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Archive messages, announcements, notes, etc.

2001

2-17-2

I've been intentionally putting off posting this site to the Net, even though I've continued to post daily pieces to the web pages on my computer. Why? I'm feeling reluctant to go on doing this. Yet I do, privately. But here it is, at last. A partial update of my work for the past several months.

11-26-2

I haven't been working much on this site recently, and I've been posting the work even less. I just don't feel so motivated as I used to and have been considering abandoning the site altogether. But today I feel like working on it again, so maybe I'll try to start catching it up. But don't hold your breath.

10-16-2

The frames / no frames option has been eliminated. Everything is completely converted over to a 'force-frames' mode. My apologies to you retro purists. But if you really know your stuff, you'll know how to by-pass this function, if you really care.

10-10-2

I'm in the process of converting this site to frames-only operation, so if some of the functions on the nav bar or sitemap don't work, that's the reason. Once you're in frames mode, you're not going to be able to get out of it, unless you happen to know the URL for the page you started on in no-frames mode. Eventually, I'll get all the pages coded with the force frames script, and then you'll have to be somewhat computer and Internet saavy to know how to get into no frames mode.

7-13-2

Thoughthistory has been the title of my primary online journal since its beginning. But as my website has expanded to include a lot of other things, I've unwittingly allowed the title to remain restricted to the basic journal when, really, it should have become the overall title of the site (which is 'post-performance metaphor' -- which is also an appropriate title, and maybe a good meta-title). I want to correct this mis-appellation, but I don't know quite how to go about it. I could call my basic journal simply 'auto-bio,' an appropriate title, but that would require changing all the gifs and jpgs and, besides, that might also be a title appropriate to the overall site. In a way, even the fiction I write is autobiographical [as well as automatically biographical/ biological (metaphorically speaking)] since it is drawn from my experience and is most often based on real, dreamed, and imagined (what's the difference?) events, in my life.

6-29-2

I've completely redone the intro page, but not entirely with CSS yet. I've known about this for a long time now, but I never got around to learning how to do it and implementing it until now: a tableless format with CSS. It's still in its infancy on this site, and it may take me a while to convert over to it entirely (who am I kidding. It's going to take forever.) But I'm on my way--to wit, the new format at the top right of the intro page next to thoughtcurrent. No more tables (although those boxes are still placed within a table cell). All new stuff will be CSS. This is a great formatting tool. Too bad I'd rather spend my time doing other things.

6-25-2

I know this site is not standards or accessibility compliant. I want it to be. But there's so little time to backtrack and "do the right thing" when I finally discover what it is that I'm supposed to be doing. Besides, standards are so boring. (I know this contradicts my browser complaints, but, hey, who's internally consistent all the time, really? We are all plagued with cognitive dissonance.)

6-24-2

In my pastiches, often, there is metastasis, whereas, ideally, I would prefer transition. This is not the result of the format so much as it is of a lack of time to follow-up and connect the disparate ideas that revolve around the central theme. I'm in the process of correcting this and have perfected a method whereby I develop the transition as I post. Therefore, ideally, the studio section will become obsolete as I begin posting this type of work directly to the new pastiche section (see menu).

6-6-2

New blogs page. I made it with Blog 5.0 Pretty cool.

6-2-2

Check out the animation on the new "zine" cover page. I spent four hours learning how to set this up. Man, do I know how to waste time, or what? This is an actual photo of one of my aquariums, color adjusted quite a bit to make it look better. (The fish is also one of my goldfish, but it loses a lot in the animation.)

This zine is an idea that I had a long, long time ago, something I've been trying to implement for a very long time without success. I wanted to publish my work as a monthly zine, but I could never figure out how to do that, exactly. Then, the other day, it hit me: all it has to be is a page of links. Everything else is already posted. This is not separate content, but rather a kind of mock e-zine, an alternate way of linking to the material on this site. I'll develop the format as I go along.

The content for each month's "issue" won't be so "fixed" as a normal e-zine because I usually add to the monthly pastiches as I come across old content that seems to fit into them, or as I create new content later on. In other words, these are developing issues (double meaning intended).

So, a long-standing ambition of mine, to produce a monthly zine, is finally realized. I'm going to use it, I think, as the format for my monthly newsletter. And I'm going to backtrack and put all of my old journals in this format as I post them.

5-16-2

Played around all afternoon and evening with a JavaScript menu builder and finally got the code customized to the point where I'm satisfied with it in both IE and Netscape. Thus, there's a new menu and sitemap system installed. And I finally got those old problems with the frames/no frames choice fixed. I don't know how. It just happened.

