My web site address is changing soon!!

*** http://www.nwlink.com/~mwebster ***

5-31-01

Woke up from a nightmare to the dizzies this morning at 6am. My ear was ringing like the seashore and I was soon barfing into my bucket. Like a surprise visit from unwelcome inlaws, this disease appears to be back to stay for a while. And like a fat, beer drinking uncle sleeping on the couch, I simply have to learn to live with it again since there is no cure other than time. After emptying my stomach I didn't feel quite so bad and was able to drive to work. Once in the office I was ok, if a little distracted. By lunchtime it was easing back and around 4 gone completely. One interesting thing about having an unwelcome disease like this in my life is how precious the healthy times become. It feels so good to feel normal after the dizzies that the everyday worries that usually upset me seem insignificant. The sun seems brighter, my kids happier and my old cars look newer. Not quite a near death experience, but a few steps down that road. I am thankful that the spells have been minor so far. None of the wild spinning vertigo that made my life a living hell every few days during college.

 

5-30-01

Drew an old sailboat today down on the waterfront during my lunch hour. I've had my eye on its clean, sweeping 100 year old lines for several weeks. It appears to be the real deal: two very tall old fashioned masts on a long low hull, the kind you see in pictures from the days before steamships. Overall it looks in such good shape that I suspect it may be built for the tourist trade not that long ago. Still, it has the clean refined lines of the best of the old ocean going sailing ships of yesteryear. Weather permitting I hope to develop the sketch over the next few weeks. Between walking down and back, I only get 30 minutes a day to work on it...if it's not raining. As I drew, a pair of inquisitive geese paddled up to the rocky bank where I sat and eyed me speculatively for handouts. Ordinarily I don't like geese, or rather, I don't like the mess they make of public beaches wherever they live. But these two geese were rather cute, kicking slowly along in the clear green salt water as I sketched the 2 masted schooner.

We are still busy as ever at work. Our big site went live, and we moved on to other projects, of which there seems to be a never ending supply.

5-28-01

Other than an hour spent practicing my guitar, I've spent the entire day transferring all these files to my new server: http://www.nwlink.com/~mwebster . nwlink doesn't allow any prices on their residential accounts. I told them that I had only sold one painting off this site in 4 years, and that the prices were only there as a curiosity, but they held firm and suggested I link to an outside page where prices are allowed. Today I reworked all the links, including the links in the flash movie that serves as the side navigation...oh, oh, I just remembered I forgot the intro flash movie links. Other than that, most of the bugs are worked out of the navigation as it moves between my private site and the pricing page on my other server. I had planned on painting today somewhere pretty. But when I heard the rain pounding down this morning, and saw the trees whipping around in the wind, I knew my choices were limited to things around the house. Not the ideal Memorial day weekend I had imagined, but at least I got some climbing in on Saturday. My head is buzzing from too much time spent staring at computers.

5-26-01

Climbed today with one of the guys from the office. He had never rockclimbed before but had been on a roped glacier climb on Mt Rainier and brought his own harness. It was great to get out again, but I was a little nervous taking a beginner out on the cliffs. Especially this beginner...they have a new baby, we work together and 2 of his in-laws happen to be my kids teachers who also know my wife. So, like I told his wife when we got back, "I knew I had to be really careful with your husband. If I had let him get hurt, I would have got it at home from my whole family, I would have had to face you here at the house, and I would have got it at work where he is old college buddies with 2 of our bosses."
      Thankfully, all went well. He is one of those rare people who don't seem to get scared when they get up high. He was a good listener and paid attention to the little details that make the sport as safe as humanly possible. Contrary to my old partner D who moved to San Diego this spring, my friend from the office has a relatively stable life with a low maintenance personality. He seemed to genuinely enjoy the movement of climbing. I've stopped questioning why I still love the sport after 24 years. It fits me like an old pair of jeans. I enjoy everything about it, including the climbing lifestyle with it's long road trips, eating beans out of the can and filthy hands.
      I've been staying up until midnight for 4 days in a row. Last night I was up playing seventies music on my 6 string out in the garage long after everyone else was in bed. The other 3 nights I was up working on transferring this web site over to my new server:
http://www.nwlink.com/~mwebster It's partially up, but many of the images don't show up for various reasons which I've not had time to trouble shoot. Now, after climbing all day my butt is dragging pretty badly. Perhaps I will post some pictures tomorrow.

