Intraspective.

I started writing a long LONG dissertation about my current Gaystlouis.com website... and then deleted it all.

So, let me instead start with a question and then a statement and then a clarification.

What can I do to make the website better?

Note: The Guide and Personals modules cost money. I can't afford it yet. But they are planned for.

I ask because very soon... my website is about to get a *LOT* of pressure to get the community involved and connected. I can't give details without going into the whole background of why I know this will happen, but in short, I'm about to inherit a shit-storm whether I want it or not. Ask Hunter, I'm good at predicting these and I can already see the iceberg approaching.

So I want to prepare... NOW.

I'm marking all of the comments as hidden. Tell me if you want them public or not. Likewise, feel free to email me: webmaster@gaystlouis.com or contact me however you want (see the Contact page for the multiple ways).

I just need feedback unlike I've ever needed it before.

A couple other notes:

• The logo was chosen because it can be resized, reprinted, and used in various ways easily and yet was unique.


• Also, the advertising does not bring in enough for me to keep it, so I am considering dumping it entirely. I'd like SOMETHING for advertising events, but details are very flexible.


• Lastly, the Calendar, Gallery and eventually Guide and Personals, all use phpBB3's (Forums) users' database for authenticating users so switching to other modules is possible, but they either need to tie into phpBB3 or vice versa, I need to be able to tie all these modules into them.

Just once... I'd like things to go my way.

It feels like I'm the support for everyone else. Just once I'd like feel like I'm breaking even.

(Note: I deleted the previous post. Was far too wordy.)

I know I have a fair amount of non-iTunes using folks on my friends' list, but for those who are using it, I have a question.

Is your random really random?

In my case, not at all. For example, my "Workout" playlist has 260 songs, but very commonly I'll have five Prodigy songs in a row. Or four Shamen songs.

Going through my current list right now, I have two sets of two Info Society songs back to back, two Prodigy songs back to back, two Green Day.

I know that purely statistically speaking, this is common, but I've found that in larger lists, the number of repeats gets even worse. The other day I had five Shamen songs in a row on my iPod... in "Shuffle" mode.

My iPhone tends to love doing back to back Info Society songs. My iPod Shuffle seems to *love* Green Day and Good Charlotte marathons.

Anyone else noticed this with their devices?

It isn't that I mind, but it seems like a flawed algorithm somewhere when there's five or six songs in a row from the same artist.

I've also noticed it can be the same album as well. The "Brother Bear" soundtrack tends to be consecutive frequently as well. I like the soundtrack but after the third rendition of Tina Turner's song, I'm ready to chuck the damn device.

I admit, I despise Myspace to this day. Though I do have an account... I think. I haven't logged in for months.

But Facebook has been fairly decent to me.

Until today.

I decided to try and bring Gaystlouis.com onto Facebook. Wow. That was far more complicated than it should've been!

First, their website walks you through how to do it, but things like "Webmaster" are not allowed in email addresses. So I ended up having to create a new User Account to register the website's page. And then, I can't use Webmaster in the "Full Name", it needs to be a full name. Even initials aren't enough. The problem is that there's then two of me out there if I list my full name. :P

So after a bit of searching, there's a much simpler way to set it up from within my current FB account, so I did that.

But... now I'm not sure of what to do with it.

I created it as just another vector for people to reach me. But it doesn't seem to work that way...

Anyone out there supporting an org on Facebook?

I won't spend too much time on this, but would love to figure it out. Just for me own curiosity.

Tuesday I caught something.

It's now Saturday and I'm STILL coughing up a storm.

It fits the pattern of my normal cold/flu's where I spend the first two days actually sick, and the next week trying desperately to prevent whatever from lodging into my lungs and giving me walking pneumonia. :(

But as a result, it's derailed by pattern of trying to workout. (As it's really hard to do 10 miles on the bike when you can barely breathe.) I did sneak in some exercise bike time on Thursday night, but Friday morning I could feel it.

I called in on Wednesday and Thursday and actually went in for about four hours on Friday, but I was getting overwhelmed (from work and from the cough) so I came home early.

Last night (Friday night/Saturday morning), I was unable to sleep well as I spent a good deal of it coughing.

I want this thing to be gone. :(

Here I am with the sports photos again.

This time, I like the phrasing that SI uses "tries to escape the grip"... *snicker*

Rolando McClain of Alabama

Just converting some more video and found an old Episode of "NextStep" from 1996.

In it, they interview Scott Adams, but also they talk about how media density is getting too high and how we'll be running out of hard drive space capacity soon and will need to switch to Magneto Optical discs to store data.

How wrong could we be...

I have a few Mo's around here and my god were they slow.

