. . . : ; C h i c o ' s G r o o v e ; : . . . . . . : ; . . . : ; evifytfif - january 11, 2001 . . . : ; . . . : ; http://www.disobey.com/ . . . : ; The "ARGH..." Notice Bad mood. Go away. . . . : ; The "HEY!" Notice Don't you listen? Damn! . . . : ; ANNOUNCEMENTS and trust my heart... NEW DEVIL SHAT (#Seventy): Ever heard of Blogger.com? News and media has taken an incredible liking to it... in short, it allows easy creation and updating of webpages, without having to worry about FTP settings, archiving, HTML, and all that other "look! i'm a webmaster!" crap. Morbus wants to wring it's blue and orange neck, even though he thinks it's a wonderful tool. Why the double standard? Read "Why Blogger Empowers Mindless Nits" in the latest issue. GAMEGRENE?!: Gamegrene.com received numerous updates over the past month, along with the constant addition of content for your gaming pleasure. The whole flipping thing is now XHTML compliant, there's a spiffy new busy background as well as some updates to the icons used for the different sections. And merging sections need apply as "Support" and "Open Source" disappear in favor of "Game Material" and "Experience" turns into "Stories". Finally, the logo was tweaked to be more powerful. Check it out, stay awhile, and as always, send in your comments. NEW BOX CODE: That damn "box" that appears on various Devil Shat pages, heralding a subscription form and crosslinks to other Disobey releases was updated with brand new code, and loss of an image. It's generally smaller and faster. It's also more on/off-ish, so that a few lines of code control what you do or don't see. It's geeky neat. It'll be even better soon enough though - lots of ideas spiralling around my webs. MASSIVE COLLECTED UPDATES: Collected Works, fiction that would make Vonnegut blush with envy, received a minor visible code update, but a large one in the backend. You can now comment on all pages, the site is XHTML compliant, the new box was added, and there was minor formatting changes here and there. And yeah, I'm still promising new stories "soon". Just hush. MINOR UPDATES: The world of "bwahahaha" hit Morbus, as he went around and spent time moving the tag in HTML to above the <meta> tags for any of the XHTML pages. If you have no clue what I'm talking about, don't worry - it's tedious, pointless, and serves no purpose besides satisfying some weird feng shui ideals. A robots.txt file was also added recently, mainly cos I got sick and damn tired about seeing it in my error log. Damn spiders should learn. COWPOKE-CMS SORTA: I built the perl script that currently runs Gamegrene.com and NetSlaves.com (as well as a few other sites run by friends). I had no intention of actually releasing it to the public, but after having it compared favorably to Vignette StoryServer (yeah, those John Tesh's enemies), I decided to make it ... "user-friendly". The first step in that direction was to make the script "developer-friendly". That's done, with modularization, blackboxing, and commenting as the fruit of my loins (and very big loins, yes). Next, is to finish some tutorials. From there, it'll be up on SourceForge as version 0.5. 1.0 is probably a year away <g>... . . . : ; EVERYTHING else and behind these tired eyes. SCHEDULING REGIME: A little upset that I didn't get as many things done as I wanted (probably playing too much Tony Hawk Pro Skating 2, which, trust me, is beckoning me as I type), I started using a self-imposed scheduling regime, which lists priority, section, description, expected time required, and real time required. It's nothing you care about, obviously, but it should prove enlightening once I get better at estimating time required. Maybe I'll get crap done faster. Don't know. I'm preaching to a wall, I know. Sigh. NEW COMPUTER: After the divesting of NetSlaves, I had a nice sum of money which I promptly invested into a new Macintosh g4. Yes, I'm a Mac fan - it sits nicely next to my PC as well as my Linux boxen. A g4 dual processor, with 192 megs of RAM. Sniff, it's a beautiful little machine, replacing my crappy 72mhz PowerMac. Quite a difference, lemme tell ya. Of course, fate played the right hand, and made me fuck-ass sick the first two weeks after I got the machine. I was miserably happy. Or happily miserable. Hmm... which is more fitting? . . . : ; BLAHBLAHS OF THE WEEK: ( december 15th - january 11th ) [Happy-Surprise-of-the-Week]-= Cartoon! Cartoon! ---As often happens when you've got tons of electrical toys, some ---moron plugged in a toaster, and we lost power. Dead, dead, dead. ---So, during that ever enjoyable experience of reprogramming the ---VCR, I realized that I now get Cartoon Network. You don't know ---how happy that makes me! That was the last channel that I ---"wanted". It's certainly gotten a workout - tuned almost all ---the time. Cos, hell, they got Thundercats. Hoooooooooo! [Never-Thought-I'd-of-the-Week]-= Learn Photoshop ---I've been a vocal dissident concerning Photoshop 6, to the point ---that I'd be shunned and ignored by those who are in the special ---"Photoshop Rullezzzzz" club. I always wondered how to draw a ---box within Photoshop, and after numerous various methods (none ---of which were intuitive), the Adobe people themselves said to ---"buy Illustrator if you want to do something that simple." (this ---was from a Mac tradeshow a few years back). I never give up ---though, and after reading a review over at MacAddict.com, was- ---happily surprised to see they added a shape tool, as well as ---better text handling (another beef). I've started learning. ---Never thought I'd be pleased with Photoshop. Sadly, I'm ---getting there. Now I need to find another popular program to ---bitch about. Sniff, sniff, sniff. . . . : ; The Issue Was Rushed Out Like A Discovered Whore . . . : ; SUBSCRIBE: majordomo@disobey.com BODY: Subscribe ChicosGroove . . . : ; UNSUBSCRIBE: majordomo@disobey.com BODY: Unsubscribe ChicosGroove