Ken vs. the City

As you can see, there’s a new site design. It’s entirely my own, and the template itself uses no images. Finally, I’m free of Blogger’s generic templates. I’ll post the code of the template online later for anyone who wants to download and use it, but I spent all day yesterday getting it to work, and I don’t want to play around with it anymore today.

I taught myself CSS last week, and I’m very happy with the results. There are no tables on the page whatsoever.

New features:

The header on top has a list of the most recent blog posts, but also links to the most recent articles I’ve written. Most of them are for the online advertising blog 925m, but I hope to do some other work too. I’ll also start maintaining some supplementary blogs listing things that I happen to be reading, as well as projects I’m in the middle of. This is mostly for myself, but I think other folks might be interested in what I’m up to.

All the lists, except for the recent blog posts, are compiled through FeedDigest, and the list of recent articles is updated through del.icio.us.

It’s been almost a week since my last post. I’ve been working on a new site design. I promise all of you you’ll see some new stuff in the next week or so.

I went and saw the One Man Star Wars Trilogy yesterday, and it was a hoot. It’s one guy performing the whole trilogy (eps. 4, 5, 6) in a little over 60 minutes. It was one of the funniest shows I’ve seen so far. It’s playing at The Lamb’s Theater just off of Times Square, and I highly recommend it to anyone. Apparently the show was playing in Wausau in July, and will be in Green Bay in April and June 2006. One prereq. I might mention though. You probably should have seen the original Star Wars Trilogy already, or you might get a little lost. However, seeing a guy spazzing out with a pretend lightsaber should be funny to anyone.

I went hiking all day yesterday with some friends in a place called Cold Spring, which is about an hour from the city by train. The previous day’s rain left some spectacular waterfalls.

I missed the main group, so I had time to grab some breakfast, read a little bit (just stared reading Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis in preparation for the movie) and took the train from Grand Central Terminal alone, but I met up with another guy who also missed the first train. We walked along the train track a couple of miles to the hiking trail at Breakneck Point. I scaled several rocky slopes where small rivulets of water cascaded down the sides, making each hand and foothold a treacherous gamble.

We went quickly, hoping to catch up with our friends, who had an hour’s head start. We stayed in the same trail network, but didn’t follow the same path they had. The two of us hiked over the rocky peaks until we met an experienced hiker who, unlike us, was responsible and brought a map. We had been going for about three hours without meeting our friends, and were ready for a rest, so we found the way back to town from him.

We backtracked a little ways until we hit another trail which we followed back down to the highway. The second trail had some incredible sights, including some waterfalls, a rivver, swollen by the rain, and some old mining ruins. Next time I go there, I want to check out more of the mining ruins. I talked to another guy who said there was an old two-story carriage house farther up the trail.

Any way, we went back to town where we met up with the rest of our group, had some chow, and took the train back. It only cost ten bucks to get up there. I’ll have to go again. Last night I slept like a rock.

I’m now the proud owner of a brand shiny new Gmail account. I already have an email address, but Gmail gives you 2.5 gigs of storage for free. Plus you can access your gmail through Atom/RSS and there are cool hacks like this that let you use your Gmail account as an extra hard drive.

Honestly, I don’t know how I’m ever going to fill all that space up.

When it comes to hardware, I’m electronically inept. I found this guide to repairing every electronic device you can think of, and filed it away under “Someday Maybe Perhaps.”
http://repairfaq.ece.drexel.edu/sam/sammenu.htm

Typically I like to make up my own character names, but for those of you who have trouble thinking of clever monkiers, I found this name generator that generates any number of names by type: English, Spanish, Egyptian, Arthurian, etc.
http://www.geocities.com/phillipriley/ngmain.html

http://drtexidor.blogspot.com/

A friend of mine from Wisconsin, Dan Texidor, will be serving aboard the hospital ship Anastasius as an RN with Mercy Ships off the coast of Liberia in November. He’s started a blog about his adventure. Right now he’s posting pictures of home and family. It should be a good read, once he gets into the swing of things… hooray for Dan!

Here’s an ebook I found on how to write a novel by someone named Joanne Reid. It’s pretty straightforward and offers some good tips. I tried to write a novel once, and I ran out of story about 10,000 words into it. It got to the point where I was just writing words for the sake of writing words– not an experience I’d care to repeat. Drivel is drivel wherever it comes from. Still, sometimes you just have to keep going. I’m going to try and tackle a novel again soon…

There’s a screenwriter friend of mine who has taught me a lot about the art of story from a screenwriting perspective, and it suddenly occurred to me today that the art of story when writing a screenplay is almost completely different from the art of story when writing a short story. I’m not exactly sure what it is. He would say that it’s because you an get inside a person’s head and tell the reader what that character is feeling.

I just read a short story by John Updike in a collection of the best American short stories for 2004. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what made this story so great. It was emotional, nostalgic, …and boring. You got inside the characters’ heads, and got to see what they were thinking and feeling, but there didn’t seem to be any drama in it. There’s something about that kind of short story that alienates me from the characters.

At first I thought, “maybe I’m just not that way. Maybe I don’t get all sappy and emotional.” But then I realized that “of course I do.” Maybe it’s just other people’s thoughts and other people’s nostalgia that I can’t seem to relate to sometimes. Or maybe I’m just someone who needs to see clear-cut moral decisions like does Spidey save the cable car full of children, or save the woman he loves.

I’m trying to wrap my head around whatever Updike and other writers like him have. Despite how boring I find those kinds of stories, I can definately see the talent behind them. Not only do I find that admirable, but it also attracts that certain kind of discriminating (aka snobby) reader that a lot of literary magazines cater to. And for some reason that seems to make, in the eyes of the (snobby) world, some stories greater than others.