PopWars

We walked through the woods with our neighbors, Rick and Monica, and their dogs. We came out on the gold course and spotted this guy swinging at a dayglo orange ball. The temperature dropped overnight and we got about ten inches of snow so today we skied up to the lake with Olga. We hooked up with Brian Williams later on and I helped him with his computer. He had the same problem my father had with his iPhoto library getting too big for his computer only Brian’s problem was with his iTunes folder getting too big his computer. I wish I could find someone to help me with my php/mysql problems.

The Democrat & Chronicle’s Jack Garner reviewed our new cd over the weekend.
MARGARET EXPLOSION: LIVE DIVE. Rochester’s most unique band offers a new collection of live tracks, recorded over four years at various local venues. ME is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea (and what sort of artist would ever want to be?). They play spacey, floating dreamscapes with smart improvisational skill, carefully listening to each other as they move forward with their own slices of mercurial, musical mood. I’m reminded of some of the Scandinavian free jazz one would hear on ECM Records over the years. Most of the tracks are relatively abstract. One cut, though, offers what surely must be the most offbeat ode to a deceased artist. Who would have thought they’d create a tune called “Sleep Michael Jackson?” — Jack Garner

Steve Hoy called yesterday to alert me to the fact that PopWars was down. Not just the blog but the site. I think the server went down. And when it came back the last few weeks of posts were missing. Looks like that was the most recent back up they had. So I used Google’s cached versions of the blog entries to sort of restore. It was a little tricky reentering the comments. As I was piecing it back together Steve sent this note.

“good to see you back up paul, altho looks like you are missing the last couple posts. dont worry, tiger woods has been having the exact same problem. Seriously, marshall mcluhan would be proud of POP WARS. i need you guys to be there for me, keep up the good work. also updates on sparky and the old man neighbor you have are always appreciated.”

Muhammad Ali is quoted as saying, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was. ” And he is even a bigger star than James Brown. We watched “Soul Power” at the George Eastman House’s Dryden Theater over the weekend. It’s really the outtakes from “When We Were Kings” which Peggi and I saw at the Little Theater with my father a few years back. But these outtakes are all music scenes from the 1974 concert and championship fight in Zaire, Africa. And it just when you think it couldn’t get any better than James Brown at his peak performing in Africa Muhammad Ali steals the scene.

Why didn’t we go hear Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings when they were in town last week because we are spoiled. We saw the Godfather of Soul (GFOS) a few times (Red Creek and the Auditorium Theater). In this movie James wore a wide scarf-like garment wrapped around his waist with “GFOS” printed on it and Peggi and I kept thinking of of Rochester’s “AKOS”, Mike Allen. But Mike could never get away with performing “I’m Black and I’m Proud” like James does here. I loved that song when it came out but that was easy. Duane went to a mostly black high school on Rochester’s west side and he said it was too much. James Brown even stopped performing the song because the song cost him a lot of my crossover audience. I noticed in the credits that Rochester’s Pee Wee Ellis gets co-writing credits for “I’m Black and I’m Proud”.

We finished our MySQL job and succesfully linked the first column of this page to a drawing with specs that come from the data base. Amazing. Of course we had help from Bill Jones and the flute player.

We took a break from our web design work, put old clothes on and went out to work in the yard for an hour or so yesterday. We were expecting a few calls so we took our phone with us and set it down next to the brick walkway that we were relaying. Our 92 year old neighbor, Leo, stopped by to see what we were up to and and said, “If I set my phone down like that I would never see it again. I loose everything”. We laughed. We got a few calls and then came in to work. The phone rang again and we couldn’t find it. Still can’t.

Michael Greenberger came back into town to pick up his car. Remember, it broke down on the NYS Thruway near Henrietta as they were passing Rochester? He stayed at our place and we stayed up too late gabbing. He gave us a short stack of Duplex Planet magazines, a box of Ernest Brookings matches (in return for the Margo Explo matches we gave him) and a bunch of NRBQ releases. David did their artwork when they were a band and he does Terry Adam’s art now. We made plans to make plans to do a project together.

We took Anne Havens‘ computer apart to install more ram and now we’re updating her OS. Keep your fingers crossed that it reboots ok.

That’s my ringer underneath Rick’s leaner. If the leaner came after the ringer does it cancel the ringer?

Our neighbor is 92 and still driving but he is forgetting his way around the city. The other day he drove up and down Hudson Avenue looking for a place that had closed decades ago. He rang our bell this morning asking directions to Rowe Photo on Mount Hope.

I was pulling my hair out with this jquerry ThickBox script until Bill Jones troubleshot our work and found that I had to remove an @ in the thickbox.js code.

I brought up a Google map and showed our neighbor how to get to Rowe but I could see he wasn’t quite following it. He told me “he’s getting soft in the head”. I asked him what he was going out there for and he said that his camera was broken. I took a look at it and found he had locked the card so that he couldn’t write to it. I opened the photos that were already on the card including the photo he took in Rowe Photo when he bought the thing. I found one of him and his lady friend and I cloned his face onto the woman’s head. He asked if he could do that with his computer. I said “sure” but then he told me he had hired someone to help him with his pc twice at 90 bucks per visit and it still wasn’t working right. I’m quite sure the computer is fine. I told him that sounds like some easy money, easier than jquerry implementation, and I laughingly told him to call us next time.

