September 29, 2004
After a year and a half I finally know all of the moves in our sword form. The last two or three are giving me fits as they are a combination of upward slices with steps. What keeps throwing me off is that the move is a forward progression, but the steps are two forward, one back, then finish forward in a 70/30 stance.
Practice, practice, practice.
Now that I know all of the moves I feel like I can start to concentrate on getting under the sword and getting my weight to sink into the ground. Currently I wave the sword around a bit and am generally off balance in almost all of the spins.
Perhaps I’ll do a photo essay on the form one of these days. It could prove to be a handy reference.
The dust is settling and the blog is up and running. I had a couple of hickups, but everything is fine now. I hope you all like the new home, I’ll be adding bits and pieces as time permits, but at least everything is here and settled.
Currently the blog is operating at it’s most basic. Comments are installed and the archive is present. In a word: functional. Next comes the form. I’ve got a few ideas for fleshing out the sidebar, I just need to figure out what WordPress outputs, then I can style it. I also need to look into a little scripting for a couple of ideas that I have.
Next is to polish up my stylesheet and get the core template organized. Then, some actual content on the front page and an About page. Later, I’ll port over my existing photo albums, then work on creating new, hopefully dynamic, albums. I’ve also have some other photos I’ve been meaning to share.
Finally, for those wondering, no news on the house front. We’ve had several people view ours in the last few days, so that’s something. Hopefully we’ll have a bite soon — we really want to move into the new house before it gets too cold.
September 25, 2004
If you are looking at this via Internet Explorer, it won’t look right at the moment — the sidebar is probably below the main content. This is because IE doesn’t know what it’s doing. Adding in some extra code just to get IE to behave properly is on my list of things to do.
Of course, I suggest you switch to a browser that get’s things right and has far fewer security holes. I highly recomment FireFox.
* Update, 7:00 pm: Looks like I’ve got the box model problem licked. It should appear correctly in almost all browsers.
Well, here you are — looking at my new version of Tao Te Blog. After a quick delete and reinstall, I’m pretty happy with the way the backend is now set up. All of the old post from Blogger are here, minus comments.
I have a script to import the comments from HaloScan, but it doesn’t seem to want to work. It’s not really a big deal as there aren’t that many comments on the old site. If I get really desperate I can always do it the old fashion way.
As for the rest of the site, I’ll be working on finishing off the style sheet, cleaning up the xhtml, and creating some content. The only other big task is to figure out what to do for a photo library.
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September 22, 2004
Am attempting to direct this to my WordPress directory…
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September 18, 2004
Things have been pretty quiet on the house front. Yesterday we had someone look at it for the first time in nearly two weeks. The lack of action has us a bit worried, but we’re trying to stay calm. Since there seems to be a glut of houses in our area right now (two more on our street went up for sale last week) and with the lack of action, we have officially lowered the price and run new ads.
Let’s hope we’ll get some action and get it sold soon.
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I’ve been making slow progress on tjameswhite.com. The main template is done, although I may move some code around and use a different positioning technique. This week I simply haven’t spent much time working on it. What I am in the process now is figuring out the bits and pieces of WordPress. It shouldn’t take me too long to get the main template working, I just need to set aside some time.
Once I do get close to having WordPress ready things may get a bit wonky around here. There is a way to import all of my Blogger posts to the new WP install, but it involves redirecting Blogger to my server and publishing everything on the main page. I’m not quite sure what affect that might have on everything, so I’m waiting till the last minute to do that.
Once everything is in WordPress and on the new site, it’ll go live and then I can just work on tweaking it.
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September 10, 2004
There’s not much to look at yet, but the basic design (courtesy of Kelley G.) is now up instead of the more generic “coming soon.” Over the next xx days I hope to iron out a few problems with the navigation elements (not yet present) and then I will begin moving over content.
In the meantime, tao-te-blog will remain up and running – though it too will be moved over to my new space at some point, where it will be migrated to WordPress. The installation of WordPress is a breeze and, with the small time I’ve spent with it, I like it. Look for the addition of categories, trackback, and in-entry comments. (I know, some of that is available here on Blogger, but I haven’t bothered looking into it since I know I’m moving.)
And, now that I have my own server space, I’m going to play around with some programming elements. I have PHP (any MySQL) available and I plan on fiddling around to tweak WordPress and to create my own customized photo albums. Kelley has also invisioned some ‘interactive’ ideas for the site design that I won’t be able to implement until I know a bit more PHP. I’m sure that I’ll start with simple server-side include items and work up from there. (I did write my first Perl script at work the other day. Not bad considering I’ve never formally studied programming.)
And that is that, for now.
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September 8, 2004
My coworker John Boissy and his comic compatriots are having a comic art showing Sept. 9 – Nov. 6 at the Padzieski Art Gallery in Dearborn, MI. If you’re in the area, be sure to stop on by. The works of 11 artists will be on display – going back to their early days of comic styling (I beleive John’s first strips from age 10 will be there).
September 5, 2004
We saw Hero last night. I have to say that I wasn’t overly impressed. It has certainly taken cues from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, perhaps too many.
It’s big problem is slow pacing. Not that there is anything wrong with a slowly paced movie, Hero just doesn’t have enough steam. It failed to really engage me at any point. Even the score, by Tan Dun (he who did CT, HD) sounded too familiar.
I did enjoy the cinematography and the costume color changing, and the basic story line. However, the execution just didn’t quiet work for me.
Overall, 3.5 our of 5.
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