Monsters from the Id 怪獣大悪脳

I feel a bit like Microsoft. To get my redesign done and up I ended up tossing out quite a few goodies I was working on. I figured the major "look and feel" was the single most important thing. And since I'm going back to work this week, I had to get something up or it would languish for a while.

So it's missing the font resizer that would allow you to choose between small and large fonts, and the style switcher so that visitors could turn off CSS if it wasn't working with their browser. Also missing are a few new pages like "Downloads" that will turn up one of these days. There's also a bunch of little tweaky stuff I didn't get done like moving my affiliations list from the About page to the sidebar and validation of the code with appropriate links.

Despite all that I think the new look turned out pretty darn cool, if I do say so myself. And I was able to put in some fun new things like integrating the site with my photo moblog, and the new sidebar sections---recent comments and interesting links. Plus I have new RSS feed options. Take a look at the bottom of the sidebar for all the XML goodness.

So there you go. I welcome any and all comments. Please let me know if there are any display issues on any browser---I definitely couldn't check them all.

Posted by Jon at 12:23 AM | Permalink

Well, I've finished up with a "quick and dirty" version of what MFTI looked like under MT2.661 with the new MT3 templates. It's not perfect, but it's mostly there. (I haven't put the title graphic back in place. I figure I'll save that for when I have all the little "bells and whistles" in place.)

I already love the new comment approval thing in MT3. I've been able to stop several Casino and P**** Enlargement spams in the short time that I've been switched over. It'll be great when Blacklist is working with MT3 but this is pretty good.

And the UTF-8 default is great too. I've had the bandly mangled Japanese name for my website for a few years now, but the text didn't work right in the old ISO encoding. Now I can use it again. If you can tell me what this means:

怪獣大悪脳

I'll give you a cookie.

I have noticed that the email I get when a new comment is posted doesn't display the Unicode characters correctly in the subject.

[Monsters from the Id æªç£å§æªè] New Comment Posted

They are fine in the body. I don't think it's Apple Mail causing the problem. It supports Unicode. I'll have to look into this more.

Posted by Jon at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)

I have upgraded this site to MT3. You may have noticed that it looks completely different from how it looked yesterday. You may have also noticed that it looks suspiciously like the default templates that come with MT3. That's because it is. I'll be changing this soon. The whole backend of the site is different and I had a lot of redirect problems to work out. They should all be taken care of now. If you notice any problems, please let me know so that I can fix it.

With that out of the way I can once again focus on getting the site to look the way I want.

MT3 also means TypeKey comments. You don't have to have a TypeKey account to post a comment but it will make the whole process much easier. It's up to you.

Posted by Jon at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Back to work on Monday. Woohoo! Bad news. We're on a week to week basis. So I've got one week of work guaranteed and we'll just see from there. Hey, work is work. I'm not complaining. And since I can make as much in a week doing sound as I can in a month on the state's unemployment, it'll be a nice little cash influx every once in a while until we can get on another show fulltime.

I wish the unemployed versus employed timing was a little better with this extra super bonus hardware trade-in from Digidesign. The offer ends on June 30. I might have to bite the bullet and bring my Mix Plus up to an HD 2 Accel.

Posted by Jon at 5:49 PM | Permalink

Lee is looking to sell some of his paintings. He has some very nice ones of rockstars, and others as well. You can find more information about the paintings and his contact info at his website.

Shirley Manson

Adam Ant

Morrissey

Also: Pregnant For The Last Time, Paris One, and Betty.

Posted by Jon at 3:16 PM | Permalink

Oi! My feet are killing me! I'm back home after much walking around Las Vegas. I have things to say about stuff I saw, and places I went. But not now. Now it is late. Or at least late enough. And I'm tired. And the kitties missed me. Goodnight.

Posted by Jon at 11:04 PM | Permalink

You are now looking at the Movable Type version of my website. After a lot of work I was able to get back to the same functionality that I had under iBlog plus a few extra little features. I'm hoping to add some things in the future. Some of them you won't even notice--like an interface on my end so that I can quickly add new links. And some more style sheets including one optimized for printing. But all that is down the road. I think the only thing that hasn't carried over from my iBlog version are the comments that people left for me at Haloscan. There weren't many. I will add them in over here. Unfortunately the original dates of the comments won't carry over. Oh well.

Please let me know if you notice any problems with the new site.

