last update: 2009.05.07.04.14.pst

FAQ more whys and wherefores than you can shake a stick at.

why does your site look like this?

this site was originally authored and maintained from a P3-500 based system with what was- even then- a dismal amount of memory, an average monitor, and a graphics adaptor that's decidedly less than state-of-the-art. nevertheless, i found it quite capable of displaying graphics in true color at resolutions as high as 1280x1024. since this was within the grasp of my quaint little computer, i found (and still find) it hard to believe that the majority of people accessing this site will have equipment unable to match this performance. therefore there must be another reason so many sites continue to be optimized for resolutions of 800x600. the only practical explanations are to accommodate traffic from people with less-capable machines than mine (i assume this to be very rare), or to attempt to compensate for visitors with bad eyesight, or people who just like everything either very large or squished onto one side of their screen. i'm of the mind that most people with poor eyesight are already compensating for it by increasing the display size of fonts on their machines and/or using an application to zoom in on specific portions of the screen, or something similar. these are the best options for those people since they're not limited to any specific application. decreasing the display resolution of your graphics adaptor is generally not the best option for increasing the size of text displayed on your monitor. if you generally have no problem seeing what's on your screen, but find text viewed in your web browser too small, a temporary fix you can use when surfing the web is to increase the size with which your browser displays fonts. in Internet Explorer, this option is found on the menu bar at the top of the screen; click View/Text Size/[size choice]. in Google's Chrome browser (which i've recently become enamored with for viewing certain sites, and for the way it handles some things), press your Control key and the number-pad + or - keys to increase or decrease font display size. this method, alas, like all things, doesn't always work. sometimes page authors set their font sizes in absolute pixels rather than relative sizes (usually either to preserve the integrity of a layout, especially when including static-sized and absolutely-placed graphics, or through lack of understanding of better means). i've attempted to use relatively-sized fonts and relative placement of page elements in most places on this site, so font-resizing within browsers should work in most places. if someone finds any part of this site otherwise encoded, i'd appreciate a heads-up so i can bring it into the fold. in the meantime, if you want to see the site the way i've laid it out, you can match the setup i'm optimizing for: 1280x1024 resolution, with normal size fonts (96 dpi) and IE6 with fonts set to "larger" (View/Text Size/Larger from the menu bar). the maximum width of pictures included in the center column (my blog) is generally 580 pixels, and never exceeds 640 pixels. i'm consciously limiting the size of the pictures to keep the download times reasonable for people with slower connections and to balance the layout between the pictures and text. if you see a picture on my blog you'd like full-size, email me at the address at the top right of the page and i'll be more than happy to send it along.

when do you update?

if you'd like to be notified when the site is updated, for the moment you're out of luck. there are however email and RSS feed links for my blog posts, (the links are on the right side of the main page, under the heading 'subscribe' in grey). if anyone subscribes and wants to give me feedback on it, i'd much appreciate it. for the moment, that's the extent of the pushed content from this site. i've also recently enabled commenting on specific blog posts, and i'm notified by email when this occurs, so you can be sure i'll see it if you feel like dropping a line or two about something. i highly encourage it; it's incredibly gratifying to realize someone's dropped by. i only update the "____" of the moment pages when the mood strikes me or someone asks me to. if you'd like me to update it, the best means by which you can do so is sending me an email. having said that, this FAQ has existed in basically the same form for 5 years, and only 1 person has ever made the request. i have a ton of content i wouldn't mind making available, at some point, when i acquire enough ASP or scripting language knowledge, or (as always seems to be "on the table") begin hosting this site somewhere scripting tools reasonably powerful enough to handle what i'd like to actually do are allowable. my ISP doesn't support server-side scripting whatsoever so i'll have to work something else out before attempting to expand the scope of content i make available. another option is to maintain more than one server site, but $ is always an issue around here, and free hosting sites don't offer the disk space i'd need to make an expansion of the content in those areas worthwhile. i certainly don't intend to expand the scope of what's being served by my local machine. IIS in XP2 worked reasonably well- while it worked- but i've never been able to successfully reinitialize it after some serious system problems. therefore my multi-gig online photo albums have disappeared from the site. i'd love to have something automatically edit my pages with the date/time of their most recent updates but i like the look of the format i'm using and haven't found anything that will do that automatically- so it's done manually when i update those pages. the update date/time stamp on the main page is only for when i overhaul the site in general- it doesn't include blog posts (which obviously have their update info included) and won't tell you when any of the other pages have been updated. other pages have their own date/time stamps.

