The (Ch|K)ristine’s have a very cool new site called Picture Yourself which is a photo site which features pictures where the subject is also the photographer. I think this is a very fun idea, and I look forward to seeing the site grow. Go check it out and submit any photos you might have. I’ve sent one in already.
Monthly Archives: September 2002
Klip Me!
Thanks to the wonderful Kymberlie (isn’t that an interesting spelling?) I have been able to set up a Klipfolio for this site, which you can get by clicking here. I’ve also added an item to the menu, so if you put it off for a month and the entry has faded into the archives, they’ll be a convenient link where you can still get this channel. This is a very useful tool, and since I’ve started using it I have become addicted to the live updates that it delivers.
Great Google Article
I just read an amazing article on Google called Pagerank: Google’s Original Sin. Now it brings up some interesting points about how PageRank technology works creates a reinforcing cycle of “rich” websites getting richer and bestowing their “riches” on partners and such. Frankly though, I think the article is a little whiny. If you can’t get a PageRank above 5, then you’re doing something wrong on your site. As a webmaster who has created about two dozen sites on as many domains, even with the earliest have decent PageRanks. If you write a page with good semantically meaningful markup and have useful content, people will find it even if the PageRank isn’t spectacular, and if people find it and it’s truly useful, they’ll link to it. Also most of the tips and tricks I’ve seen for optimizing for search engines also make sense for users. If your page is about a subject, but it in your title! Put it in the URI! Use real headings! Keep the most significant content above the fold! I guess it seems logical now, but I can’t say honestly that I followed all these rules when I was first starting out.
An example of what I consider to be meaningful markup and URIs would be Mullenweg.com. It has a ton of unique content and information (thanks to my wonderful sister), yet the front page has a measly PageRank of 5, and it goes down from there. However it averages 47 unique visitors a day, and the vast majority of them come from Google. Why? Because you find stuff there that simply isn’t anywhere else.
That said, PageRank can be frustrating for me simply because I feel trapped by it’s quantified measure of importance. While I don’t have any sites below 5, I also don’t have any above 6. Breaking the 6 barrier has been quite a challenge, and I don’t see it happening any time soon. Oh well. 6 is respectable, right? And she said PageRank doesn’t really matter . . .
Driving Story
You know how sometimes when you’re walking under a tree after it’s rained and someone shakes a branch while you’re under it and it drips all its drops on you? Something similar happened to me while I was driving today down Weslayan in West University, a street which doesn’t commonly have eighteen-wheelers on it, but I was behind one. Anyway this huge moving truck would shake all the trees when it went under them and they would rain on me. My car emerged slightly wet, but covered in flowers, so this cloud had a silver lining.
Oh My!
To those of you who may have tried to validate this page in the few days may have run into a mess of errors! In reality, there was just one error, a missing end tag for a paragraph element, but it was causing the validator to throw several errors up. If validator error messages scare you and XHTML sounds like something from a Transformers episode, you might want to read Zeldman’s Better Living Through XHTML. Satisfaction guaranteed.
Feeling Better
The cold is starting to subside, and things are clearing up. I’ve only missed one day of classes and I’m looking forward to going back tomorrow. I went by Fry’s today to pick up some wireless networking equipment for a client (setting up wireless networks is a gas!) and took the oppurtunity to pick up some of those blue LED fans that they sell there. Not only do they look pretty darn cool, but they seem to work better and ‘fan’ more than my old ones. However with a grand total of five fans running in my tower now, it sounds like a plane is taking off when I bot up. I’ll take some pictures soon! I still have some picture catching up to do though.
Iraq Agrees to Readmit Inspectors
Iraq Agrees to Readmit Inspectors, U.N. Says–and not a moment too soon. It was starting to get hot in here.
Record Streak Broken
My sinuses do not get along with the rest of my body.
I seem to have contracted what I can only hope is a common cold, with all the symptoms to be expected with such a malady. Now beyond the normal yuckiness, this is espescially a bummer (technical term) because I haven’t gotten sick in a while. Not a while like my Dad, who is remarkably healthy, but long in Matt-time, about 3-4 months. This might not seem significant but if you’ve known me for a while you know that sometimes I’m liable to get sick a lot for extended periods of time. I credit my run of healthiness at least in part to my health-nut former economics teacher, who showed me the wisdom in good living. Overall I’m not too worried about this; I can judge these things pretty well by now and I should be able to get this out of the way pretty soon. Or at least I better–I’m too busy not to! Maybe that’s why I haven’t gotten sick lately, I just haven’t had time.
Fair Competition
I’m trying out different email clients, because my mail is now all IMAP and I’m not tied to Outlook anymore, and I noticed something very interesting: when Outlook XP was running Eudora would not install. It just struck me as funny. Another funny thing I noticed when I was trying to set up someone’s computer yesterday was that Windows XP will not allow a user called “Bob.” Since the person I was installing XP for actually went by the name Bob, this struck me as a little annoying. It must be a feature.
Gallery: 9-15-2002
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Roy Hargrove
I saw an absolutely amazing concert by Roy Hargrove, jazz legend, at the new jazz club, IRIS. The venue was really nice and it was pleasing to see a new place just for jazz listening, even if their musical lineup tends to lean a little towards the smooth. Roy Hargrove and his band just blew the roof off. His large jam group was comprised up two drum sets, an organist, keyboard player (Robert Glasper, HSPVA grad), guitar, bass, vocalist (who was excellent), and two sax players (on alto and tenor was Keith Anderson). The grooves were hard and the music was incredibly energetic. One thing I really enjoyed was how the band built solos, starting it chill and then taking it to a very high level, with the crowd in hysterics. It was very well put together show, and you could tell the musicians had their act together.
