Category: Geekery

  • DVD stands for, er, movies in my living room!

    After months and years of wanting and waiting and whining, I finally busted out and bought a DVD player for the home-entertainment rack. It’s the Toshiba SD-2800, their budget-priced component deck. So far it’s been a reliable, beautiful piece of hardware.

    We also picked up the DVD titles Chicken Run, the Princess Bride special edition, the Shrek special edition and for the one anime title I was able to grab I chose the Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz special edition. Lots of great viewing yummy goodness, folks! It almost offsets the fact that I spent my weekend oblivious to the world.

    Aw, who am I kidding? I’m thrilled to finally have a “real live” DVD player. Crowding around the computer screen is not the way to enjoy a movie experience, folks, take it from me.

  • Blogsnob, what?

    One of the ongoing dilemmas facing anyone who maintains a personal site such as this one is the matter of exposure. On the one hand, you are pouring your heart and soul into something and really, really want everyone to see it, love it, and most importantly tell you how great you are for it.

    On the other hand, you have another five fingers. No, wait, what I meant to say is that on the other hand, if you’re an artistic-type you’re at least partly doing this because you simply need the creative outlet. You’re doing it for yourself, not for any other individual or group.

    That “see it love it” stuff is damned attractive, though.

    To make a long posting shorter, I’m now signed up with Blogsnob, an advertising service of sorts. You’ll note the “Blogsnob Link,” a scripted advert that pulls from the pool of thousands of other Blogsnob members and semi-randomly creates a link to that ‘blog page.

    When you get right down to it, the whole thing’s just a weird kind of ego-stroking circle-jerk (great mental image, that) but dammit, we have egos and they need stroking! Besides, there’s a good chance that by following the Blogsnob link you’ll end up reading stuff by someone much more entertaining than this little grey duck.
    Blogsnob

  • Taking the redesign stuff seriously

    If you need proof that I’m serious about restructuring this journal system, take a peek at this page. It’s kind of mangled, and will always be in various states of “mangled-ness” while I experiment with stylesheets and the removal of table code.

    I’ve created test includes, a test stylesheet and the test document so I can use the database content of this site without breaking the main page itself. As I find tricks that can be migrated back to the main page, I will do so. (Actually I already have; witness the newly-grey search widget.)

    I’m having a lot of fun with this, and learning a tremendous amount. If all goes well, greyduck.net will be a fabulously cool website some day.

  • Behind the scenes, some prep work on the site

    In a frenzy of reading source code, I reconfigured this site to use an external stylesheet. This will allow me to experiment with a variety of different stylesheet tricks to achieve various effects.

    The idea that I can exercise more control over the elements on this page is just too attractive to let go of. I will make it work, and it’ll look damned cool.

  • Books, TV, computer games?

    When I was building this website, I tried to come up with better channel definitions than I had used on the old Zero site. In terms of Media Reviews, the only viable category was Books, so that was carried over while the other Media channels were dropped.

    This time around I’ve added TV and Games, and the next time I actually see a movie in the theater you can be sure I’ll add a Movies category. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the one existing entry under Games: Links LS 1999.

  • Prototypical Journal Entry #823-B

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    Blah blah blah. Blah, blah blah blah blah blah.