5-3-2

With all of the new additions and formats (e.g., blogs, etc.) that I've added to this Website, this notes section has fallen into disuse. But I still like the idea of it. I'm not ready to do away with it just yet.

3-21-2

I have a new label for what I do: Psycho-Literature. It came to me while I was trying to explain to a newsletter what it is my Website is all about. I like the double meaning of the "psycho" prefix.

2-26-2

I don't want this Website to be(come) a fixed thing. I want it to evolve, with input coming in one end, working its way through the system, and eventually exiting the other, the higher quality stuff hanging around longer than the crap. Hopefully, some (ever-growing) part of it will become permanent. And that will be a tribute to my (self-perceived) ability.

2-18-2a

By expressing myself as completely as I am motivated to in my journals and by processing all of that content into the various formats I have chosen (especially the websites), I . . . I what? I knew what I wanted to say when I started writing this, but I got sidetracked and forgot it. I hate when that happens. I'm just reporting on me, as I reflect my world [added the banner above, to reflect that reflection], and subsequently exercising a little bit of control as I mold that reporting into some kind of an art.

2-18-2b

Hit what I hope is a minor snag in my system for posting to and maintaining my Website. This has to be dealt with now. It's only going to get worse and worse as the content increases.

2-15-2

I put link follows on the menu. It took me a while to figure out how to do it, and they don't completely work in Netscape 4.7 (of course), but I finally got them to at least show up. Tried a javascript to make them work, but it didn't work. Finally ended up doing it the old-fashioned way (style sheets).

2-10-2a

Some of the page jumps (when clicking a link that goes to a different page) don't consistently work. Apparently, there's nothing I can do about it. The problem seems to be caused by the activity of the banner ad that my host places at the top of the page, but I'm not certain about this. If anyone has an insight into this problem, please e-mail me.

2-10-2b

Added 1728, 6023, and 640 to dreams' notebox. Someone wanted to know what they meant, and I suddenly realized that readers didn't know what I was referring to (which is probably more often true than I'd like to believe).

2-3-2

After a lull of over three months, I'm finally beginning to see some traffic to and e-mail from my site again. (I got an e-mail yesterday.) I wonder at this episodic nature. It seems so... erratic, like my life. I guess it's not so unusual after all.

2-1-2

I broke the big table in the thoughthistory 2001 file into a lot of smaller ones so that the page would load piecemeal instead of waiting for the entire page to download. That makes the wait a little bit more tolerable. One of these days I'm going to have to get around to breaking the whole file into separate pages.

1-17-2

My monthly journal (the one on my computer, not the one on my Web site) is a work book and a source book that provides the raw material for projects and [monthly (although more than a few may be combined)] pastiches, which are the evolution of an old idea of a monthly zine that would have been the periodic publication of my work, if that idea had ever worked out. The website has nixed this pre-defunct publication before it ever had a chance to develop, because a website is more a flexible and unifying conception. But the periodic collection is still a valid idea, represented now in the pastiches and the various journals. I just thought I needed to make this clear. I don't know why.

1-15-2

I know that thoughthistory 2001 is way too long and takes far too much time to download. I'm going to break it apart into separate documents. It's just that the idea of finding and changing all the links to it is such a big job that I've been avoiding it. Meanwhile, current posting to it is closing down as I near the end of last year's journal entries, so it's not going to get too much bigger---until I start to backtrack to catch up all the stuff I didn't get to earlier this year---if I ever do.

12-21-1

I changed the cover page (slightly) to better reflect the (true) nature of this site. Think of this website as an ongoing novel-in-progress, a project that is never-ending, incorporating elements of reality, imagination, fantasy, dreams, truth, lies, fiction, creative non-fiction, past, present, future, multiple genres and formats---a postmodern pastiche (de)constructed to tell a story in the most complex way possible, to reflect (a) human life. (That's what all novels are, after all, the only difference between them being the way they structure the material. Cf. New Portuguese Letters by The Three Marias.)

12-17-1

This website is my current text (in the most general, postmodern sense of the word.) I am a text, and this creation is a subtext. As a result, I often don't like parts of it. The problem is not with the website, but with me. I don't like (parts of) myself sometimes. Instead of reconstructing the site, I should be reconstructing myself. This is my intent when I reconstruct the site, but maybe my focus has been wrong.

12-5-1

Hi. I'm back. (You probably didn't even know I was gone.) I spent Thanksgiving in Boston and, as usual, the time away disrupted my routine. But I'm back in business now. I intend to revamp this entire site, esp re CSS. But my life is paved (over) with good intentions.