But there was talk also about how "lasers" were going to be able to record in three dimensions on surfaces (sort of true), but then they diverged into discussing a Holographic storage system, which has never worked right. :P

Just amazing to see how tech has changed so much in 13 years that they were completely wrong in their future predictions.

Nothing changed... except the expectations.

Woke up a few hours early this morning and couldn't get back to bed, so decided to do a little music surfing...

And I came across this: Information Society - 300bps N, 8, I (Terminal Mode Or Ascii Download)

For those unaware, this is a 300bps hidden track (well, not really hidden as it IS on the liner notes) that gives a text story when played into an acoustic modem.

Really? Amazon is selling this?

It's just like this track: The Benzedrine Monks of Santo Domonica - The Monks' Vow of Silence (Album Version)

1:12 seconds of... nothing. At least it's only priced at $0.69.

This message brought to you by the makers of Shock Doctor Athletic Supporters and Protection.

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Tonight I flipped on the DVR only to be greeted by one word TV shows:

-Heroes
-House
-Psych
-Eureka
-Fringe
-Bones

So... five nouns and one exclamation.

Weird.

And people say that there's no new ideas. *snicker*

One of my projects for a while has been converting some adult videos over from VHS to computer files.

I got a bit of a shock yesterday.

I started consolidating all of it onto one drive (in an attempt to actually make backups) and so far, what I've converted is just under 400GB.

I probably still have another 400GB of tapes here and I suspect I have at least that many more tapes to convert from yet another new source.

And that's not even the "regular" (non-adult) movies I've recorded via our Replay DVR which are another terabyte by themselves.

I know I'm on the bleeding edge of going all-digital, but still... two terabytes of video? Eeesh...

I really hope iTunes can handle that much. ;)

(Side note: Semagic apparently doesn't know the word "terabyte" and suggested instead "gigabytes"... um. Off by a few powers of ten.)

Got a few more pics for folks.

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I mentioned over on Facebook about some CCCP that I was listening to, and decided to look through some of my old music that I'd converted years ago (which I need to redo) and came across:

Duran Duran - Fame (Yes, the Bowie one.)
The Knuckleheads - Havin' a Party
Anything KLF...
Soul City Orchestra - It's Jurassic (Yes, a dance Jurassic Park theme)
Hi-Power - Cult of Snap (which later became know as just Snap!)
Real Life - Send Me An Angel (the original one from 87)
Depeche Mode - Strangelove (Midi-Mix) (yes, as in MIDI... I love it!)
Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Rage Hard/Suffragette City
The Weather Girls - Dear Santa (Bring Me A Man This Christmas)
Pood, Bhud N Pflug - Duelling Techno
TeeVee Toons - Jane, Get Me Off This Crazy Thing (yes, the Jetsons)
Clockdiva - The Hacker / The Connection Machine (later used by the Prodigy as the "Intro" to "Music for the Jilted Generation")
12 Gauge - The Hustle
Julie Brown - Girl Fight Tonight (Extended)
Josie Cotton - Johnny Are You Queer?
Billy Ocean - European Queen (not Caribbean)
Ultimix - 1993 Flashback Medley
Utah Saints - Something Good
Andy Summers - 2010 (think a dance version of the 2010 theme)
Betty Boo - Doin' The Do

Yes, I have some bizarre musical tastes. ;)

(Added: Just found the Tammy Wynette & KLF's "Justified and Ancient". *giddy*)

Figured I'd throw out my experience upgrading to Snow Leopard.

I have a Mac Mini (1.83Ghz Core Duo, not the Core 2) which I've upgraded to 2 Gigs of memory booted off of an external USB 1Gig Western Digital hard drive.

Frankly, the upgrade took nearly 75 minutes, but was painless...

Upon reboot, Mail reconfigured itself. iTunes reset everything. And it just seems to, well, work... Slower.

It's not a fast machine to start with, but sadly, Snow Leopard shows the age of this system moreso.

I didn't expect to really gain much with this upgrade. I was hoping for some slightly new features. (I despise how Notes are now built into Mail.)

For $29, I am not too worried about the upgrade.

But it worked perfectly fine on my main Mac.

All my other Macs are G4-based and thus will never step beyond (plain) Leopard.

Was surfing around the CNN website yesterday and saw this:

Photo Show: Tim Mantoani - Mark McGwire

Oh... I *LOVE* this picture of McGwire.

The smirk on his face. The piercing eyes. The impression from the compression shorts. The bulge on his... arms.

It's true...

I Miss Mark!

I wrote about how I was going through my old cassettes.

For years I'd held onto the cassettes as they represented my teenage years (mostly) and there was lots of music on there that I had nowhere else. However, over the past few years, I doubted that there was anything important on them, but because I'm thorough, I wanted to check...

Wow. I didn't believe it, but I really didn't have a lot of these songs.

