More images.
Just pictures, some old some new. What I was thinking about when I suggested a picture gallery.
Short memory
(And yes, the RSS feed thing should be working before too long, I’m twiddling with code.)
There were two “free” web log portals that have succumbed to economic duress. But the memory of the user public seems a little limited. Pre-Google days, Blogger crashed and burned a few times. Flicker seems to have outage problems, too, and nothing gets the little net-heads in an uproar faster than to have to a sever stop serving. Not much room to bitch, though, not from a free service.
My own Sister went through this one time when her own start page wouldn’t load, and she had all the little tickers set to tick out whatever information she wanted ticked out, and when it didn’t tick out, she was ticked off.
“Can’t you fix it?”
Personally, I steer away from free services. Too many ads. Not guarantee on privacy. Or, as a closet control freak, no control over what happens. And if an “act of god” occurs? One word: screwed.
Doesn’t much matter to me, either way. Except. See, and that’s the whole point, I’ve got a number of images, like yesterday’sdog sign, that I’d like to experiment with.
I’ve got an all-time favorite splash image I think I’d like to run, but then again, maybe I’d like some other image. Or a series of rotating images. Again, no way to do handle this.
To be sure, I’ve got rented server space and bandwidth to cover it all, but no place in the “top down” organization chart for such visual tidbits. Sometimes, like that “beware of dog” sign, I’m not sure that the humor really gets across. Or the whole image of “Stardust Motel” since it was the last piece standing on a nearly-abandoned highway, just a little west of Marfa, Texas. Like, in the middle of nowhere. Real West Texas (not the Hollywood version of the West, either.)
Then there’s the other solution, too. Instead of a link to an external site for storing images, why not just post them in the web journal? doesn’t get the exposure that I was looking for, but near as I can tell, and from the places I look at on the web, I’d tend to agree with the net-heads, I don’t usually like a splash page unless it has valid and current information. Or gives simple list of choices without too much graphic flash confusing the issue. Besides, I’m basically a text guy. Nothing more.
Old fashioned, isn’t it?
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe
I can blame a Scorpio lad. He got me hooked on the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, way back when.
I’ve toted the series, in fact, most of Douglas Adam’s books, with me, and I’ve always intended to reread the series. Since the movie opened, I thought I’d dip back into the books, or, at least, the first one, and see what all the fuss was about. All I remember was liking it.
It’s a little thin on plot, a little heavy on fantasy, and basically silly. But buried in that silliness,
Hitchhiker’s Guide – the movie. there were some astute observations, if I recall.
Like, Ford Prefect’s observations about humanity?
“At first Ford formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration, he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.” (page 49)
An observation wherein fiction is better than fact? That seems to be one that I’ve remembered. And employed.
The Scorpio lad who hooked me on this material, to begin with, he liked the TV show, and all its subsequent variations, usually on PBS, Brit humor. Me? I just liked the books. My buddy’s nickname for me, though, afterwards? Zaphod.
“There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomability into an art form. He attacked everything in life with with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence. and it was often difficult to tell which was which.” (page 110)
(Who are we kidding? I earned that name for other similarities.)
