You won't see this page for a few days, if you've been checking you'll have seen that my page has been down. MSN has been giving me fits, I couldn't publish my site, and so I decided to take matters into my own hands. So, if you're reading this, you already know about FAULGUY.COM Yep, I'm the proud papa of my own domain name. I should be up and running in the next two weeks. I've bought web space out on hostway.net which is based out of Chicago. I could have gotten free hosting, but frankly, you get what you pay for, and as long as I'm a paying customer, I expect service. MSN allowed me to get my feet wet, but it's time to dive in. So, bye bye, long URL's, bye bye, unsolicited ads, hello 200MB of space, hello faulguy@faulguy.com, hello microsoft server extensions, hello brave new world, hello fully functional counters, and databases.
Well, I'll talk more on the subject when it happens. I've been working on the Achtung Baby era of U2, I've gotten about a dozen more pages up and added some interesting pictures of things that are not readily available at your corner music store. I'm hoping to complete a good portion of those pages today, and I'll post them when I can.
Work is better, I'm not nearly as overwhelmed as I have been. Mostly I'm just putting the pieces together and we'll moving forward with our plans to consolidate.
We won our second game in Softball on Monday night of last week. It was another comeback victory for us. For some reason we have been on our heels in the first inning, this time we were down by 7 runs before coming back and winning 17 - 15. A win is a win. Next game Tuesday, June 6. Let's see if we can keep it up.
Sayonara, until I'm in my new home. What a great day!
I made it! Hostway.net gave me space in a little under 5 hours. It will take another 10 days they say, before I'm fully the faulguy. In the meantime, I can clean up my new home, since I'll now be searchable throughout the world. I'm not sure that I'm ready yet, but I do have a boatload of content and I now have a permanent residence for when I move. After I move, people will always be able to get in touch with me, which is great! I have a lot of work ahead of me. I need to beef up some pages, and clean up others. I want the site to be a source of pride, not a source of shame. Oh hell, even if it was crap, I'm happy with how much I've learned in the last 5 months since I've been working on this. My site already has over 6 MB's of content, and as I learn more and more, it will be easier to navigate and will be more exciting and interesting.
I'm so jazzed by this :-) I always wanted to be a star, not that my audience is very large, nor will it ever be huge, but it's nice to contribute something to the world that will be here for a while. I think we all have the dream of contributing something to the world before we die. Many of us have children, some people build things to last, other people give of themselves, so some one else will benefit, thus propagating the notion that our lives have not been wasted. The truth is, many of us will be forgotten by those who follow, but it seldom matters, whether we like it or not, we do have an impact on people's lives. Not as much as you would think for some, and more than you could have dreamed for others.
Time to get back to work. It's a bright future, and I've got to go greet it :-)
I'm getting it done, step by step. Tonight I worked on the opening page for my U2 section. Over the next few days, I need to complete the introductions for each U2 era. By that time, my domain should be up. Not much to contribute tonight. Yesterday, I was in a foul mood, it rained ALL day long. Our softball game was cancelled, so at least we remain undefeated (ha, ha). We'll try again next week.
Sorry for a boring entry, it's time to go to bed. Goodnight.
Times are slipping away, moving further and further into the future. Which, at this time, is probably a pretty good thing. People are leaving my life, in pursuit of their futures. I'm sticking around for a number of reasons. Monetary, professional curiosity, obligations, and tiny bit of fear of the unknown. At least I admit the last part. I want time to go quickly, but I don't waste it. Not that I've made the most of all my moments of my life. Much of my spare time is spent working on projects such as these and socializing when I can find people to be social with. I try to keep active with sports. There is a nagging thought that the reason I'm sticking around is cowardice. It's the devil you know vs. the devil you don't. It's the king of the small town, what I would amount to elsewhere? I'm still growing in this place, and I'm a little reticent to start small again some place else. But, you can't gain something without a little bit of risk. In any case, it won't be long before I'll be packing my things here and moving on to a new life. I don't necessarily know what I want, but I'm sure I'll land on my feet. I've learned some very valuable lessons about me, and what I need to do to maintain this balance where I'm content most of the time. Fortunately, I am content getting things done, which means, that I won't remain idle for long. I'll keep hustling.
Hmm, I'm listening to the new Matchbox 20 disc. It's pleasant, he has a good voice, and the album is chock full of melody. They are also attempting some harmony as well. If I had to put a knock on this album, it would be that it sounds very polished. Kind of like the Goo Goo dolls of late. Which I like, but I always feel in danger of slipping too close to the mainstream. Funny how you cling to certain things that you think are coool. Wow, I thought I grew out of that. Oh well, I'll keep listening. So far, so good. I'll write more tomorrow. I have a lot to do this weekend. It's been 5 days and my site still hasn't been transferred to my new domain name yet. Any day now....
