Housekeeping Archives
He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace!
‘Tis true — Blather is shuttered. My blogging urges are now being met by a tumbleblog sort of thing in the Interstice section of this site.
If you’re interested in the time period covered by Blather — in grad school and in Germany — you can check out samples of the work I did at The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism or photos and writing from my time on the Burns Fellowship and working as Oskar’s magazine.
Otherwise, of course, feel free to poke through the Blather morgue.
Quick site notes: The Guestbook is down, for some bizarre reason that I’m still trying to figure out. So if you have something to say, mail it to me, and I’ll post comments when I get it back up. In happier news, the Links section is being updated again, and now features a nifty list of permalinks. Go and enjoy.
Explain to me again why Macintoshes don’t have disk drives?
I’ve never been an anti-Mac person — in fact, I used to run a Macintosh network back in college — but I can’t say I ever particularly favored them. The negatives (not having as much software, having higher prices) were things I cared about, while the things they were touted for, like their interface, wasn’t as important to me. In fact, being the type of person who grew up on Commodores and moved to PCs when you could still write your own BASIC programs, I actually found the touch-and-feel of the desktop rather irritating; I like a machine where you can get at the guts and, say, mess up the autoexec.bat file all on your own.
Apple’s decision to not include disk drives with their machines, though, is now beginning to really piss me off. When the newest Macs came out, and I read that they were disk-drive-less, my thoughts were along the lines of, “Eh. Interesting. Whatever.” Now that I’m working on a Mac and can’t freaking up- or download anything, I’m somewhat less sanguine.
The thinking, I gather, went something like this: People don’t transfer stuff on floppies anymore; everybody’s networked, and you can burn stuff to CDs pretty easily, anyway. Well, yeah, in theory — a theory that would make more sense if the machines were shipped with — oh, I dunno, maybe a CD burner. As it is now, there’s no way to get two machines not connected by a common network to share information. If Apple was in charge of human reproduction, I can see someone saying, “Hey, we’ll develop telephathy sometime in the future — so let’s sew up everyone’s mouth when they’re born!”
All of that’s to say that I’m making changes to the site, most of which you won’t see for a while, since I can’t get them off my laptop. For now, the only new things are the permalinks below each post (enabling you to link directly to an entry you like) and the Tell a Friend feature over on the right. You can use these together, if you so desire, to let everybody else on the Web know about my blatherings. If, of course, you have any desire to.
Damn dirty Macs.
Knowing that some of you just stop by to hear me blather (never seeing the wonderously glorious front page), I thought I’d mentioned that the links section of the site is also updated on a not-quite-regular basis.
Just thought you’d want to know …
Once again I’ve let far too long go between updates. But now I’m back — back on the Web, back in Germany, back to having a full-time job. Here’s a quick life update: After finishing up the Burns Fellowship — which allowed me to go to Berlin back in August and work for German newspapers for a few months — I returned home in October, where I squatted in my parent’s attic and held down part-time jobs as a caterer and a box monkey. A few days after celebrating a very Merry Christmas, I caught a plane to Hamburg, where, next week, I’ll start work at Oscar’s, a bi-lingual magazine published by German media empire Gruner+Jahr. They’ve hired me as the editor of the English section. I’ll be laboring at that for the first half of the year or so (it’s a short-term contract), and then most likely heading back to the States — so if you know of any jobs there, let me know.
And, hopefully, I’ll be updating this thing more often …
I’ve come to the conclusion that I do updates simply to fool people into thinking that I’ll continue to do updates …
I’ve been traveling for the past week and a half in Germany, England and Ireland (pictures to come from that; for now, check out the photos I already have online), discovering that, at least for cheap travellers, the Emerald Isle has really crappy ‘net connections — hence the lack of updates.
But I’m back from that now and, indeed, back from Europe in general, having returned to the States yesterday. I’m now busily endeavoring to conquer jet lag and retrain myself in where the y and z keys are … I’ll let you know how it goes …
I’m back! After (dang, say I, as I scroll down the screen) four months, I’ve returned to the web. Timgibbons.net 3.0 is now in place, featuring a different interface, bunches of pictures and, well, just gobs of goodness. The main new thing, for former habitués of the site, is the photo collection, located here, which, for now, features bunches of pictures of Germany. I’ve also changed the Links page to a more Blogger-like format, making it easier to add new favorite pages. Plus, with two updatable pages, that means I’m twice as likely to get closer to the daily updates I promised when I first set this thing up. (Or half as likely: I haven’t really done the math.)
For now, though, you can expect new Blather every two, three days, with new links coming up at about the same pace. More photos will be uploaded once I 1) take them and 2) figure out some more stable form of Internet connection. (Damn these European telecom monopolies. Damn them!)
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Put ‘em in the guestbook or send them my way.
Some minor housekeeping details: I’ve recently gone through and made some programming changes in the site in an effort to make it run faster. Do you think it’s made a difference?.
The changes are part of a general cleanup as the school year winds down and I prepare to move the site to a real ISP. In preperation for that, if there’s anything you’ve noticed on the site that you think I should modify, let me know,
It’s here! It’s here.
You’re now looking at the site I’ve been laboring over for the past month or so. Let me know what you think.
Oh, the irony.
timgibbons 2.0 is ready to go. So I come to the school computer lab to upload it — superior technology here, ya know — and find the network down. Translation: All of my files are sitting on some machine somewhere I can’t get to. Rest assured, though, that it will be here for your viewing pleasure ASAP.
The redesign is done!
You just can’t see it yet.
Last night, I uploaded 58 pages of pure goodness: pictures, frames, JavaScript, layers, CGI scripts. It’s beautiful …
Anyway, I have a handpicked team of reviewers looking at the thing now to make sure all the bugs are ironed out (is that a mixed metaphor? I dunno; I kinda like the imagery of chasing bugs around an ironing board and steaming them to death. The other phrase people use is “ironing the kinks out” which sounds, well, kinky …) before unleashing it upon the world. Come, say, Thursday, the all-new design will replace what you’re seeing now.
So I’m a little behind schedule with the site update. A draft of my master’s project — an 8,000-word examination of modern American hobos — was due this morning, and was a little higher on the priority scale.
Nevertheless, things are proceeding apace. I’m about 82 percent done with the new stuff; as soon as I convert a few more files and create one more section on the site, I’ll have a beta version ready to roll … say, this weekend sometime. Maybe.
Site update update: I’ve gotten the first, biggest hurdle out of the way, coming up with a new style for the site and creating three — count ‘em, three! — index pages, making my stuff visible no matter what browser ya got.
Next project: converting all my clips to the new look. Of course, while that’s going on, you can take a look at them in their current incarnation, if you so desire.
At long last, my clips from past jobs are up on the web.
I have no idea why you should care — but if you do, you can check out stories I’ve done over the past few years by clicking on the clips link at right. Feel free, by the by, to pass this link on to any hiring editors at large papers you might happen to know …
At long last, to the ecstatic cries of the clamoring hordes, the Links section of my site has come online. Go, my faithful minions — read what I read! Think like I think! Soon, we can take over the world!
Bwaahaha!