MY LIFE - JUNE 1999

Saturday, June 12, 1999

For the first time in almost a year, I didn't have to get up and go to work on a Saturday. I could sleep in as long as wanted to and didn't have to worry about any distractions at all. So what do I do? I slept until about 2:30 before deciding to get up since it was getting unbelievably warm in my room. I then found that my mom and dad were getting ready to go to a graduation party of some sort. I wasn't interested, but it was made to sound like I should probably go anyway. Just so my dad would stop bugging me, I had him write down the directions to the party, giving him the indication that I would go eventually. I never did.

Instead, I did what I intended to do, and that was absolutely nothing at all. It felt great not having to do anything either. I just sat around on my butt without a care in the world. No one was home to tell me to do anything and no one was certainly going to suddenly show up. So I puttered around for about two hours before getting bored out of my mind. It was just as my mom said. I had no clue what to do with myself today. Nothing. It was too warm to really do anything that required excessive movement, and whenever I did try and do something, I found myself sweating to the point where I thought I was going to drown in my own sweat. I did eventually find things to do, but it wasn't anything too worthwhile. It did feel weird though.

That was one of the downfalls of having the day off. Sure, I lost an hour of pay, but that doesn't really mean much to me right now. What took a bigger hit is my normal routine. This will certainly throw the next few days out of whack for me. For example, I thought today was Sunday since I didn't have to do anything or go anywhere. I'm not really sure how this will effect me over the long run, but anytime there's been a slight change to my routine, something's gone completely out of whack. Last time it was my period of sleep that got thrown completely out of whack. It sounds weird, but it does happen.

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I found out the other night how people can get lost while cruising through the internet. You click on a couple of links and before you know it, you're somewhere where you didn't expect to be. What I had been doing was cruising through the Teen Power web ring, signing guestbooks, trying to raise awareness of my own site, when I found myself at a site that I didn't remember intending on going to. Nevermind it was a nice site, it was just weird how I lost track of where I was going. It probably doesn't help that half the sites on these rings have the code copied wrong or are missing things in the code making it impossible to have smooth navigation. I don't get that at all. More than a few times I became enraged when I tried to go to a previous site and got an error message screen saying that a proper ring ID was needed. Can't these people put code in their site properly? I guess not.

Anyway, I found that half the sites were pretty much all the same thing while a couple were sites hosted by WBS, a hosting service that has a really long and complicated URL for each of its members' sites. All the sites looked the same and all of them had graphics that didn't work or load right. There was even one page that had a series of graphics on them. Only problem was, none of the pages loaded correctly since the wrong information was probably put in. It was real interesting. Oh, and most of those same sites were written by teens who were 13, 14, and 15 years old. They all gave you a sense of deja vu since most of them had similar content, backgrounds, and text fonts, making you wonder if you clicked on the wrong link.

I did find some interesting sites, a few that will be added into The Escape Pod once I go back and write up a small review of each. While I'm at it, I'll be doing a link check on established links to check and see if they all work. With the cancellation of MST3K, just about anything can happen now in terms of those sites, many which will probably be coming down in the near future. In any case, look for a few new links in there shortly as well as a possible new format as well, since I'm pretty much sick of what I have there now.

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Some information to pass along about this site as well. I will begin working with Photoshop to try and set up some new graphics for this site. Title graphics as well as a few other kinds will be the main graphics to be worked on, but I have no idea just how things are going to work out. I have an idea of how I want things to look like, I'm just not set on that. I'll also begin work on a navigation graphic for the frame set-up, which would allow me to put the frame at the top or bottom of the page, where I'd like to have it instead of along the left side. I'm also going to work on removing the border, but that's going to take a little playing around. Naturally, netscape and internet explorer don't recognize the same attribute, which will complicate things a bit.