11-2-1

Combining all of my websites together into one has really taken a toll. Things are more screwed up than I realized. I hope too many visitors don't leave in frustration while I work to get it all sorted out. There are a lot of tiny details to go thru. ("You've got to pick up every stitch...") The worst problem seems to be the frames/no frames choices. The best strategy seems to be to choose one of them and then do not go back to the other. Once you start moving between them, everything starts to get confused.

10-25-1

I put the scroll bar back between the menu and the content frames. I didn't want to do this, but the page jump will not consistently work on this host and the menu gets cut off at the bottom. I have to find a solution to this problem. I hate the way this scroll bar looks.

10-23-1a

Since I combined all of my websites into one, some things work a bit strangely. The menu system for thoughthistory is internal only to that system, so the menu links on the journal pages don't return you to the main menu page or frame. There are probably a lot of other irregularities too that I haven't yet noticed. I hope to have this all worked out one day. Meanwhile...

10-23-1b

The new mailing list is available. Finally.

10-17-1

I would like my website (and/or, more generally, my life's work, my oeuvre) to be a more direct reflection of my life. As it is, it is just okay, probably a lot better--a lot more accurate--than I want to believe, adequate in a way I would rather it not be, but in any case, okay. But I want it to be a definitive step-by-step account of the course of my life.

10-16-1

Back online as of 10-16-01 at 10:00 AM. At last.

10-15-1

These are my first posts since the WTC attack. My ISP service to my local area was a victim, first of an actual connection loss, then later, of a path (phone service) provider going out of business. Actually, I'm still not reconnected. I'm at the library posting this. Fortunately, during most of this "time of testing," I've still had email service. Unfortunately, in a separate terrorist effect, my mailing list is also (permanently) down, so I've been thoroughly network-incommunicado. I'll be looking for a new mailing list service and hope to be back in business soon. The "new look" of this site is actually a recombination of all of my old sites into one, something I'd been planning to do for a long time but never got around to until my net connection went away, leaving me with lots of extra time. (Some good always results from every evil act. One side breeds the other, otherwise, without contrast, we could not perceive a difference nor be motivated to change. Even the labels 'good' and 'evil' are relative. Ask a non-American Arab.)]

10-10-1

I would have gotten this new site up sooner, but my ISP has been screwing up. I haven't been able to get onto it for a week, and before that, I'd been having trouble off and on.

9-6-1

Beware of Scumware: A long time ago I downloaded Gator, realized the mistake I'd made, and deleted it from my system (which was not all that easy a thing to do). Now, I'm much more wary of downloads. Just because it seems to be a mainstream product no longer qualifies it as safe. Apparently, there are an increasing number of program downloads designed to do far more than their stated purpose. I'm not talking about the simple spyware programs here. Programs that monitor your Internet usage seem kind of tame now by comparison. I'm talking about programs like Kazaa and Toptext and even MS's SmartTags Great article here.

8-29-1b

If you can read this, you're pretty hip.

8-14

Traffic to my website is like sex: it comes in spurts.

8-8-1

No one's been e-mailing me lately. I'm feeling so rejected. :(  Is it something I said?

7-28-1

You think you know someone, but do you, really? How long do you have to know someone before you really know them? You may think you get to know me via this site, but you never know anyone until you have sampled the widest variety of their work and being, and even then, nothing is ever guaranteed. This site changes to better realize my vision of who I am. Changes may be small. Additions vary the overall vision. Unless you know it all, and more, you do not know me. I struggle with this perception occasionally: people know me superficially, and depending upon how they know me, from which source(s), they may (and probably do) not know the real me. This site is a long-term attempt to present to the public my whole self--an impossible task; so I settle for as wide a variety of my self as possible. We always fail to realize our real self in public. The public has its own prejudiced way of deciding who we are. What am I saying? Unless you've read everything on this website, you do not know me, alas. Everything is modified by everything that's gone before it.

7-3-1

What I like most about receiving e-mail from people who read what I've written is when they ask me what I mean when I've used a certain phrase that seems out of place, or when they point out what they think is incorrect grammar or usage. I love to explain why I wrote it exactly the way I did---if it wasn't actually only a mistake.

6-28-1a

Most of the time, I really don't know what I'm talking about. But I always think I do. This is why I write. Re-reading what I've written gives me time to consider what I've said, so that I may change it before anyone else reads it. A lot of the stuff in this textbox, for example, is ill-considered. I leave it all in here (for now) because I like the spontaneity it imparts. I'd rather be thought a babbling fool than an anal-retentive straight--although I worry that the latter is closer to the truth.