I learned some interesting things this weekend about Front Page. A word of warning, be careful when you specify default. Your best bet when designing a site is to make sure that you always force a font, don't take the default. If you do, things may not align correctly. For example, my internet settings for font is Times New Roman, so I've been designing my site, thinking that it would be fine. Unfortunately, if someone else were to go to my site and they had a different default font, they would see everything in that font. I'm not sure how common Times New Roman is, I know that it is common on Windows platforms, but I'm not sure about Mac. In any case, all of my U2 content has been changed to Times New Roman, and everything that I am currently working on is being changed as I come upon it. Another place that you have to be careful of is when your background color is set to default. Default for my desktop theme is white, but for someone who is using say purple, then everything goes to purple. I'm sure that I will encounter other idiosyncrasies with Front Page, but all in all, I'm pleased with it. Primarily because I have saved so much time in getting all the content that I have up on the web. It's been about 5 months of work. All of which has been done in my spare time, and I'm far from complete. I have a host of pages to redo later, when I complete the U2 section. This weekend I have been doing a lot of cleanup work, and a few new pages have been added. I've rescanned in a number of pictures that were absolute crap. For some reason, I had everything off when I was scanning pictures of U2 and I've corrected a number of them. I will probably selectively cycle them out with better pictures as I move through the site.
I went and played 9 holes yesterday, I needed to tune up my golf game. I'm playing on Tuesday with a guy at work. It will be fun, but I absolutely needed the practice. My game is crap right now. Not that it was ever any good, but the last time I went out, I shot horribly, I would have gotten a higher score by throwing the golf ball down the fairway. We'll see how it goes on Tuesday. If I take my time, I should be OK.
I've been listening to the Matchbox 20 CD non-stop while working on the site. It's quite the disc. I don't think there is a bad song on it. It flows well, and it will yield some hits. One of my favorite songs so far is "Black & White People". It speaks to me right now. The stanza I like goes a lot like this: (Actually, exactly like this)
If we slide on over and accept fate then it's bound to be a powerful thing
If it's just that you're weak can we talk about it?
It's gettin' so damn creepy just nursing this ghost of a chance.
The fiction, the romance and the Technicolor dreams of black and white people.
I think I like it because I'm a closet romantic. I love the John Hughes teen flicks from the 80's. Occasionally, I fall back into it and believe in fate, and what is meant to be will be. It's liberating in one sense, it allows you to let go of a situation that you have no control over. I also participate in the standard set of denial. Everyone has it at times, when a situation is winding down and you are grasping for comfort. You tell yourself that if things just turn slightly, then that person will be looking into your eyes and they will recognize what you already do. The movie "Some Kind of Wonderful" is like that. Watts loves Keith, and Keith doesn't see her. In the end, he flashes to her and realizes that she was there all along. This also reminds me of one of my favorite lyrics. This one is by James. I don't know if I've shared this before with you, but the lyric is: "It's not enough to believe in love." It seems like a simple phrase, and it is, but it spoke to me nearly 7 years ago when I was in a relationship that I couldn't get my heart around. She was a good person, attractive, etc. But the timing was off. I thought that love would conquer all. It doesn't and things don't change. Circumstances, misunderstandings, time and place and fate? are all in play. Still, that feeling you get when you see that person, that feeling of being lost in the room, and the crowd evaporates, and it's just you two. It's a nice, disorienting feeling. I'm not talking about lust, it's so far beyond it. I've personally only felt it for a couple of people. Whoa, it's time to step back into today.
OK, time to do laundry. How'd you like that segue? Goodnight all, the site still hasn't been put up on Faulguy. It's been a week, crossing my fingers, and dutifully updating all I can. Maybe tomorrow...for all that I want.
12 days. It's been almost two weeks since I've written in this thing. Time changes everything, but not always when you expect it. Work has been stressful, I've been learning new things and I have been extremely busy. The high stress has bled into my personal life and it sort of ebbs and flows back in forth between the two. I've been pissed off most of the time, and I've put it right under the surface, but I think that people can feel it like heat from a blacktop. Despite the stress level, I've been able to get a lot of things done, but not nearly enough. The softball team is now 5 - 0. We beat two good teams this week. On Tuesday we played extremely well, and I was really proud in how much we dominated the game. We were much flatter the next night, but we got the win. I think that we played smarter than the other team, and it helped us win the game in the bottom of the 7th. I've got to develop a whole new attitude for Monday's game. If I continue on like this, I'm not going to enjoy myself very much and the team may not enjoy playing as much. Yeah, I know, I probably don't have that much affect on my team, but I ought to lead by example. One of my teammates got hurt during Wednesday's game, she probably won't be able to play for a little while, so I need to find replacements for her. It's also putting stress on the other women on the team because they don't want us to forfeit because we don't have enough people. I started out with 8 women and now I have 3. *sigh* Story of my life. Just kidding, it's not that bad.
