Archive for category Ａｂｏｕｔ

Added a youtube playlist to the sidebar. It just has one video in it right now: Evelyn Glennie’s TED talk which I used to have embedded in there direct from the TED site. It never really embedded right, but I kinda liked how it looked in there provided the screen resolution was set to whatever. The youtube embed adjusts along with the resolution:

Here the TED version is an obvious win, but it’s pretty zoomed in. What happens the smaller you make it:

I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out. I needed the module to be 300 px across to match the width of the album covers and that mattered more than getting all the frame in there. Everything else distorted the video itself withing the frame. (I didn’t think of screencapping my attempts when I was originally working on this, here is the page with the original code; here is one with my code.) I kept it like that for so long cause I was proud of my half-solution to the resizing problem, because it really seemed like that thing did not want to be resized. If anyone can figure it out I’m still curious. This started as a design issue, but I should really learn more about code in general.

Now that I’ve changed it, I kinda like that the TED slogan isn’t there anymore. But the slight border was nice and I’d like to change the thumbnail. I think there might be a way to change this within the youtube code. I’m going to keep messing with it. And I keep messing with the links, I dunno. Some links I took off if I’m following them through blogger, or twitter. It’s the ones I’ve subscribed directly to the RSS or sites I don’t want to forget. Every time I try to split up the links into more categories it causes a glitch that erases the underlining on the category name, which is awful, just awful! I know. This is all ridiculous. Also I’m keeping the Japan Society donation thing, which is not ridiculous, even though donating to the Red Cross at this point may accidentally be helping Americans hit by tornadoes and such, which you would never do otherwise, obviously. Man, I joke about my record collection and what not being a disaster, but at least it’s only scattered around this room and not over several square miles and/or the bottom of the ocean. Maybe it would be a huge relief losing the ability to obsess endlessly about it. Hopefully it never comes to that.

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Deleted my podomatic account. Second time. The less said about the first one might be the better. It was a futile attempt to stop myself from ruining my old blog, which I started doing something like a podcast on, but it kept derailing miserably. The move to the podomatic site did not improve things. Let’s say it was a learning experience. But the learning didn’t stop there, oh no. After writing the site off completely, I found several people doing interesting shows, and it looked like they were fixing up the site quite a bit. I made a new account, and lost no time turning a whole new show into a whole new complete disaster. I was working through some stuff. But forget about the show, I could now use the site to keep up with all these new podcasts! I can follow 10, 20…no better keep that within multiples of 3 so the grid fills out evenly…yes, yes!

Now, most of the shows I was following have stopped and the site’s updates have stagnated. Plenty of people still use the site, but 90% of them appear to be house DJs* and they’re all friends with each other and they all want to be friends with you if you play even one housey J-pop track (which, I did…nice video). I don’t hate it, but it’s become like the myspace of podcasting sites. It’s a good place to start.

So here are the ones I was following at one point or another:

 
I should really post some stuff to Soundcloud.

*probably not true; probably should be

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As you transglide the webcloud, do you tend to accumulate bookmarks to read later, then spend hours, categorizing them, sorting them into carefully labeled folders, arranging to folders into yet more folders, until all those folders go into one big folder that goes right into the trash can? Are you sure you want to delete this folder? Oh fuck yes, just get me away from this bullshit, oh god? Of course you do, you’re reading a blog with almost no useful information and possibly even less entertainment value. But we can’t always help ourselves. Binging is always easiest but I’ve had a problem with purging lately. I blame the earthquake. I’m going to do some more posts on/in Japanese and some Japan stuff, mostly music-related but not all…maybe I could write a record review or two (gosh!). Anyway, I’m a bastard with procrastination. (Like, hypothetically speaking, suppose I had to write some record reviews…with no deadlines, how can they be written at the last minute?) It’s shitty. I’ve never gotten freelance work cause I know I’d fuck it up. (Well, I’m trying to train myself out of it…)

Enough about me. Wait this whole post is about me. Me and my backlog. Yep, just keep tellin yourself that…no that’s it. It’s just that I was ok with letting crap pile up while I was studying, I had a really good momentum going. Then you figure, what’s the point learning to deal with a country that’s totally fucked. I know it’s not totally fucked, (on a scale on fucked, America’s not really much less) but it’s hard to focus in the same way. I think I’m over it, but I was so locked in to just reading every single news story, or anything else that would distract me from those news stories, it’s like I was going through every link like it was a study item. And there’s no next level on the internet. It’s just tubes that you…surf. Fuck! Whatever.

I realize the irony of writing about studying when I could be studying, but I’m trying to keep it on top. I already put in a couple hours today. I enjoy it. It seems like my most likely lead in life for making any kind of decent living and I need to really keep drilling that into my head. Been thinking about going back into retail lately. Retail sucks but it’s the easiest way to get a decent steady paycheck with a 39.75 hour week. (I currently only work about 12-20 hours a week, which was fine when I was doing side photo work, that work dried up so I’ve just been scraping by.) Then I could afford to get my Bachelor’s and pay off my credit cards.

Or I could have my eyeballs removed and do skullfucking porn. Depends on the hours.

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