"Dave's Pop Culture Extravaganza" will be coming down shortly. I just have no desire to run that kind of site right now, nor do I have the time. Hell, I barely have time to run this site. So that will become another casualty of war. A couple other pages may go down too, among them "Headlines". I'm going to continue to review this web site and determine just what I want to come out of it. Most pages will remain up, since people do regularly visit them, but one or two may die, as was the case with "History of Dave's World," which was officially deleted from this site a few weeks ago. Instead, clicking on any link to that page will just take you to a page informing you of that page no longer existing and giving you a list of links that do work.

Another thing that has quietly died is my monthly editorial. This decision came after wondering if there was anything else I could say that hadn't been said already. With My Life expanding and becoming the focus of this site, it became apparent that it was silly to repeat what had been said in previous entries. So I made the decision to stop writing editorials. Old editorials are going to remain up as are the Random Acts of Writing, which I hope to resume writing in "Dave's Forum Center". In addition, Commentary is going to be moving into the forum center as soon as I axe "Headlines."

The changes are finally underway at this site, but I don't expect anything too drastic at this point in time. I've found that the constant change hurts the popularity of a site, and the popularity of this site is still growing. I don't want to do anything that drives people away.

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A couple of people have decided that they don't particularly like all the writing that I do in this site. They want more graphics, they want dancing images, and they want a fancy-ass site overall that dazzles. Guess what? I don't like those kinds of sites at all, which is why I don't make them. I hate sites that focus on graphics and fancy effects to keep people coming. I don't like sites that emphasize glamour and forget about the substance part. I hate going to a site and finding a bunch of images loading before I can do anything. Aside from The Picture Gallery, I have avoided loading this site up with graphics.

The people I want coming to this site are the people who take the time to read the content of a site, not just look at the eye candy and skidaddle onto the next site. I want the people who like to read things, who like to take the time to look around and see what the site has to offer. I know that this isn't a very large portion of the online community, but I know these people are out there because they come to this site. They go to other sites that rely on even few graphics and other eye candy. These are the smart people, the witty people who give a damn about another person. These are the people you enjoy talking to in real life because they take the time to understand you. I don't want the people looking for excessive graphics coming here. All they do is gripe about how dull the site is, write a nasty e-mail, then move onto the next site.

Then there are those people who just have nothing better to do than to be mean. They go through the site, then when they find something that they don't like, they write a nasty e-mail asking how a person could write such offensive material. Nevermind that it's the author's very own opinion. These people take it upon themselves to point out the *mistake* made and just be mean in general. If I were to say something bad about an actor, I'm sure that I'd receive an e-mail about it in the near future from someone who can't believe that I'd badmouth that particular actor. Let's face it people. We all have different tastes and different opinions. That's what makes things so interesting. No one has the exact same opinion on everything. There's always a disagreement somewhere along the line.

There's no need to go out and then write an e-mail and accuse the person who expressed their opinion of being a communist, or of being inferior somehow. Let's face it. I can't stand half the sitcoms out there right now. There are people who'd disagree, and if I were to choose one and call it the worst one ever, someone would be offended. But does that justify them writing an e-mail which is soley to try and badmouth me in return? Maybe, but maybe not. It depends on how far the person goes. If they started calling me names that were just not true or even close to being right, I'd be offended. However, if they just wanted to let me know that they felt differently, I'm fine with that. It's the people who get so hot on a subject that make me wonder.

And while we're at it, let's cut down on the awards shows. Every other week there's one on tv and I just hate those things. An awards show is basically an accuse to get the stars dressed up in next to nothing and to give them more attention and awards that some don't deserve.

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It's final going to end. Monday is going to be an important day for a lot of us. It's finally going to be a nice day with highs only in the mid 70s. I can't wait. And the low temperatures in the upper 40s and lower 50s, bring them on. I can't stand this muggy air any longer....The Indians took their second in a row at Cincinnati tonight behind 6.1 innings of strong pitching by Charles Nagy, who's won five starts in a row. Where are all those people who badmouthed Nagy early in the year at now? He's 8-3, which is good enough for second best record in the AL right now....Anybody got any bug spray? There are bugs everywhere right now. Not just little ones either. There are some big-ass bugs out there right now. My cat got one the other night, and I could not believe the size of the damn thing. It's crazy.