I got to talk to Robert for a while and he is a very interesting cat. We talked a bit about piano players, and he suggested I check out more Lenny Tristano, Ahmad Jamal, and Keith Jarrett. He told me a bit about some of the musicians he has played with in New York, which included pretty much every big name I’ve heard of, including Wynton Marsalis, Christian McBride, Kenny Garrett . . . We talked about his sense of time, which I’ve heard stories about from David a bit. In his trio instead of feeling a beat or measure, he can feel a section, be it eight bars or thirty-two. It allows the music to move in different directions, but still land right. This is really unique and I’d like to hear more of his playing so I could get a better sense of it. He has a new album on its way so I’ll definitely want to check that out. He also gave an interesting perspective on the “Jazz died with Trane” argument: he said that because people Trane did so much and were at such a high level, musicians put them on a pedestal and say to themselves that they’ll never be that good. This mental block actually prevents musicians from advancing because they already have this limit of how far things can go, a pre-conceived idea of that the highest level is. Of course things can always be taken higher, but it takes someone with a lot of guts and talent to do it. I think that Branford doing A Love Supreme (arguably best Coltrane recording ever) on his latest album is a good example of people with a respect and understanding of the past, but still trying to take things to a different level. Jazz shouldn’t move horizontally, it should be moving forward. Look at how much changed from 1940-1960 in jazz, now look back two decades and think of what has really blown you away. Let me know what you think. I know I’ll be thinking about it a lot.
Update: The pictures from tonight are now online.
Kel’s Birthday Photos
Surprise!
Tonight myself and about 30 other local jazz musicians presented Kelly Dean with his belated 40th birthday present, an iPod. He’s really wanted one of these for the longest time and the look on his face when he got it was amazing. Things were put together relatively hastily, starting when he left for a 5 day cruise on Saturday with an idea. Got in touch with Dana Rogers and she was a huge help in contacting so many people, in fact the majority of the musicians who donated she called. Kel had a gig tonight with Erin Wright at The River Café on Montrose, which turned into a birthday celebration, culminating with the presentation of the iPod, which had been hidden inside a Vaio box :). Pictures will go up tomorrow morning. I’d like to thank the following people, a veritable who’s who list of Houston jazz:
Gallery: 9-13-2002
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Dave Barry
Dave Barry – On hallowed ground is one of the best articles I read yesterday. There was quite a range, from an utterly offensive editorial in The Daily Cougar to the dozens of touching accounts I read on different blogs.
Greyscale
A return to normalcy? Not quite, but it’s a beginning. Grief is a natural reaction to extraordinary events, it’s a protection mechanism to help us cope. However when it’s prolonged it can have the negative effect of holding us from moving forward. It’s impossible not to grieve with the images being shown on every station and website, however, things must move forward. I think that a lot of people took a step back and thought about things yesterday, and I couldn’t think of a better way to honor the memory of September 11th.
9/11 is a flashbulb memory for most everyone; every trivial detail about where we were, who we were with is burned into our memories. For my generation, this is really the first event of that kind, thankfully. I tried to think of today as a day of quiet introspection–remembrances, resolutions, emotions, and most of all, examination of today’s events. Where has the US gone since 9/11? I think reaction-ism on the part of some lawmakers has hurt the very things we’re trying to protect: our liberty, freedom, and ultimately, safety for ourselves and our progeny.
Anyway, mostly because I don’t want these things to fade in my own mind, I have set it up so on the 11th of every month the memorial (greyscale) theme will load for that day.
Gallery: 9-12-2002
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Google Image Hits
98% of the last 200 hits on swcdesign.com have been from images.google.com; I don’t often get hits from there so I decided to investigate what was causing such a ruckus and huge spike in traffic. Well it turns out a picture I made last year right around this time is on the tenth page of results for searches on “911” in Google images. On the tenth page and it hundreds of people a day have been following the link. I think it speaks a little to people’s thoughts at the moment, I know that personally I rarely go past the second page of results, especially on Google.
More importantly, it’s a somber reminder of the fast approaching anniversary of a date that at least in my mind I’ve been avoiding. Yesterday a lady told me a story about her brother who signed a lease that morning on an office in the WTC and was on his way to look at it when the first plane hit. Her other brother was forced to jump in the river when the towers collapsed. Both were okay. Every time someone mentions the event it seems I hear a new story almost too incredible for belief, but you know they’re mostly true. Still the incredible stories of survival only seem to whet my taste for real answers to the events.
Three hundred and sixty-four days later, what have we done? We’ve bombed the hell out of a third world country, caught a few underlings, spent $80 billion, took away more than a few personal liberties, and we’re now at the brink of war with an oil superpower. Very smart thing to do during a recession. I admit that I’ve always supported the Bush administration. Bush himself isn’t the most competent guy but he handled an emergency relatively well, and he surrounds himself with some of the best and brightest in the country (with the notable exception of John Ashcroft and John Poindexter). Now you have talk of Colin Powell not coming back for a second term, of course assuming that the administration makes it that far. The backlash has been brewing for weeks; people want results. Eighty billion dollars and they can’t even produce a body? The news media is pouncing in its traditional fashion, and there has been a rash of meta-news and meta-meta-news, and the world doesn’t need any more of that here. I won’t be posting Wednesday, but what I’m going to keep in my mind is that the terrorists were trying to destroy something much larger than the twin towers last year, and it’s up to everyone on a personal level to make sure they don’t succeed.
How Big?
I know at some point you’ve wondered just how big this site really is. Or not. But if you want to know how much space all those dang pictures take up check out the new feature on the Zeitgeist. All the stats on that page are live!
Gallery: 9-10-2002
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