why is everything in lower case?

it's something i started a long time ago and just sort of stuck with. there really are a couple reasons for it. the first reason is that a long time ago i had an english teacher who mentioned to me that the author e.e. cummings never capitalized his (her?) name, because he (she?) never considered himself (herself?) to be all that important. i guess i sort of admired the humility that implied; i've never been very full of myself and it seemed to fit with me. when i started thinking about an online name, back in the days when such were still called 'nyms', i used 'infidel', which evolved into an all lower case from a difficult-to-duplicate series of control characters. it was the name of a band i played in, as well as a fairly accurate description of my skeptical philosophy, and it sort of expanded from there. much of the time i spent online in the old days was on ASCII-based BBS systems (way back in the mid-to-late'80s with 300 baud modems and monochrome monitors, and eventually greyscale and RIP graphics, etc.); when you're having a conversation with someone online, the most annoying thing in the world is waiting around forever for a response, and this was exacerbated by the connection speeds of the time. i figured out that ignoring capitalization eliminated keystrokes and i could get things out a little quicker. another benefit to using predominantly lower case letters also surfaced in those old chat boards: emphasis. people routinely got criticized for excessive use of ALL CAPS, which as most of you know is known as SHOUTING. becoming widely recognized as using all lower case letters only served to further emphasize my emphaticness when i chose to become emphatic. i've always been a bit of a stickler for spelling and punctuation though; there have to be SOME rules or things get completely unreadable. so i could never quite bring myself to ignore that stuff. i generally capitalize proper nouns of things which i think deserve the respect, or for which the meanings might not be as apparent in the sentence without them, and acronyms. i also employ a method of shorthand sometimes when i'm really hurrying to get something out or typing something rather long and involved, a method which eliminates many of the vowels in the words- a skill for which i gained proficiency mostly by creating easily decipherable filenames back in the days when everything was done in MS-DOS or the like, and filenames were limited to eight characters. in that system, weekend becomes WKND, much the same as assistant manager becomes ASST MGR, level becomes LVL....u get the picture. much of this shorthand is easily decipherable in chat rooms and the like, as many people did similar things to ease their arduous hunting and pecking. so, 20+ years later, even though my keyboarding skills equal or surpass most everyone i know, it sticks. the only disadvantage i notice using this system now is that web browsers routinely ignore extra white space, and so eliminate the (punctuationally correct!) double space after a period at the end of a sentence, which makes sentences beginning without capital letters a bit harder to read (as you may have recognized). this really bugs me, and if there's a good reason for it, i haven't seen it yet. call me Don Quixote, but i'm hoping they might eventually become capable of displaying text as it's presented, and i still include those double spaces in the source code for text in all my pages, so if the planets someday align, and the Browser Powers That Be and W3 Consortium Gods so decree, and these otherwise-nifty websurfing applications manage to become capable of punctuationally-correct display, these pages will all miraculously become more readable. until then, i remain sufficiently enamored of the nonconformity of the system to continue employing it in most things i do in a casual environment. there are only a couple pages on this site (as of writing this) that i've executed with conventional norms in place, and only one that i made that way intentionally- my recommended reading page. my reasoning for this is that most avid readers are at least as finicky as i am for punctuation and grammar, etc., so that's my way of giving them a little nod.