mcgees.org

mcgees.org will be down during the move.  Expect an outage from tonight or tomorrow morning through Sunday, perhaps Monday.  Everyone with mcgees.org email addresses will be affected.

Finally, the site and my email are back up.  Sorry for the long outage.

It has been a long time since my last post.  Sorry about that.  I had a great time with Jennifer and family over the holiday, did a lot of reading, I rode my new bike (a full post on the bike later), I relaxed.  In my laziness I did not stop to note that on 15 December mcgees.org celebrated its first anniversary.  More posts soon.

The Public DNS at granitecanyon.com, who provide primary and secondary DNS for mcgees.org, joshuamcgee.com, ScotchFinder, and davidjmcgee.com, among others, seem to have all their servers down.

If you can read this page, and if you did not type in a numeric URL to get here, their servers are up again.

There is a new page, with three new covers, in Postal Cancel Art.

There are new additions to Postal Cancel Art.

And it’s working again.

It is hard to believe that it is after midnight now.  There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to do everything I want to do these days.  This is mostly a good thing: there are a lot of activities that interest me at the moment, so I am never at a loss for something to do and enjoy.  Here is a list of activities I have wanted to pursue in the past couple of days, only a subset of which have been accomplished or attempted.

1. Play with Cakewalk.  Use it to record some of my musical compositions, with multiple vocal and instrumental tracks.
2. Order more stamps from Iowa Stamps & Coins for my ongoing (but unnamed) philatelic art project.  Work on the art project.  Transfer the pieces to a new album.
3. Work on a redesign of mcgees.org.
4. Install the new printer that has been sitting on my floor, in a box, since the day after Christmas.
5. Play some more with the new TiVo.
6. Watch some of the movies recorded by it.
7. Listen to my new CDs from Christmas.
8. Research the sport of fencing.
9. Add advertising to ScotchFinder (the advertisers are arranged, I just need to do some re-coding of the site.)  Add the ability to search the database via a toll-free telephone number.
10. Research whale deafness.
11. Continue reading The Annotated Alice, Infinite Jest, and The Life of Samuel Johnson.
12. Research PocketPCs, potentially to buy one soon.
13. Make hotel reservations for the UK trip.
14. Search Fresh Air archives.
15. Buy add-ons to the hamster habitats.
16. Clean my study.
17. Reinstall Microsoft Visual Studio at home from my CDs, which I haven’t done since my hard drive crashed.

These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  (You probably think some of these are fake, thrown in for humor.  That is not the case.  Even the whale one.)  Implicitly on the list, of course, is to write about the activities in this ‘blog.

My makeshift way of dealing with the situation has been to get 5.5 hours of sleep per night.  I think this is beginning to take a toll.  It’s getting close to 12:30.  I will probably go watch half an hour of “Antiques Roadshow” on TiVo, pour a malt, maybe scoop a bit of Ben and Jerry’s (which is, by the way, now the most popular tourist attraction in Vermont.  Yikes.)

More descriptions of the activities on the list will follow, as time permits.  I have found that it is frequently easier to write about one’s experiences doing something after one has already done the something.  Wish me luck for making the time.

With respect to the last post, it looks like IE will ignore classes selected into SPAN elements much of the time.  Perhaps the most conservative route would be to use DIVs exclusively, as I have not run into any problems with them so far.

I would really like some standardization on this front.  There exists a spec, but every browser’s implementation is so riddled with bugs that any CSS design is a minefield of potential incompatibilities.

Revised: It looks like I originally mischaracterized the bug.  The real bug seems to be that Netscape will not allow CSS padding or margin settings to be set for a TD element.  IE, on the other hand, won’t let them be set for a SPAN element.  Both render the code correctly if they are set for a DIV element.  Go figure.

Liquor.com redesigned their website a couple of months ago.  In fact, I think the site is much improved.  However, this change broke the script used by ScotchFinder (which I run) so their inventory has been out of the ScotchFinder system since the change.  This is not ideal, of course, but I didn’t do anything about it until now.  So, if you care, Liquor.com is back in ScotchFinder.

OK everyone, here goes.  This is the inaugural post for the newly-redesigned mcgees.org.  The idea is to have a running web log on the left and push all the links, which used to populate this page, over to the right.  Blogger provides this logging service.  I’m pretty impressed with their interface and the power of their design.  It is also very gratifying to have this log on mcgees.org rather than on some remote site.

The system is this: with a web browser, I can now add a note to my homepage through a convenient text form.  The ease of this (compared to FTP-ing a copy of index.html, making the changes manually, and uploading the new version) will likely result in much fresher content on these pages.  We shall see.

My wife thinks the graphical design (white and green, etc.) makes this page too professional-looking and impersonal.  She may very well be right.  Please feel free to drop me a note at joshua@mcgees.org and give me suggestions on ways to improve this.  [Ed. note, 07 Feb 2001: The design scheme was changed shortly after this post was written.]