly crazy on them, I still have widgets for weather, lyrics for whatever song is playing in iTunes at the moment, Astronomy Photo of the Day, Apple Pro Audio news, statistics for my computer (such as temperature, memory usage, etc.), AllRecipes.com, and several others.

The Conversion widget is excellent, converting area, currency, energy, temperature, time, length, weight, speed, pressure, power, and volume. Say you read a statistic about land use in Africa (it could happen!) and the value given is 45,000 hectares. Choose hectares in one popup menu and acres in the other, and it calculates as you type, showing 111,197.42 acres. Or 173.74597 square miles. Of course you can select the value and copy and paste it. Did you know that 100 Kilowatts is equivalent to 5,686.9029 BTUs per minute? Do you care? Me neither, at least not at the moment. Still, you get the point.

The widget I use most often, though, is the Dictionary/Thesaurus, especially since I’ve been a New Yorker subscriber. When you run into an unfamiliar word, just double-click it to select, command-c to copy it, F12 to open Dashboard and command-v to paste. You’ll get the Oxford Dictionary entry on the word, including its derivation and origin—not only interesting, but it makes it easier to remember, and to use properly (oh, I am such a geek). Or you can flip over to the thesaurus side and get synonyms, antonyms, etc. Big fun!

But the reason I’m writing today is that it turns out you don’t even have to use the widget to use Dictionary/Thesaurus. Move the mouse cursor over a word, hold down control-command-d, and you get the Oxford Dictionary definition. Continue to hold those keys down and click the mouse to scroll down if it’s a long entry, or click the popup menu to switch to the Oxford Thesaurus entry for the word. Totally cool!

This works in all Apple applications, such as Safari and Mail. In, say, Microsoft Word, my guess is probably not. But it’s easy enough to try. The tech email I got this tip from notes that in Mail, if you accidentally hold down the shift key instead of control, you will send your email draft immediately. But that’s only if you’re writing an email at the moment, and probably you’re not going to be using a word you don’t know anyway. There is that caveat, though.

Go ahead. Command-control-d on “caveat.” You know you want to.

Posted by pat at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A friend gave me a photocopied sheet, reportedly from a notebook belonging to Thelonius Monk and circulated by Al Kooper. It’s pretty cool, but four items in particular caught my eye:

• Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time.
• You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
• A genius is the one most like himself.
• They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.

Number 3 is inspiring. I want to make a sign out of it and put it on the wall. I’m in no danger of being considered a genius, but I think it’s good advice in any kind of creative endeavor.

Posted by pat at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone is upset about the trial and conviction of Roxana Saberi, and rightfully so. It’s high-handed, shameful, and likely has more to do with internal Iranian politics than her activities.

So, let’s just imagine for a moment: what if she and we were, say, Saudi or Yemeni, instead of American? And she was in, say, Guantanamo instead of Teheran? How much different would we feel?

Of course what the Iranians are doing is wrong. And I am certainly not saying the prisoners in Gitmo are innocent (though under American law, aren’t they presumed to be until proven otherwise?). I’m just asking, how much different would we feel?

Posted by pat at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)