Archives for blog meta info category

Sunday March 20, 2005

A site for the blind

I'm going to do Dive Into Accessibility over the next few days. I had a lot of problems using my computer when I was disabled and I'm going to do my part to make my part of the web better. Most of the problems I had related to browsers not having the greatest accessibility features (I particularly needed a black background and white type to see) but a big part of the responsibility lies with web designers.

Monday February 28, 2005

Did you know that I want to feed you?

The best feature of the new primco.org blog is the feed: XML that describes the structure and contains the message I'm sending. How convenient! Down on the lower left hand corner you can chose on the format you like best. I like Atom. If you don't how to deal with an XML feed or why you'd want to, well, I won't go deeply into that now. but basically, it turns a web blog (which is a thing where you have to go and get it), to a subscription (which is a thing that comes to you when it's ready). Here's a good intro to this stuff. If you use Firefox, it's got built in aggregation.

New primco.org style

Well, finishing the re-design of my site is definitely worth blogging. It only took me 2 years. I'm also moving web hosts to TextDrive. The new layout is mostly css dependent with only a few lingering tables. All the content and structure is the same, just changes the window dressing. I've also added a banner for each section. The images will rotate a couple times a week.

The next steps are to actually update the content. The photo page is a few years old and I have a lot of new photos.

Wednesday February 9, 2005

It's ON

This shit is back on. I've spent the last few days porting my blog to a new format and now I'm going to write in it.

Tonight I saw that movie about that woman who gave cameras to kids who were children of Calcutta prostitutes. I recommend it. Don't have anything to say about it right now. Probably won't later. Why write in the blog if one has nothing to say? Good question. Discuss amongst yourselves.

How's that for a standard blog entry.

Thursday November 27, 2003

Happy thanksgiving. I hope at least one of my friends has an uncle that says "pull my finger" and before the end of today they get to pull said finger.

Well, over a month since my last entry and nothing to write for the foreseeable future. I have 4 jobs. Some folks have told me that there are people who keep going to my blog and finding nothing new to read. I'd like to save them the trouble. So here's what I'm gonna do: If you are one of these people, put your email address in the little box below and send it to me. Then, when I decided to start writing again, I'll send you an email. Ok? But by all means, read some of the shit I wrote about India or something if you haven't.

--Form removed--

Sunday June 22, 2003

When I'm checking my web stats I usually find some message board post somewhere on the internet where some smart-ass guy has grabbed an image from my website and is using it as a visual aid in a conversation. This is made possible by image searching of course. And what's even better is that I can see when and where I'm being sampled. And I've got a good one today. I don't know how long this post will stay up on the net (it's some pretty low-end drivel on a site called pointlesswasteoftime.com) but somehow, Google knew that I loved Led Zeppelin in 7th grade possibly more than anything else on earth and when someone went searching .... ah, forget it. Just look at this post.

Sunday May 4, 2003

Well, because of some stupid ass shit on my Linksys router, I was unable to run primco radio for a few months but now all that stupid ass hard work has paid off and the thing streams 80k without rebuffering. Our first tune from the randomly shuffled memory banks of my computer is Guitar Slim "Hello, How Ya Been? Goodbye" -- a tasty number. It's not always going to be on but I'll try to leave it on when I don't need the extra bandwidth. Oh, and no stream ripping. Ok?

Sunday March 16, 2003

Well, It turns out that PRIMCO Radio is not working right now. Constant re-buffering. I'm going to look into this as soon as I can. Now I see why everyone who tries to listen is turning it off after about 30 seconds.

Tuesday March 11, 2003

Since I made the Squidsheet I've been talking with Scott Beale about calendarizing the Squid List in a more formal manner. Well, looks like he really went for it and got a developer to make his system database-backed. I think his calendar eliminates the need for mine and my calendar has been somewhat unreliable and inaccurate in the past.... I'm going to kill mine soon.