I've received and spent my retention bonus. Easy come, easy go. I paid off one of my credit cards and a personal loan. I now officially own my car, my computer and my bed. I'm glad that I did it and I look forward to paying more and more of the debt off. Today I bought Microsoft Photo Draw. And I'm just not all that happy with it so far. The first problem I have is cropping. Microsoft Photo Editor allows you to crop an image using numbers, i.e. crop 1 pixel from the left, or top, and this allows me a certain measure of precision. Every other product requires me to drag a box around the image and I can never be sure if I'm cropping what I want. It's a preference of mine, so I'm still using the Photo Editor. I was hoping to have one application do it all. The second problem comes from not being able to open certain files in it. It's a pain, and I think I may have wasted my money. There are certain effects that are available and since I can't return it, I might as well try to learn so I don't waste my money. Some things just take time to get used to. Plus I need to expand my imaging capabilities, so I can make cool pages.
My golf game is getting better, I think I'm breaking through to a new level. I'm starting to hit the ball more consistently, so if I can continue that, then I'll be able to work on the subtleties of the game and it will continue to be enjoyable. I also need to spend some time unwinding so that I can cope with work better. It's going to be difficult for a little while and I'll earn every penny they give me from here on out. I'm starting to dream about life in Virginia. Maybe I'll meet that special person down there, or maybe I'll just suffer under the same shyness that has caused me to be alone this long. I did ask a waitress out last week at a local restaurant. I gave her my phone number and she didn't call me. I didn't expect her to. It was good that I mustered enough courage to do it. It's completely not my style to do it, but sometimes you have to go out on a limb.
I'm losing a member of my staff in two weeks. I'm happy for him, but it will put more pressure on the rest of my staff. I wish him the best of luck in this new job. The funny thing is that he is going to a company that we beat this year in Softball. We dealt them their only loss of the season.
Well, time to hit the sack, hope you all have a good weekend. My site should probably be up my Monday. It should have been up over a week ago, but I made a mistake, I didn't read some of the fine print and thought that the place that was hosting my site was going to automatically move it. Turns out that it was my responsibility to change the host server. Oh well, live and learn. Good night.
I'm grooving now! My site is now available on Faulguy.com! Whoo-hooo! I've been working on the site off and on today and I've added some pretty cool pieces to it. I've been working the U2 part of the site and I've improved the Wide Awake In America section. I finally added a fact and broke out the track listings onto a separate page, and I'm pretty pleased with both parts. The picture of Bono in the track listing is my favorite picture of him. I've also finished up the track listing for Stay, which was kind of pain, because when you have a lot of tables and an awkward image, it makes it sort of difficult to maneuver about. and make it look ok. I've done as best as I can with that one. I finally finished the fact for The Unforgettable Fire Album as well. It's interesting, but not really, really cool. I haven't really created a really cool page since the Lemon Facts, but the pages by and large look better from the start. I also added some content to Zooropa's track listing as well. I've also changed a few subtle things that you probably won't notice, but I think add to the ease of use of my site. I've got to work on creating a new logo for my site, one which prominently displays Faul Guy. This will require me to be an artist. HA! I'll give it go. Well, welcome welcome welcome. It's nice to be home :-) Talk to you later.
Well, it's almost midnight and I'm working on the site, which is a bit foolhardy perhaps, I'll probably pay for it tomorrow. We played our second game this week and we lost again, but tonight was much different. Our team played fantastic. We lost the game 5 - 4 and it was just a good game to be part of. We ended up losing 23 - 3 on Monday and the game became laughable. We really didn't play poorly, but anytime you don't get the out, you open yourself up to allowing runs. In this game one out equaled 3 - 4 runs and there was nothing for us to do about it. Usually we give up a few outs, and we only sacrifice a run or so because of it. Tonight we were nearly flawless. We do need to adjust better to good pitchers, but other than that, we'll be fine. Our record is now 5 - 2 and we'll be playing next Thursday, which is really a long way away, but I'm kind of happy about that, since it is sort of stressful to make the lineup and make sure that everybody plays and that they feel like a part of the team. Maybe it isn't my job to do so, but I try. I had a good time at the bar afterwards, the team we played is pretty nice and I struck up a fairly long conversation with a person from the other team. After a game like that, it's hard not to be a little wound up. Work is still going on, I'm constantly on it. Have to be. Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger right? That's what I'm banking on. Part of what I'm doing excites me, but there is some dread associated with almost unrealistic deadlines. I say that they are unrealistic, but since I had a hand in setting them, I have no one to blame but myself. The unrealistic portion comes from the fact that I'm doing a lot of people's work. I'm doing it because no one else knows about this stuff... yet. We've lost some key people so I have a lot of responsibility, which I like, but if you can't accomplish your core job, than you aren't doing a good job. Well that's about all for tonight. Goodnight.