5-24-01

Sitting at the computer this morning, I noticed the room spinning lazily around me and realized Menieres disease had come to visit for a few hours. I've not had any symptoms other than a partially deaf ear in over a year. Fearing the worst, I told both of my bosses that I might have to make a quick exit to my car where I still keep a bucket for these unexplainable seasickness attacks. By focusing intently on the screen, and not moving anything but my fingers, I was able to work through it and actually had a phenomenal day. Something about the disease forces all of the riff raff from my mind. I grab onto my job like a drowning man grabs a lifejacket. By focusing intently on the task at hand, I can ignore the slow spinning of the room around me. It's a trick I learned in college 18 months ago when the dizzies first hit me.
         I think I have a pretty good idea why I had my first episode in a year. Last week I had my yearly allergy doctor appointment. We talked about how well I had recovered from Menieres and she suggested trying to clear out my sinuses in an effort to improve my diminished hearing. Her therapy involved squirting nose sprays up each nostril, then squirting a saline solution (baking soda and salt) up there afterward. I told her that salt triggers my attacks but she promised me I wouldn't get enough to bring one on. Am I going to sue her....nahhhh. I hate lawyers. I should have trusted my instincts. I'll take a deaf ear and a stuffy nose any day over the dizzies.

!!Attention regular readers!! My web site host went belly up. I will be changing this site to a new server within the next week or two:

http://www.nwlink.com/~mwebster/

In the meantime, this current address on virtualalt should last until the end of the month. My e-mail will become mwebster@nwlink.com  My new ISP requires me to post my prices elsewhere, or pay an extra $5.00 a month. I've only sold one painting off this site in 4 years, so no big. I plan to add my prices page to my free account at http://www.markwebster.freeservers.com

Regarding our new-used car: the vibration going uphill on a right turning corner turned out to be the right cv joints and shaft. I thought they were just going to do the inboard engine side, but, after looking at the new 18 inch axle with 2 new boots on either end, it only makes sense they would do the whole thing. Now I can corner without worrying about strange vibrations.

5-22-01

Painted my first landscape of the year today out at the Belfair Salt marsh, also known as the Theler wetlands. It's a weird wild life sanctuary right off the main road going through downtown Belfair and built into the backyard of a community center. This particular community center's backyard happens to be 5 miles long and encompasses the marshy North terminus of Hood Canal. There has been a lot of community volunteer work done, not all of it good. At the entrance to the park, there is a huge homemade gate with 10 foot high hand carved arched doors that would look right at home in a hippie commune at Woodstock. The carvings make me think of the stuff one sees done with chain saws. Still, there is a certain charm to it all and they are lucky to have the community involved or the park would more than likely not even exist. They have built a series of gravel and boardwalk trails out across the marshlands where one can stroll along and enjoy the rare sounds of wind in the tall marsh grass and great blue herons taking flight. While I was painting one of the herons landed on the bank of the waterway I was painting. It's wing span was at least 5 feet wide. The torso was about as big as two large footballs. Watching it stalk it's dinner was a rare treat. My painting turned out quite well, considering how rusty I was. I took some pictures of it with my digital, but they turned out to poor to post. That camera (Olympus d-460) has a problem photographing pastel paintings. It has a bad tendency to distort the highlights. I should have waited another 2 years before jumping into the digital market.

Before I left the house this morning I changed the oil and bled the clutch on our "new" used Corolla. While I was under the car, I noticed a bunch of wet oil on a support strut under the engine. On closer examination, I found it was coming from the split drive boot on the cv joint. I'm going to stop by my mechanics on the way in and ask him if a cv joint problem could cause the rumbling I feel coming from the front end whenever I drive up a hill on a right hand corner. What's another $400 on plastic? I'm so far in debt it won't make much difference.

5-19-01

Good news and bad news today.
 