I've been using Midomi on my iPhone to keep a list of all the missing songs. Why? Because it's convenient and most of the tapes aren't labeled.

So here's a list of songs from today alone that I didn't have anywhere... and these are just from four or five tapes.

• Pray - MC Hammer


• Pour Some Sugar On Me - Def Leppard


• Nobody's Fool - Kenny Loggins


• Staying Together - Debbie Gibson


• Simply Irresistible - Robert Palmer


• Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car - Billy Ocean


• 1999 - Prince</i>
  
• Only In My Dreams - Debbie Gibson


• The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades - Timbuk 3


• The Heart of Rock and Roll - Huey Lewis & The News


• Say It Isn't So - Hall & Oates


• Infatuation - Rod Stewart


• Shake It Up - The Cars


• Magic - The Cars


• Tall Cool One - Robert Plant

Yet somehow, I have "Turtle Power" (Partners in Kryme), "Kokomo" (Beach Boys), "Me So Horny" (2 Live Crew) and "Nightmare on My Street" (DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince) in my collection. WTF?

Almost every one of those songs I have the 12" version of, but I don't have them on ANY of my CDs. (And for the record, my MP3 collection is around 160G at this point. That's something like 24,000 songs.)

It's like my CD collection has a big hole from the 80s where I have every other song.

I'm resisting the urge to buy anything until I get to the end and can compile an album list (as it may be cheaper to hit the record store and buy them en masse)... (hopefully when I have money).

(Addendum: I don't feel so bad now. I did NOT have "A Fly Girl" by the Boogie Boys in my collection... *snicker*)

I'm slowly getting rid of all the old media in the house.

The video tapes are almost all gone.

The home-burnt DVDs have almost all been converted.

So I started up on my old cassettes. The first six tapes I pulled, I found seven songs I needed to track down, and two full tapes I had to save.

I'm actually a little more afraid of going through these tapes than I was the videotapes. Far more of my old memories here.

But this song just reminded me that, well, not all the memories are that good. ;)

Correction
I just found some old Commodore 64 "covers". In particular "You Might Think" by the Cars in SIDPlayer format. Followed by "Ghostbusters" by Ray Parker, Jr.

Yeah... a lot of memories I should forget.

Happy Birthday to mynchyld, first and foremost. Hope you have a good day today!

But I also received a very interesting spam message this morning. (Behind the cut.)

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In short, the spammers are trying to find new ways to spam. And I admit, this method is a bit of an interesting puzzle.

How can you protect against puzzles? Human nature is the "decode" these things instantly upon seeing them.

Years ago, there was a study done and it was determined that road signs work well because driving adults are taught to read all street signs. And so on the highway, we naturally read EVERY sign. We may not remember them, but because we've been trained to not ignore signs when driving, we do not. (Think about that the next time you read a bumper sticker... can you remember the color of the car? Or the model? Or just the text you read?)

I don't know a good way to stop this type of spam, but I do believe that email, in its current form, is doomed.

It is destined to become like Usenet, where people avoid it BECAUSE of the spam. And I believe that's why places like Twitter and Facebook have such a following. For the most part, you can communicate on there without the spam (unless you count the billions of "play my game" messages.) Consequently, this is why MySpace is dying. They have been unable/unwilling to combat the spam-bots.

What are your thoughts?

Today has been a down day for me.

Normally everyone has upward and downward feelings, but today, it was entirely downward.

I won't go into specifics, both to protect the innocent and guilty, but also because it isn't necessary. It just turns into more words that clutter the point of the message as I ramble on.

Simply put, right now, I'm feeling really vulnerable on multiple fronts. And I am wishing I had a thicker skin to handle these things.

I realize to get the thicker skin, I need to start looking out for my best interests, which sadly conflict with my interests for others.

But maybe I need to change... obviously my old ways aren't working for me.

Two web items for your amusement today.

First up... Rachael Ray Cookware at Cooking.com

Obviously this is not for fans of Rachael... even minor fans would recognize that she over and over stresses that she can't bake! She refuses to bake anything because she burns it.

Not sure that buying Bakeware from her is a good idea...

Next up... Four links of SI Covers:
Sports Illustrated College Football Preview: Ole Miss
Sports Illustrated College Football Preview: Oklahoma State
Sports Illustrated College Football Preview: Oregon
Sports Illustrated College Football Preview: Penn State

Damn! I admit, I wouldn't mind a poster of any of the four.

But where are the other 16? *whimper*

I want to see Texas, NC, and USC's players too!

I spent most of the day going through old journal entries and clearing out old ones.

I kept only two posts from before my announcement of restarting my journal. The one from the LAST time I restarted the journal, when I switched to the Cubziz name. And the notice of Hunter's layoff. (As that seemed important to keep up for reference.)

