About op. 44

Scope and Purpose

This site was originally conceived as a portable repository for my links and research so that I would be able to access them anywhere, and also as a way to teach myself HTML. It overachieved its goals in both areas, and so, naturally, was subjected to misson creep. It now contains several features and a hodge-podge selection of my own writing. I am never satisfied with it, but even Fitzgerald wanted to change The Great Gatsby after it was already on the press because he thought it could be better.

Barely relevant minutiae

The material on this site that was created by me is claimed to be intellectual property. You’re welcome to download it, quote from it, or use it in any other manner, with the condition that the original source (http://geocities.datacellar.net/lmc2124) is given. I would like to emphasize this particularly with the material contained in "My writings", to which I claim and retain all copyright privileges. This site is intended to be an aid to research, and, as such, any material on this site may be used, in whole or in part (with the aforementioned exception, in which case you may quote from it, but not use things in whole). If you do use it, a mention of where you obtained it is appreciated. For information on how to cite material from the web, see www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos/idx_basic.html. Under no circumstances shall anything here be used for commercial purposes--unless, of course, I get a good cut of the profits. If there were any profits to be had in it, I'd probably already be using this material as down payment on a new Ferrari. These terms are pretty much the Creative Commons license, but without the cutesy name.

On the flip side, a good portion of the material to be found here has come to me unattributed. If I have used something of yours and haven’t given you credit, let me know. If I know where it originated, I give credit.

The first cause of this site is as-yet-undecipherable biochemical reactions and nearly random kinetic activity of one Larry M. Coleman, philosopher, psychologist, and writer sans excellence. If you're wondering just what that brain activity is wrapped up in, a poor picture is available. There is also more information about your author on that page. This site comes to you from Avon, OH, a formerly pleasant little village on the shores of Lake Erie that has become yet another bursting barrell of vapid yuppie wannabees. It is hand-coded in Kate, vi, gedit, Emacs, or whatever text editor I happen to feel like abusing that day (real men don’t use mice, they don’t drag-and-drop, and they sure as hell don’t use Micro$oft FrontPage--if you do, please see my how not to make me hate you page; you probably need it) on an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ running Linux (either SuSE or Debian).

The title of this site will be familiar to fans of the Art of Noise. The four are Anne Dudley, Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara.

Technical notes

Each page on this website has been designed for simplicity, speed, and interoperability. Theoretically, it should display perfectly in any browser released within the last decade or so. However, the real world has a way of having its way with theories. It has been checked at several resolutions in various browsers, primarily Firefox 1.5, Mozilla 1.7.10, Epiphany 1.6.0, Lynx 2.8.5rel.2, and Internet Explorer 6 (I have to put up with Windows at work, so I might as well make it as close to productive as a Microsoft product can get) and looks pretty much the same in all of them.

language.html

• Problem: W3C validator gives "Error: unknown entity ’hl’"
  Cause: validator-side error
  Comments: The validator does not realize this ampersand is not defining anything; it is part of a URL. It’s not a problem with the HTML code and, as such, will have no deleterious effect in any browser. For other pseudo-errors, see bullet two in 2001.10.21 below.

Significant Revision history

2006.01.10

• Added "Why I will not be buying Windows Vista, and a gentle introduction to Linux".

2002.09.15

• A historic moment: There will never be a bad website on the Internet again.

2002.08.25

• Added Steely Dan and Lisa Loeb à la Cybernetic Poet and Piet Mondrian and Andy Warhol
• Finally, after only a year or so of effort, site shows up in Google. For some reason, I had to do an end run around Google by submitting to AltaVista and waiting for Google to take it from them.

2002.06.23

• Spurred into action by my discovery of constellations in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002, I finally collected all my screenshots and made a page out of them. This is just the first step in an aviation-related section, including a gallery of real aviation pictures. All of this material has been sitting on my hard drive for months, but I’m currently dividing my time between working, writing a book of flights to take in MSFS2k2, flying for SimNASA, plowing through the Project Gutenberg texts of Charles Dickens, and sundry other things.
• A substantial amount of content was added site-wide, including the text of the Manifesto of Surrealism on the André Breton page, a dozen or so more quotations, and a few dozen new funny definitions, but almost every page saw something new.

2002.06.01

• No, it hasn’t really been seven months since I’ve worked on the site--it’s just been that long since I’ve done anything significant enough to note here (that’s why this section is called Significant Revision History). I’m constantly tweaking things, adding a little bit of content here and there, and I check the links every 4-6 weeks to prevent link rot, but to clutter this section with every minor thing I change would be a waste of time for both you and me. However, today op. 44 sees its first major layout change, going to the spiffy new two-column layout with the navigation bar on the left instead of at the bottom. I’ve been thinking about doing it for about a month, and, having finally done it, I like it even more than I thought I would. The biggest surprise was how easy it was in the end, and for that I have the stylesheet to thank. Almost all of the change involved copying and pasting a few lines of code for the table to divide the screen, because everything else was laid out in the stylesheet. When I tweaked the stylesheet, it changed everything at once all across the site, saving me from having to change the code in every page by hand. Total time to convert: about 45 minutes. Estimated time to convert if I hadn’t used a stylesheet: probably the whole day. Another good reason to learn them.

