Monday, July 6, 1998

        When I got up this morning I got on the computer and pulled up the frames project I was working on last night, and it worked perfectly. The one that was driving me crazy last night. As far as I can tell, it was a Netscape cache problem or something. The coding was fine, but it wasn't working right. A little later something else wouldn't work right, but if I closed Netscape down and re-opened it, it was fine. So I'm not sure what that was all about, but I'm glad at least that I really was doing it right.

        It never fails to amaze me how I can sit down at the computer and start working on something like this, and two or three hours pass in the blink of an eye. I suddenly realized that it was almost three o'clock and I hadn't had lunch yet, and I was starving. So I went up to Schlotzky's and had lunch, and watched some workmen install a new oven. I love eating there, but at lunch time it's always packed and I always had to plan my lunch hour so I went late if I wanted to get in. It's pretty empty at 3:00, though, which was nice, but also a little weird.

        After lunch I wandered around Hobby Lobby and bought some sandpaper to sand the chair I painted a couple of days ago, and then went next door to the drugstore to pick up some toothpaste and ended up buying some fake ice for the cooler and some very, very dark blue nail polish . . . with a tiny bit of glitter. For my toes. Maybe. I love that Revlon Street Wear stuff. This one is called "Dark." I also bought some for my fingernails, one called "Plastic," a clear polish with a little bit of pinkish orange color in it, and one called "Glow," which is the same color but with a sort of mica-like fleck in it.

        I'm upstairs now, working on the desktop computer in the office. I started out here this morning working on the bookeeping stuff for the company, and I started this journal entry on it, so I had to come up and upload it to my server so that I could go back downstairs and work on it on the laptop, which is my preferred writing method. It feels weird sitting up here in the evening with Bob downstairs.

        Now I'm back downstairs on the laptop. I've scrapped the frames design. It's just too clunky and cumbersome. It can be done well, but I just don't feel like doing it right now. It looked okay on the big computer, but on the tiny laptop screen it looks awful, and I really do try to design stuff that looks okay on any kind of equipment. And also, I started it in Dreamweaver and assumed that I could open it up in Visual Page and finish it. But no, it doesn't seem to work that way, which really surprises and disappoints me. I guess I should try it the other way around and see if that works. Of course, I can open it up in Notepad and edit it that way, but I don't feel like it.

        The reason I don't have the Dreamweaver demo on the laptop is that I'm out of hard drive space. I don't have any room for anything else. And I don't have a CD drive on this computer either. Bob was talking today about buying me a new laptop. I'm resisting it because we really don't need to spend the money, but this one has locked up on me twice tonight and I really do need to get it fixed or do something else, I guess.

Later . . .

        We went to see Armageddon tonight. I thought it was wonderful. Much better than Deep Impact, which I liked, too. I thought the whole romance thing, though, was sort of silly and could have been dispensed with, but other than that, I thought it was great. I'm a pretty easy movie audience, I think. I get pretty immersed in a film and don't worry about how things are done or whether or not they're realistic unless they're really, obviously bad. I almost always like Bruce Willis, and I like movies about the space program, and I'm sort of a sucker for the "rag-tag band of losers saving the world" sort of plot. I like Will Patton; when I see him in something I always remember that I listened to him read the audio version of Robert Pirsig's "Lila."

        The Bryce book that I ordered from Amazon came today and while I was watching the movie, I was thinking about how I could achieve similar scenes in Bryce. Thinking about creating an asteroid belt, and a scene from another planet with Earth in the distance, and various planets and stars in the sky . . . The reason I wanted this book is that it actually tells you how to do things. The manual tells you how things work, how and why the various controls work, but it doesn't actually tell you how to make anything. This book does, and gives lots of examples of things that you can create. I've been having fun just playing around with it and discovering things on my own, but I was getting a little frustrated by wanting to make specific things and not knowing how, and not being able to figure it out. So hopefully this will help. It will at least give me new things to think about.