One thing that I think people don't appreciate about the squid list is that Scott compiles this thing manually every day by himself and has for years. He hand-edits every post and translates the stuff people type into his submission form into readable email. I truly appreciate this after programming my little squid page. He is single-handedly responsible for a lot of good things that happen in SF.

http://laughingsquid.org/squidlist/calendar/

 

Here's the email he sent out to me:

The calendar is generated directly from the posts that are sent out to the list. My primary focus is still on the email list itself and the calendar is supplemental, adding additional functionality. One of the nice features is that all of the event listings are stored in a database and this calendar will server as a historical archive of the list (right now it only goes back a few weeks). If you accidently delete a post or if you are traveling and do not have access to your email, this calendar will really come in handy. Like the list itself, the calendar will only have information through the current week and is not an advance planning calendar.

In order to protect event producer's email addresses from spambots and other forms of email harvesting, we have removed all email addresses from the calendar listings. If you need the actual email address associated with a post, please reference the orginal email that was sent to the list or the online list archives (you need to be subscribed to the list to access the archives).

Kudos to John McDonnell, Laughing Squid's newest sys admin, for all the great coding that went into the creation of this calendar. For you geeks, it is written in PHP pulling data from a MySQL database which is populated via Mailman, our email list program (yeah, we really dig open source software).

I have not officially announced the calendar yet. I kind of want it to be passed around word-of-mouth, just like the list itself was when I started it. So you guys are the first to know about it and if you want to tell others your little secret, that is up to you as long as they know the secret handshake. It's really not that secret, but people always like to think that they have access to information that other people do not know about, so just like Mr. Rogers used to tell you, "You're special".

As always, you can find all the list specific info, such as how to subscribe/unsubscribe or submit a post to the list, in our FAQ, so please direct all of your questions there: http://laughingsquid.org/squidlist/faq.html

Enjoy,

Scott

Monday March 10, 2003

I'm streaming my mp3 collection (currently 3700 songs) to the internet for one lucky listener who can listen to a random selection from my library. I don't have bandwidth to do more streams than this. Tune in to PRIMCO Radio!

Here's some of the first songs the shuffler has picked

Radiohead - Optimistic
The Mountain Goats - Noctifer Birmingham
The Papercuts - untitled
Mogwai - helicon 2
the magnetic fields - the dreaming moon
Elliott Smith - alameda
Coachwhips - I Put It In, Way Down South
Hayden - Street Car
Kalyanji,Anandji - Fists of Curry
Aphex Twin - Xtal
Massive Attack - Black Milk
Black Box Recorder - Goodnight Kiss
Modest Mouse - The Stars Are Projectors

Sunday June 23, 2002

To all you motherfuckas who I give my stickers to and who peep my site and never send a word, fuck all y'all. I mean, I need some something. I know you like it because you tell me when you see me. But that could be never again, right? I have given over 500 stickers away over the last year and have only gotten any kind of anything from a couple of people. Y'all like 'em when I show 'em to you. You look at this shit and you can say 'no thanks' if you want and that's cool. But it makes me think they don't do any good except for the moment when I have you there lookin over them. Whaterver. I'm a fuckin whiner.

I love handin out stickers and I aint gonna stop.

Ok. That's all.

Saturday June 15, 2002

So many people try to type natural language queries into Google's search box. I see it in the DSR's on my site all the time. New and cool and something of a remedy for this situation in internet land is Google Answers. A paid information researching system. Some people use Google Answers to ask questions about Google but it appears that the folks at Google are trying to discourage that sort of stuff. I thought to myself, "Hmm, this is a place where there are a lot of people hanging out who know how to use Google really well and I'd like to know what they know." Maybe I need to pay for an answer because didn't find anything from browsing around. But it is entertaining. Especially the Miscellaneous section: Where are all the 420 mile markers in the continental US?

Wednesday April 24, 2002

After switching primco.org from 66.33.4.4 to 66.70.232.218 and then finally to 66.70.151.85 and mucking with linix builds for 2 weeks straight, I'm ready to post the newest programming turdlet available from primco.org. It's the STATS page. (I copied the code from diveintomark.org) It's self explanatory. The magic of referrer logs have been covered before on this blog so I'll not go into that now. Keep checking back for that daily dose of google zaniness!