6-14-1

Because none of you who e-mail me seem to want me to post your messages to my guestbook, and because Homestead is planning to cut back my free webspace, I've discontinued it. I'm thinking about setting up a separate site where I can post my (for the public) correspondence, but... Like writing projects, I have a lot of websites planned. I'll never get around to them all.

Since it's still relatively small, I'm maintaining my mailing list via a computer-based program. That leaves the problem of how to sign-up new list members. Anyone know of a good program or javascript that doesn't require an SSI?

6-13-1

Well, I finally got the odd color combinations fixed. At last.

6-12-1

Major changes are coming, maybe. Homestead is cutting back on its free service. What will be the outcome for this site? Wait and see.

5-27-1

Once again, I have become completely disenchanted with my artistic expression. Once again, I resist the urge to tear this website down. See studio\note #5.

5-11-1

Posted to site: prologue from my most recent novel and my (but not publisher's, because they won't allow me to change it) e-book cover; excerpts from my 1995 novel Reservations; link to an old ePosse Review article; lots of misc. notes tucked away here and there.

4-11-1

If you sign the GuestBook, it may take me a few days, or even weeks, to get the message posted. I'm still having problems with the input. I'm getting it all now, but it's not sequential and I have to do a lot of cutting, pasting, and coding. It'd be a lot simpler to use the standard Guestbook that Homestead provides, but I like to be able to exclude inappropriate comments without deleting the whole guestbook and starting over. I hope to get a lot of the past entries posted soon, and also some of the entries from my old websites.

3-16-1

The e-mail form on the contact page is fixed and functioning. I'm now receiving all of the information entered into the boxes. Sorry for the inconvenience to those of you who had to rewrite me after I responded to your blank e-mails--and to those of you who didn't because I didn't even get your addresses, or who never bothered to answer. Please write again. (The real inconvenience is to me. I missed a number of people who might have become friends. So many mysterious strangers we ALMOST contact throughout our lives!)

3-8-1

I took the .wav file off the "life stories" page because several people e-mailed me to tell me it was "irritatating" (sic), "self-serving" (of course), "demeaning" (I presume she meant to me), and "beneath me" (how would she know?) And then I got an e-mail wherein a guy complained about its removal. He said it was the best thing about the site. (That doesn't say much for my work, does it?) So, maybe I'll put it back up as an option. The biggest complaint was that it couldn't be turned off and it played through the visit to my page at my (ex) publisher's site. Honey, that's what the stop button on your browser is for.

2-29-1

I'm working on the e-mail form on the contact page. It's not defaulting to my e-mail address, nor is it including the info in some of the form boxes. Meanwhile, if you want to write to me (and I really wish you would), click on my e-mail address instead.

2-28-1b

The "menu" on the cover page is redundant for those of you who have browsers capable of supporting frames. And you don't have to click on it on any of the other pages either to return, because the menu remains at the left, no matter what page you're on. I set it up this way for the benefit of those unfortunate retros who are still using old browsers, so that they won't get error messages.

2-25-1

The color combinations are a little odd, now that I added frames to the site. I'm going to have to fix this one day. (Visitors using browsers incapable of viewing frames are not going to understand this message.)

2-10-1

I begin to get depressed when I surf the net and find all of the great sites and consider my site in comparison. I am motivated to make mine better, but there is so much to learn and so much work to do before I will accomplish this--and so many other things to do besides--that I think I will never get back to site reconstruction.

1-29-1

I never like how I appear on a website, the personna I end up presenting. This is why I keep tearing my sites apart and rebuilding them. I always think, after the initial rush of desire to communicate has passed, that I have said too much. This has nothing to do with websites per se; it has to do with me. I'm this same way in "real" life. (It's really not all that real, is it.) I often regret having communicated. This is why I write: to hedge myself against personal contact. (You can revise many times before presenting written words to the public.) This is deep psychology. No one ever thinks of me in this way (until now, that is--now that I've revealed it.) I compensate very well, so that I appear to be a sociable person. But we all do this. It's just that I happen to worry about it consciously. I'll probably end up deleting this message. I've become too personal again.

1-21-1

Hi. I'm back. Had a lot of personal/career problems/crises I had to take care of and couldn't find the time/motivation to work on the websites. (This happens every winter: seasonal affective disorder.) Thanks to those of you who bought my latest book, whoever you are. Let me hear from you. Send me an e-mail and tell me what you thought of it. I'd like that.

As for the old websites, I don't like them, so I'm reconstructing them (again). Meanwhile...

This site is still weak. Haven't had the time or energy to... [yawn]