July 17, 1998

Friday, July 17, 1998

Today was a long, lazy day spent at the computer. Bob spent the night out at John's, so I slept in even though I didn't stay up terribly late last night, well, maybe it was 2:00 a.m. . . . I can't remember. Anyway, I slept until about 9:30 when I was woken, as usual, by the telephone. It was someone calling with a free life insurance policy for three months. Not five minutes later, someone else called wanting to send us five years' worth of free magazines. My standard response is, "I'm not interested, thank you," and then I hang up the phone. Sometimes I can still hear their little tinny voice coming out of the receiver. It makes me feel a little bit guilty, but I really don't have any patience for it.

Bob is upstairs taking a nap. I went up and laid down with him for a few minutes, but then got up to come down and write. He asked me what I was going to write about and I said I didn't know yet, and he said, sleepily, "Well, you can write that you spent the whole day working on the computer, that you didn't leave the house at all, and that it was a nice, quiet day, but that the other day you went out and bought a new little chair to paint, and some flower decals or something, and then do one of your lists: "toothpaste, tooth brush, pain pills, shaving cream, band-aids." And there you go."

My list for tomorrow is:

Diet Coke
Diet 7-Up
Toilet paper
Dishwashing liquid
Brown tie
TV Guide

Boring, isn't it?

There's a new reflection linked from the front page: Summer Vacation. It's not especially "reflective" this time, I don't think. It's just sort of a Thank You to the powers that be for allowing me this summer to play. It's been an incredible tonic for me. I was extremely stressed out when I left my last job, and while it wasn't as apparent to me as it might have been, I was also sort of depressed. Understandable, I suppose, since I was working in a job that I wasn't crazy about, not using any of my creative abilities and just trying to make it through the days. Anyway, these six weeks have been wonderful. And now I'm ready to go back to work. It's been a great vacation. I have one more week left . . .

This morning I put a picture of Gretchen and Stefani's mom in the Photo Album. I couldn't think what to do with it for a long time, but it finally came to me. It's a cool picture, from 1964:

I also worked on a music page today, as promised. I got my CD box out of the car and took it upstairs to the office, put a CD in the CD drive, turned up the volume, and started scanning in CD cover art. That was the easy part. The hard part was writing the descriptive text. Like I say on the page, I don't know anything about music, I just know when something moves me. And that feeling is hard to describe. I know what I like, but I don't know how to express it in a way that makes sense to other people, or that conveys what a particular song means to me, how it makes me feel. But the beginning is here: The Music Room.

This week I've also been working on a tutorial in collaboration with David Knopfler called "HTML for Technophobes." I wasn't going to talk about it yet, because it's just in the very beginning stages, but someone wrote tonight and asked how to get started making a website, and that's the point of the book as we envision it--to write an accessible, easily understood introduction to HTML for people that don't have a technical background or any experience in computer programming, but want to build a website or update one that someone else started for them. It's fun, and interesting, although I think my next assignment is going to be something boring like forms . . .

I'm learning things in the process, too. Yesterday I read David's chapter on Javascript and found out that you can put Javascript code in a separate document and call it from an HTML page, thereby keeping the original page less cluttered and making it load faster. I immediately tried it by putting Javascript rollover buttons on all my secondary pages by simply referencing the same Javascript page. Worked like a charm.