My brother is a mason and he bids on some pretty big projects. A few weeks ago he drove to Buffalo to pick up some plans that the builder wanted to email him. He didn’t have a computer then but he does now. He had a pc years ago when his daughter was in her teens and she brought the computer to its knees with viruses. I encouraged him to buy a Mac this time and he did so we’ve been doing phone support all week. We told our neighbor to buy a Mac too but he found a cheaper pc.

I used to be much more competitive when I was younger. Sports is about all I did in my teens and the drive to be better propelled me. We have horseshoe pits in our front yard and Rick from across the street will play at the drop of a hat. I just have to go out front and clang the shoes together. Rick called the other day while we were still working. I picked up the phone and all he said was, “Clang, Clang”. Of course he beat me so we played another and he beat me again. I try my best to hit the stake but I have the hardest time keeping score. I can’t bring myself tally the points. I don’t really care who wins. I’m thinking I’ve gone soft in the head.

Found some more cans near a turn in the road on Hoffman today. We brought them home.

Spent a good part of the day trying to develop this template with vertical centering. I manage to get it working but I created a page that had no scroll bars in any browser. With Joe Tunis‘s help, I got the scroolbars back but then lost the centering. This test has a table in there to help control the madness between browsers.I would like to do this without tables and this is as far as I’ve gotten here.

I say “I” but all I have done is search the web for help in executing this design. I wrote about this project a few days ago and Martin Edic sent me a link to a blog that had a great piece on vertical centering with css.

“I get high with a little help from my friends”.

I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to get the contents of a html/php page to stay centered vertically, as well as horizontally, no matter how big you open the browser window and no matter how much content is on the page. This used to be easy with tables but I’m trying to do it with CSS. I came awake early this morning thinking about this. I’ve been using bits and pieces of various people’s code to develop this thing. When I put paragraph returns or includes or just about ay more content into this this thing thing it all falls apart.

I am trying to come up with a template that I can use on the Refrigerator and other sites. The template has an include for the header, footer and Goggle ads (if I go that route) and I want to get the Google search bar in the header of each page. Yesterday I got the logo graphic (with its link) to change on a rollover with css so I don’t have to pile on that java script. I found a pretty cool  trick here for that. And I still need to develop a Spry menu bar for the header so you can navigate the site. It has been getting so complicated that I keep wondering what exactly is wrong with one link on each page that goes back to an index page that has links for anywhere you might want to go on the site.

I have been obsessing over this project of building a webpage that could serve as a template for whole portions of a website. I want to do it without tables. I would like a header of a fixed height to stay at the top and a footer to stay stuck to the bottom and both of them would be php includes so I can update the whole thing in one document. And in between that I would like to float the content, centered horizontally and vertically, no matter what the actual height of the content is or how big the browser window is. This guy has a pretty nice solution for part of the problem.

I’m sitting over at Jerome’s Ignition while Igor looks at our car. It’s been making a clunking noise in the front end. This is already sounding like a Click and Clack episode. We are planning to drive to New York soon to see the Marlene Dumas show at the Modern and we are a little concerned about the thump. Igor didn’t see anything so he took it for a spin. When he got back he noticed that the lug nuts on our left front tire were loose. These guys are the best in the world. If only they had a wireless connection here.

I didn’t sleep very well last night and while I was awake I started worrying about my opening tomorrow night. Somebody was saying if I call it an “opening” that would not imply free food but if I call it an “opening reception” that would imply free food. I put “opening reception” on the post card so I stand to look like a cheapskate. I don’t really understand all the protocol of openings and what little I do understand I resist. For instance I can’t bring my own food or beverages in there because that’s their (not for profit) business. I could buy food from them and serve that for free but that’s part I don’t get.

Painting class started up again at the Creative Workshop and my father did some quick watercolor sketches from photos he took on Sunday night of Margaret Explosion on WXXI’s “OnStage”. I took this photo over his shoulder. I’m not sure that he spelled “Margaret ” right but I like the magic carpet under us.

The sun never appeared today. In fact the five day forecast, as unreliable as that is, calls for rain on Saturday and Sunday and then on Monday we’re supposed to get the remnants of Ike. So we stuck close to our computers and got sort of caught up with our 4D work. I had time to sort photos that were still on my camera and found this one of the back of the house under the brush. That trim around the windows is now dark brown and I took the newspapers off tonight. We still have window trim, the doors and the porch to do when the rain stops.

I chased a couple of deer out the garden. They were eatting the tops off our tomato plants. I clapped my hands and yelled “hey” and they ran. One of them crashed into the fence but shook it off and ran. Peggi’s helping John Gilmore with his computer. He used this near government level “FileVault” encription on his files and then his “User” folder got corrupted. We were able to recue the files from his old system and we did an erase and install. John brought a fish fry over for us from Captain Jim’s in our old neighborhood. And he gave us a cd copy of the new Brian Wilsom album from vinyl.