First the good news:

• I got a big overtime check and our days of poverty are over for a while.
• With part of the money I was able to replace the rubber chickens in my car (more on that later).
• We are through with the large project at work and I am back to working normal hours
• My allergy doctor tells me my breathing test (for asthma) is the best it's been in 5 years, even more surprising since I stopped using inhalers 9 months ago
• My hearing loss tested out as minor, but they did catch me on a good day (of which there have been many in the last few weeks)
• I roller bladed after work yesterday on the waterfront at Ruston Way. This is not unusual except, for the first time this year, I found my rhythm...I was in a zone! Unlimited acceleration and a smile from ear to ear
• Our new used car is running splendidly

Now the bad news:

• Someone hacked my debit card number and went on a spending spree in Texas to the tune of almost $300
• My kinked neck has been hurting for a month without much improvement
• I've been getting compliments/harassment at work on my legs from a programmer who is unfortunately a guy

For 13 years now I've kept rubber chickens in my cars as a security measure. Many people over the years have asked me why a rubber chicken can prevent a car from forced entry. It's hard to explain...it may even be a paranormal phenomenon. These latest chickens are the best ever. Sunlight is very hard on rubber. Every few years I have to replace them when the ultraviolet rays harden the rubber to the point where the legs or the neck crack off. Still, even with the body in pieces, the protective power remains. These latest rubber chickens promise to be extremely effective crime preventers: they are screaming rubber chickens.

I got some strange looks at the office when I asked around about where I could find a new chicken. At lunch I drove up to Spencers at the Tacoma Mall where I supposed they might be sold. Sure enough, amidst the inflatable love dolls and lava lamps were some rubber chickens. I asked the young green haired sales clerk what the "screaming" meant. She motioned toward the chicken and indicated I should squeeze it. The poor thing let out a horrible death rattle that filled the store and turned all eyes upon us. Then I squeezed the chicken and it made the same terrible noise.
Driving back to work, I kept squeezing the poor thing and breaking into hysterics. At a stop light, the people in the car next to me looked over suspiciously when they heard the death rattle through the open window. I left one in the car and took the spare into the office. When the programmer (the same one who thinks I have cute legs) walked by, I pulled the chicken out of my bag. He got a big grin as I placed it tenderly in his hands.
" Whatever you do, don't squeeze it", I said.
He promptly squeezed it as hard as he could. All eyes turned toward us as the death rattle filled the office.
"That's nice Mark", he said, retreating to his cubicle.

At quitting time, as he was turning off his computer, I realized I needed his assistance changing an onCllick event to an onLoad event in a dropdown menu.

Conversation overheard in high tech office:

"Hey D, I'll let you squeeze my chicken if you come over here and help me with this JavaScript"

"But I already squeezed your chicken once today"

"Well, I need your help with this menu, and I'll let you squeeze it again."

Several people at once stood up in their cubicles and wanted to know what was going on with the chicken.

"I have a chicken, and D likes to squeeze it" I said.

"All right then...if it's gonna be that kind of a party", my boss stood up with a big grin and began to reach for something, not sure what...because I reached down and held up the rubber chicken for all to see. D grabbed it from me and squeezed hard, no surprise there, but he kept squeezing for the next 15 minutes as he walked around the office, trouble shooting a server side include at various work stations. D is a rather reserved fellow, with a large funny bone, but usually not given to excess. I suppose it was the paranormal properties of the screaming rubber chicken simply overcoming his restraint.

5-16-01

Dreamweaver has become my favorite program. We have been developing a site for a client who regularly changes their mind about the navigation links. This is reasonably normal with a large company, but this particular design has 35 rollover button links, for a total of 70 separate gifs I have to make, and rewrite the JavaScript for, each time they change their mind. After the 5th round I am getting it all down to a science. ImageReady 3.0 has an excellent rollover function that blends seamlessly with PhotoShop, working very similar to Fireworks. I still have to manually type in the new button names, and yank around the borders that form a seamless black edge on the drop down layers. But ImageReady automates the creation and slicing of the transparent gifs. And once ImageReady is up and working, I can edit and remake the gifs very quickly. But the best part is Dreamweavers Library function. It has turned a 2 hour job of site wide "find and replace  (64 html pages) into a 1 minute job. My bosses are so impressed they have threatened to make me teach a little in house tutorial. Today we wrapped up the project on schedule for the 5 PM deadline. Hell, I even got to go home a half hour early. I'm tired, but feeling pretty good about the big push. Dad asked me last Sunday how I liked my new career. I always pause and reflect when people ask that. It's not easy to answer...I still feel I am best suited to painting. Painting comes easier to me than anything else I have ever earned money doing. Still, I usually reply that it's a lot better than printing, it pays the bills and it's day shift. Compared to the life I've lived for the last 9 years in printing, this is heaven.

