o0o Thursday, April 16, 1998, 5:52 p.m. o0o

Oi! to all of you out there in Oompa-Loompa Land. Want to know where your favorite web designer has been for the last month? Well I have read more fanfic, learned how to make mpeg3's (if your running ie4 and if your settings allowed you to download it you should be hearing the R.E.M. song 'belong' about now), presented this site to my application group, watched Casablanca for the first time, started the beginnings of a minor site redesign, begun to understand ActiveX controls, and have finally begun to relax.

It's spring break for me right now and I have squandered my precious time on aimlessly wondering the net and watching crappy TV shows. I tried out MSN's comic chat recently and found it to be truly entertaining, though I like the set-up of yahoo better -- less of a naked feeling. I finally got a copy of navigator 4.05 and was astonished at how small of a file it was. I wasn't too horribly impressed with it, but I was impressed with what it could do given that it was only 15mb big. I have been using ie4 since it's beta release last summer and have been upgrading as upgrades have been made available and while I appreciate the things that it can do: ActiveX, play the mpegs (and just about everything else), open just about anything, and the visual layout of the beast I have never liked that it takes up a huge amount of space on my system nearly 100mb (to be fair that is with all the accessories including MSN 2.5).

Well as most of you know I have been doing this page for my application project (graduation requirement) and that I would have to present it in late spring. Well I just finished the first round of the three presentations of this project 2 weeks ago today -- the first is to my group showing my main piece of evidence, the second a in-class presentation of my project, the third an open house type of exhibition). So picture you favorite lab rat bringing to the early morning meeting of my application group a single floppy disk containing this page minus the one audio component of the page when I get there Matt is setting up his computer. He also designed a web site.

When he presented his page to the html illiterate group they where impressed with the background sound and the animated gifs and the 'advanced' look his unhidden frames gave the page and all the pretty colors it used. And I just knew that his page was the worst possible thing that could have happened to my project. You have seen the page you know it conforms to a certain style that makes it less 'fun' than an exhibition of multimedia that runs at hard drive speeds. So when I go to show the group my project they where incapable of appreciating all the fun things my page does when run on ie4 because Matt only had navigator and it doesn't recognize any of them. so my fixed backgrounds moved, the ActiveX controls wouldn't have worked even if I did have the proper mpeg file, and all the other things I'm forgetting (and at that time my site was even less 'fun' than it is now). so my audience just started dumbly at me thinking how much they liked the moving pictures that accompanied Matt's presentation.

After that horrible experience I rushed home and added color to the navigation bars, a logo, moved quiet a few things around, and started to make this site 'funnier'. I'm less than half way through and I present to the class in less than 2 weeks so I'm struggling. the finished product will have more of everything: poems, stories, pictures, tabs, links, and R.E.M. stuff. It will also have video clips for download or viewing and maybe sound clips from R.E.M. songs and all sorts of fun things. I think I'll make my site more navigator 4.05 friendly by offering a slightly different version to those running navigator so they can hear the sounds and play the videos similarly to the ie4 people. If you haven't yet please look at the R.E.M. page and the lyrics offered there as I'm especially proud of what I've done there.

Well I've probably bored the pants off of you so I guess I'll stop now.

Space Cadet signing off now...

- 7:04 p.m.

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