Monday April 15, 2002

As I was telling Dave and Mona today, I gave about 25 of the most powerful brain hours I have had in recent memory to the creation of a little calendar program for the squidlist. I wolfed down Dexedrine and finished it last night after the PinkandBrown show. It doesn't look like much but it is functional goddamnit and you don't have to sift through the crud just to figure out what's going on tonight. The "about" page tells you more if you need to know. It's called The SquidSheet.

Saturday February 16, 2002

I realize that I'm becoming like all those other bloggers who get made fun of for their inconsequential little posts. And I'm told by my web stats that there are actually people who read this every day. So I feel bad, of course. I've never been able to come up with a spectacular piece of writing every day. I used to be able to get a photo that'd I'd taken scanned and published but the picture river has dried up. I refuse to walk around and snap stupid lomo-ish digital photos of abstract stuff just to have something to publish. I've tried not to write drivel.

In the interest of "having something to say", I've thought about getting glamorous jobs such as a backhoe operator that would put me in contact with people I find interesting and foreign. He's an example of me going on and on about my glamorous life in Bombay during this week two years ago. (God, don't' those two look good? (and sweaty)) I'm reminded that I only wrote a couple of times a week when I was living 50 times as fast as I am now so I shouldn't be so hard on myself.

But I gotta do something to justify the time I'm spending on developing my back-end content-management system. My back-end is pretty sore from sitting in front of my computer for 20 hours a day for the last 2 weeks. It's time to justify it. (And I don't mean that in the formatting sense!)

Oh shit, I just had another idea: to add a "save as draft" functionality to it. So I could squirrel away ideas until I was ready to make blog entries out of them.

It really is becoming quite monstrous. And I love it. Yes I do.

SO HERE IT IS: my big piece of content for you to manage. A story called "The Greatest Night of My Life". I'm going to publish it serially and I'm not going to put the actual text in this blog (except for teasers). (the reasons should be obvious, if you read it from the archives you'd have a pretty tough time making sense of the ordering of the sections.)

Damn, I'm being long-winded.

Here's today's teaser paragraph:

I watched Diane getting ready in her room. She was being extra nice and not yelling and trying to make herself pretty. I was only 13 but I knew that Diane was putting on makeup badly. Red stripes on her cheeks, blue streaks on her eyelids, lip-gloss and curling-iron curls of bleached-white hair framing her puffy red face. Diane was the ugliest woman I'd ever seen and she was even stupider than she was ugly. At one point I saw her breasts as she pulled on her shirt but I didn't get excited. That was the first time I'd ever seen bare boobs and contrary to what I'd been told, I found that it was possible to not enjoy it.

Sunday January 20, 2002

Wait, who am I talking to?

Friday November 9, 2001

So, tonight I was making a web a photo gallery of some pictures of me and my girlfriend climbing Half Dome in Yosemite. They're definitely in the "vacation photos" category. I thought about putting a link to that page here on my blog and then I thought, "You can't put family photos up there. That's were your art goes."

See, I think I'm an artist. And I have a pretty stiff rule about separating out all those pictures that are just interesting to me and those that are interesting to other people. I mean strangers. That is a pretty good place to start if you're trying to figure out what art is if you ask me. So I said to myself, "Wait, what is your blog anyway? Just a place to throw up diary entries (here I go again) and the detritus of the CF slot on my digital camera?" NO. This isn't david_primmer.com -- [it's all about me...here's my favorite links!]. It may seem that way, and indeed, people may use it with the intent of getting more dave™ each day. But I think of it more like a visual documentary combined with an editorial column.

The two don't usually interact. They can, and it's nice when I essay about a photo or quicktime movie, or the visual stuff supports something I write, but I usually don't feel like writing something about a picture I took a year ago. I'm going to the effort of scanning it, that should be enough.

Ok, there you have the mission statement for the blog. Please send me your comments if you thought sucking packets off my server was gonna get you something else or if you thought you were looking at my family album. I'm curios to know.

Just as a side note, I'd like to get more fine art photography in the mix -- stuff with less narrative and overt subject matter. We'll see how that goes. One trick was to start shooting with toy cameras so I forget about things like focus and depth of field or being funny.

Primco.org. -- The king of all flavors. Roll and rolls and rolls of life savers.