Otherwise, the journal has essentially been restarted.

I saved each old entry off as a PDF, as the various LJ archive programs failed (And, no LJArchive crashed too.) Probably because my account has been under two IDs and has flipped back and forth from paid to unpaid every other year. At one point my journal went day-by-day instead of via groups (Next 50).

But they are archived, more for my reading them in another 10 years or 20 years.

I found some interesting history in them.

• Converting porn for the iPod Video, later for the iPhone, then the AppleTV


• Back in 2006, I swore to lose weight and predicted I'd be done by June of 2007. Guess what? Didn't even get close...


• My Aunt Ann died, as did Rage Player Barry Brueggemann, a friend Aric and later Cubia.


• Vented about the Rage switching from NIFL to UIF and they switched again from UIF to IFL... and who knows where they will be next year.


• Replaced both my computer and Hunter's in November 2006... we're both still using them.


• Got my Septum piercing in November 2007. Started at a 10g. I'm up to a 4g now, debating a 2g.


• Every year I've vowed to lose weight as my New Year's Resolution. 2009 has been the only one where I actually pulled it off for the long term... thus far.


• I first started talking about the sagging economy in November of 2007... Little did I know how it would ultimately affect me... Though I had an inkling of what was to come.


• My Month of Open Source never made it past 17 days.


• My "Picture Of The Day" resolution in 2008 only made it 16 days.


• Favorite quote: "Damn. No sexual encounter is worth underarmour. ;)"


• Lastly, it was a shame to see responses from people who have passed on, either in life or from LJ. They are both missed.

So, the journal starts anew. I've switched the "Adult" rating off as I have nothing questionable at this point. (Nothing beyond a "Teen Beat" magazine article.)

For months, I have been predicting that various credit cards would start raising rates.

A week ago, I got a letter from AmEx deciding to raise my rates from a 10.9% fixed, to a 12.9% variable, which means 12.9% + whatever the "interest rate" is. Course, their letter indicated that the current interest rate (variable one) is about 3.0%. The letter makes it clear that it could go down... (Yeah, with the gov't having interest rates below 0.25%? I don't think so...)

So in other words, two years ago this card was at 3.9%. Early last year it went to 7.9%. Earlier this year it went to 10.9% and now they want to take it to 15+%? Um. No.

And by the way, this is on all purchases PAST OR FUTURE! So this is now retroactive.

For more details on how sinister AmEx's policy is (you can't opt out... not even by closing your card) check out the Consumerist article which came out yesterday.

AMEX Blue Raises Rates, Also on Past Balances, And Won't Let You Opt-Out

So I've started talking to one of the consumer credit counseling groups to see what is possible because AmEx is one act is going to destroy my credit rating. And I need to position myself as best as I can.

Just watch out. I suspect this will become a common policy with all the cards soon. I mean if AmEx can do it, the others will just to get their "share" before the new credit card policies take effect next June.

[Note: Fixed URL]

This weekend I'm going to go ahead and restart my journal here.

I used to do this every year, but I'm been holding onto this stuff for almost three years now, and feeling it's about time to clear out the overgrowth.

I tried some of the "archive" programs out there but none of them seem to work properly and crash at one particular point in my journal, so it'll be gone at that point. (No real other alternatives.)

Anyway, just wanted to give a heads up before it all vanished and folks wondered what happened?

I'll just be starting over anew.

The day has arrived...

Last night, I was tempted to make a post to LJ talking about a new worst case scenario that appeared yesterday and, well, it happened.

My job is intact.

Hunter was laid off.

Why was this a worst case scenario?

All along, we assumed that his seniority of 12 years at the company would've kept him somewhat safe, while my under 2 years, made me a moving target. And so, the assumption was that the worst scenario was that we both got laid off.

But yesterday, I realized that while I was completely prepared mentally, financially and physically to be laid off... Hunter was not.

He was given his papers this morning and walked out the door.

I drove him home and we've talked, but I know there's no way to convey my preparation to him, without coming across as condescending, which is not at all what I want to do. As I told him, it's like the scene in Real Genius where Laslow tells the student that he "dug into the computer and pulled out every question Dr. Hathaway has ever asked" and then proceeds to tell them that he memorized them. Which of course, did the other students no good.

My preparation can't help Hunter and thus, my new worst case scenario came true today. :(

So, for those of you out there with words of advice, please let him know. Either over at his journal: javabear or webmaster@dailywav.com.

I admit, I'm dreading my days at work. It's hard to feel dedicated to a place of employment which just made the life of a loved one a complete mess. And yet... it's our only income right now, so I have to push forward.

Yes, things change.

And yet, some stay the same.

Welcome to the new home.