Posted by Jon at 10:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I just got an email from my buddy Ben who's taking off for Japan and Australia tomorrow. His girlfriend and her friend have already been in New Zealand and Australia for a bunch of months checking things out. So they're reuniting in Tokyo which I'm very happy about. And thankfully we all get to read about it in their weblog, The Adventures of Katie and Emma.

We hung out a bit the other night when we went to see "Hellboy". (And at some point I'll finish up my review of it and post it here.) I told him that he had to bring me "ninja stuff" back from Japan.

Today is actually the one month anniversary of the new Monsters from the Id complete with weblog and swivel action kung fu grip.

"So I've got that going for me.... Which is nice."
--Carl Spackler

Posted by Jon at 11:27 AM | Permalink

It is done. After a little bit of wondering where my title graphic when off to and then trying to figure out why there was an orange stripe above the graphic, the Monsters from the Id revised website is done. Please let me introduce you to a style I call:

Halloween

It is inspired by a style called "Zen Pool" from the excellent CSS Zen Garden website. This weekend while I was bringing my site up to date, I created another style I call "Frankenstein" which was basically the same as "Zen Pool" with a different color scheme. The author of "Zen Pool" had a fixed amount of text to deal with for that design. After many hours of messing around, I found that his method does not work at all with my weblog of various page lengths. So I scrapped it, read up a bunch more on CSS, started taking baby steps and wound up with "Halloween." At some point I'll probably rework "Halloween" to get a new version of "Frankenstein", but that will be when I set up the site with user-selectable style sheets.

Of course I did end up putting the obligatory weblog stickers down in the corner of my navigation bar. I swear the blog police knocked on my door and said, "Sir, we need you to add a zillion of these little 80x15 images to your site or we're going to have to take away your computer." It was either that or a post by Wil the other day where he gave a link to a sticker generator. One thing lead to another and suddenly I found myself at a sticker archive. I couldn't help myself.

I'm going to go play with my Colorforms and Shrinky Dinks.

Posted by Jon at 1:57 PM | Permalink

I'm so glad that these people are in charge of our country:

Bush is holding enthusiastic rallies showing support for his tax cuts--only the attendees are not U.S. citizens and most don't speak English.

Rumsfeld has a piece of the Sept 11, 2001 plane that flew into the Pentagon as a souvenir.

Posted by Jon at 6:13 PM | Permalink

I have my car back! Woo hoo!

The week before Thanksgiving 2003, I was rear-ended by Beverly Hills high school student and pushed into the car in front of me. What followed was months of phone calls trying to get his insurance company to fix my car. The huge stalling point was the guy in front of me refused to give a statement. It was a big freakin' mess--though I did get to pull out a little physics I learned years ago in high school. (So kids watching at home, pay attention. You WILL have a chance to use those boring things later in life.) But that's a whole other story.

Flash forward to late January 2004 and suddenly my insurance company calls me because the motorist in front of me in the accident has suddenly surfaced. He's talking to my insurance company through his lawyer because he's claiming he was severely injured in the accident. (Shyeah, right! As if! Though my insurance company was VERY interested in the physics calculations I'd done to prove that the accident was all the 90210 kid's fault.) Anyway, it was all a load of crap but my insurance company finally said skip trying to get the kid's insurance to fix your car, we'll do it.

So then there's a flurry of estimates and pre-ordering of parts and large checks made out to me and a repair shop and all kinds of fun. On February 11, 2004, three days before my 30th birthday, I took my car into the repair shop to get it fixed. Today after lots of communication issues (including a huge one where my car was actually completely done and ready to be picked up a week ago but the repair shop didn't get the final "Ok, we truly are going to pay for EVERYTHING" from my insurance company until today) I finally was able to drive my Bronze 2003 Honda CR-V home.

It was a great moment.

And then I realized that I left my cell phone in the cab I took to the repair shop.

Doh!

And then followed over an hour a Hi-hi-hilarity as I drove around LA stopping at pay phones to call the cab company and trying to track down the cab I'd been in not so long before to reclaim my cell. Fun fun fun.

Still it was a pretty great day.

Posted by Jon at 6:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I could be receiving good news literally any second now. I'm not going to jinx myself and say anything else. There'll be a full update when the final word is in.

For now, those of you tired of sorting through your full inbox might interested in the latest legal development.

Posted by Jon at 11:47 AM | Permalink

Welcome to the newly redesigned MFTI. I hope to occasionally update this page with my thoughts, interesting websites, and programs that I'm working on.

Drop me a line if you are so inclined

Posted by Jon at 7:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)