5-11-01

Overtime up the yoo hoo this week. We started out on Monday with an 11, went down to a 10 on Tuesday, an 8 on Wednesday, then back into the tens and twelves to finish out the week. It looks even busier next week, with 3 large projects squeezing into the pipe at once. We are trying to squeak by until Tuesday on fifty dollars. Not easy for a family of four. I made the mistake of paying cash for the vans $560 overdue mechanic visit. That, plus buying the used car last week depleted my new paycheck the day after I deposited it. Today I got all stressed out while bug checking .jsp pages on a test server in Montreal. It's painstaking, extremely labor intensive work. Check all the frames in IE, check all the frames in Netscape, check that they all have titles, check that the client side forms validation is working, check that all the images have alt tags for blind screen readers...on and on.

For lunch I drove up to Thriftway, bought some cheap yoghurt and granola and sat in the quiet sunlight in Wrights Park. That is such a nice park! Tall green trees, lush grass, shaded lanes for the joggers and lots of rolling lawns for leaning back and enjoying the sunny spring weather. As I was driving back, I saw one of our programmers jogging by Stadium High School. He had his shirt off, and I could tell he has the same problem I do, loss of upper body tone from too much time at the computer. We are both quite fit, aerobically (him much more than me) but we simply don't have "run around and carry things" kind of jobs. That's ok, those kind of jobs are usually dead ends. I should know, I spent 28 years in one.

5-9-01

Rollerbladed through downtown today. It was the one direction I hadn't yet skated. I'd been avoiding it because of the embarrassment factor: middle aged, grey haired guy falls on his butt in the middle of main intersection in town before crowds of hundreds...but decided that was paranoia. Actually, it wasn't bad at all. The grade was gentle down Pacific avenue. I had one moderate fall, more of a spin than a fall, when I paid more attention to the pedestrians ahead of me than the large cracks in the sidewalk below. I tried to skate across the new suspension bridge, but was disappointed to see it was made without sidewalks and is more freeway than road, not at all like the old 11th street bridge. Instead, I skated down old 99 toward Fife until I reached my turn around time. The return trip was a lot more fun due to the uphill grade: more control, less braking and better aerobics. I had a nice change of pace at the office today. Instead of hooking up and reworking framesets, I spent most of my day in Photoshop and Imageready redesigning a drop down navigation system for a big site in development. Once I completed the new rollovers, I used Dreamweavers find and replace function to apply the changes to all 62 pages in the site. Afterward I asked my boss if he knew much about the Library function. We spent some time on it in school, and I have heard since that it works fairly well. He hadn't used it anymore than I had. This is the 6th time the customer has made wholesale changes to the nav system. If ever there was a good candidate for the library function of Dreamweaver, this is it.
    I've been maxing out on overtime lately. Last night I got out of there around 7 ish, which is the earliest in a week or two. I managed to catch up on some of my missing sleep last night but still feel a little residual fatigue. Clint has a swollen knee from track. He never slows down, 7 days a week, but may have to now. We've warned him to take it easy on the weight lifting and BMX jumping. Now, his body is shouting at him for relief and he is finally starting to listen...to his body and the doctor at least. God knows he won't listen to his parents. I'm sorry to say I was the same way at his age, except I wasn't on the honor roll and lettering in sports.