Monday October 8, 2001

Aaaallllright yeh bastards. I've added search to this blog. Now it is way to big for its britches. I mean, my regular website with all that writin' 'bout India doesn't even have that. Maybe one day I'll do a photo search. But for now, we are young, let us lay in the sun, and search for beautiful text in this site.

Geeks, let it be known that I used KSearch v1.4. A very fine and flexible tool it is. Free and fuckin fancy.

Last night I worked on getting the video drivers on my laptop un-hozed and tonight I did a search engine. I'm avoiding. It may be obvious to those who've read other parts of this blog. I usually post a photo or something every day. I did it for 4 months before I lost control. It used to be the most important thing in my life but now matters of a more personal nature than I wish to put on a web page have stolen my interests. However, the mere fact that I'm writing about it now is a tiny indicator that I may be posting every day again soon. I still must do it. I still believe. Yes. But I'm not assuming you care. I do it because it is discipline. Discipline has met its match over these last two weeks but it is recovering like the glass-jawed punch-drunk flyweight that it is.

Monday October 1, 2001

I haven't been posting photos or writing these last 2 weeks. It's not sheer laziness. I've been hanging out with Marcie White and doing activities that kept me far away from my computer. I post something every time I get a chance. I'm gonna try to get back on it now. I'm also getting concerned that I can't find stuff that is buried deep in the archives and since Google doesn't seem to be indexing those files I suppose I'll have to figure out some kind of search engine. Today I was searching for the links I'd made to the Vice Magazine Do's and Dont's and it took me 10 minutes.

Sunday September 23, 2001

Here's some internet searches that sent people to primco.org. I think this is the best thing about having a website.

Apparently I'm a flashpoint for people typing random threatening messages into the input box of a search engine.

This is good....writing about the day my mother died earns me the number one ranking on Google for people looking for oakies having sex.

Thursday June 14, 2001

I wanted to see what some other weblogs looked like so I went to kottke.org - home of fine hypertext products which is supposedly one of the oldest and most popular weblogs. It was very good and filled with all kinds of web trickery and links to other tricky people. It made me go to photographia.org and I think I'll put some of my pics up there.

He let me know about Noah Grey's weblogging software that I may use. Blogger is rather frustrating. And even though Noah doesn't support his software, at least I'll be on my own. When Blogger slowed down the 2nd week I was working on my blog it cost me a hell of a lot of time.

So I continued reading and found Textism and I laughed out loud 3 times in the first 30 seconds of that site so I bookmarked it and followed where it led me. Which was Tomato Nation for a little girl talk and finally to Ftrain.com for a look at what may be the future of primco.org if I stay unemployed and perpetually noodling. The guys behind Textism and Ftrain are incredible writers.

Thursday May 31, 2001

I figgered out a quick and dirty little thing if you just want to backdate one day: Put this at the top of your post, say you're posting on Thursday, May 31:

<span class=date style="margin:0px;">Wednesday, May 30</span>

This will create a fake date header. When reading the posts, you can't really tell the difference. Make sure you use the same date format as is used in your site. I suppose you could use this any time, but the posts won't sort properly. You need the margin:0px because if the .date style in your stylesheet has margin:10px your "fakedate" will be indented. it does this because with .date now inside of the .posts block (with it's own 10px margin) you get a 20px margin.

Yeeeaaah dog!

Monday May 21, 2001

I'm going to include photos. I just decided. Not like I have any big traditions to go back on. This is my first online writing in a year. Ok -- six months. I did do this a while ago. At the time I had a long way to go to getting further away.

I have the urge to put in all kinds of wack crap that will get my page listed in fucked up web searches. When someone searches on the Internet and then clicks on the results they get from google, the keywords they searched with end up in your website logs. It is one of my favorite pastimes to find the paths that people can dream up to get to my web. 99.999 percent of them would naturally have NO interest in my site.

I've had people directed to primco.org after searching for "bowling alleys for sale" on google and you don't wanna know what else. OK if you do, go to the Disturbing Search Requests weblog and see if the whackos have come up with anything new since "translucent hindu shepherd flyboy porn"

Here's my photo for the day. It's a picture of a diorama in Mission Dolores. I took it while the glass was reflecting the figures of some people looming over the little pastoral indian figures. It's a nice reminder of what used to be my neighborhood.