2001.11.05

• The canonical list of funny definitons v0.9 is added. Although it does not contain everything I have at this time, it’s big enough to unleash on an otherwise unsuspecting world.
• Updated women of classical music. The megahelennic newcomer to my repertoire, Lara St. John, has finally made her way on to op. 44.
• All .gifs on the page were finally replaced with .pngs. As these were the last remnants of the despised .gif format on op. 44, the site is now gif-free. I did, however, decide to leave just one .gif as a gauntlet thrown down to Unisys. I gave some thought to which one, then decided to rub it in even more by making it the most prominent image on the site: Tux’s cousin Opus.
• Every page is now HTML 4.01 compliant when it is uploaded to GeoCities. After GeoCities gets its paws on it is another story, as previously explained.

2001.10.23

• Began converting all .gifs to .pngs. Now there is no problem with the copyright on .gifs (as if I was concerned about that--any lawyer knows not to sue a poor person), the images follow W3C’s advice, and I’m able to uphold my principles about not using products from companies run by exceptionally stupid people (read Unisys). Most .jpgs will not be touched, as JPEG often has better compression (sometimes lossy compression has its advantages), and I have yet to hear about the Joint Photographic Experts Group sticking out their hand for money.

2001.10.21

• Wrote style sheet to format pages rather than coding each one individually and resorting to deprecated tags and the abuse of tables for indentation purposes. It took all of twenty minutes, and now the background remains fixed in IE 5.5, Netscape 4.75, and Opera 5.11. The latter two allowed the background to scroll when I was using the deprecated BGPROPERTIES="fixed" tag. With the style sheet, even Netscape is smart enough to display it correctly. If you haven’t already written one for your page, pick up Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer’s Reference by Eric A. Meyer and write one! They’re a whole lot easier than they’re made out to be, especially if you’re used to hand-coding your HTML rather than using a WYSIWYG editor. If you don’t know where to start, email me and I’ll try to help you out.
• Index page is now perfect HTML 4.01 according to the strict DTD. The rest of the site is swiftly following suit. However, GeoCities’s javascript ad popup generator is not. The problem is that the beginning of their javascript uses a slew of closing tags for elements that I never open. I could get around that problem by opening them but not closing them, but that is inelegant and shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. However, even if I did that, they still use deprecated tags. I’m pretty sure GeoCities isn’t too concerned that they write Micro$oft-quality code--I may be the only one on GeoCities concerned about it, for all I know.

2001.10.10

• Removed Philip Glass MIDI. Even though it’s one of my favorite pieces for violin, hearing it each time here really began to irritate me. I can only imagine how you felt. The file is still on site here; you just don’t have to hear it each time anymore.
  
• Added language page.
  
• Renamed Quasi-FAQ to 5 Ws and rewrote text.
  
• Cleaned up formatting and some dead links.
  
• Removed code to have site autodetect browser and send to appropriate page. The HTML code is much cleaner now, so even the worst browser on the market, Netscape, can actually almost get the pages right. There are a few quirks left, as Netscape still doesn’t handle style sheets correctly on a consistent basis.

2001.10.09

• Recently I’ve been bothered by the patchwork this site has become. I was unable to come up with a satisfactory system for organizing so much unrelated material. So, instead, I decided to let it all stay, but give the site itself a uniform feel. Instead of having different backgrounds and formatting schemes to match the content of each page, I’m going to extend the format of the index page to all pages. If the index was my choice for my first impression, it’s good enough for the rest of the pages. Besides, when intially constructing this site, I spent weeks searching for something that was visually appealing yet would not fatigue the reader’s eyes (don’t you wish more people would do that?) and I didn’t want to see that go to waste.

2001.03.21

• Added code to have site autodetect browser and send to appropriate page.

2001.02.15

• Added latin quotes to quotes page.
  
  • Discovered that GeoCities’s advanced file editor can’t handle pages larger than 30-35k.
    
  • Swore at GeoCities for mangling quotes page by truncation.
    
  • Swore at myself for not having backup file.
    
  • Put "reconstruct latin quotes page" on to-do list. You may notice it still hasn’t been done.
• Had same experience with links page. Fortunately, I did have a backup for that one.

2000.06.15

• Gave psychology links and miscellaneous links their own pages, as the single links page was getting rather large. Also refined general links’ subcategories.

1999.05.13

• Added women of classical music page.

1999.03.27

• Quill & Vellum is slain. Opus for Four grows from its teeth.

1998.10.03

• Added my writing page.

1998.09.21

• Quill & Vellum v0.1 composed: small index file and links table