5-5-01

I've been taking some heat at work for this journal. When people first meet me, I appear to be a clean cut, hard working, middle aged baby boomer. As they get to know me, they discover I am all of those things plus, I have some surprises in my background. The first to come out is my art...usually in the first week. Next they find out that this greying, artistic boomer is an adrenaline junkie in one of the most exotic sports around, rock climbing. The next to last secret I reveal is the 3 years I spent as a hippie back during the anti-war years of the early seventies. If I trust the people to whom I reveal this ancient secret, I will show them the pictures. and, since I started this online journal/autobiography it's as simple as "I'll mail you the link".
    This particular person who gave me some heat for the journal is a very kind programmer who rescues me whenever I get over my head in JavaScript. A week or so after I sent him the link, he commented that he was surprised I would put so much personal information up in a public place, in a tone of voice that, for an instant, made me feel I had violated some sacred covenant. I replied that I have nothing to hide, and besides, I enjoy expressing myself with the written word. What I didn't say was that it relaxes me to get all my concerns off my chest, and if I'm going to keep a journal, why not do it online? The internet started as a place for researchers in universities to share ideas on their projects. And what could be a more important project (to me at least) than my life? I occasionally peruse other peoples journals, and a few people look at mine. Nobody gets hurt, we all give a little and move on. There are other more subtle reasons for keeping a journal. I enjoy looking back over the years. My memory isn't nearly as clear as the written word. And, by writing every few days for public consumption, I am forced to write better English; a rare thing in this time of instant communication.
    Now and then I get emails from other people who cherish the written word: my father, my brother and a couple of my friends write with a clarity and precision that is a pleasure to read. I am not criticizing hastily sent, poorly written and grossly misspelled emails, I simply mean that I can see the difference, and it says something to me about the senders views on life in general. I would suspect, for example, that they are tail enders on the highway.
    But the absolute last thing I reveal is my music. Music for me is very personal, it's a performance that bares your soul in real time, and I can't even remember the last time I played my blues harp for someone. Probably it was T, the last time we jammed together 5 years ago, but he has known me since 1965. We have a bunch of musicians at work. The aforementioned programmer jams a couple times a week after work with friends, and brings his electric base into his cubicle to thwart car thieves. All 4 of the partners used to play in bands, and a classical guitar lives in the server room. So, perhaps it's not so surprising that, when the conversation drifted onto the Neil Young music we keep on the server, I mentioned to my programmer friend that the Harvest album reminded me of a very poignant time in my past. I told him I can play all the songs on the album on my guitar, and that my harmonica/guitar performance is better than Neil Youngs, or at least the harp part. Actually that isn't saying a whole lot, since Neil sounds stoned when he does it. Last night everyone was gone but one of the partners behind a closed door, and the programmer. I whipped out my harp and played him a riff. Perhaps it's a good thing. I am surrounded by creative people where a little wackiness is encouraged. Our newest hire, a graphic designer, plays drums professionally in a local band. I suppose I am trying to fit in. Last night I had a brief attack of the stomach flu that is ripping through the family. I pray it is not my ear problem coming back.

5-3-01

Our 1991 Corolla has been running well during its first week. I took it in for some neglected maintenance that was beyond my capabilities: timing belt, water pump and front engine seal. They gave it a clean bill of health. It has a vibration in second gear, but only at high revs on a tight corner. That could easily be the worn out tires. We've been putting in the OT lately working on a large project for a big client. Lots and lots of html, editing and adapting JavaScript, making new framesets nested 3 deep and filling them up with cross linked files. Most of it is not really a web site...it's rather a thread based demonstration of how a web site could work and is used as a sales tool by our client to sell to their client. When they decide to buy, our navigable interface is simply filled out by the server side programmers who work for our client.
 
We hear daily about all the dot comers going dot goners as we get busier and busier. I was considering driving up to the mountain to camp and paint this weekend. I hear it's going to rain on Saturday, so I suppose I will have to postpone. I'm in the mood for some adventure. I like the hardship of driving up after work, sleeping poorly up a dead end dirt road and then painting the morning light on the mountain. Usually I have enough energy to do an afternoon painting as well. And the freedom of knowing I can stay an extra day if things go well is lovely. I really miss my climbing buddy D. I have no idea why he had to drop everything and move to San Diego. We got off to a rocky start, but our last few trips were the best ever.

Go back to last month