New experiment

[altivo]

Nope, not a Poisson d'Avril joke. 'Tivo the Clydesdale Librarian is pleased to present a newborn website, where he will add brief comments on books and other media for which he can't find time for a full podcast discussion.

Enter here all ye who dare.

I'm taking advantage of a beta program being run by Google. Hopefully if they decide to cancel I'll be able to shift the pages to another host. Comments and criticisms welcome.

Edit: The first review, Rita Mae Brown's The Hunt Ball, can be found by clicking "Next" at the bottom of the page. I'm still revising, this will be more obvious to navigate soon.

Edit again: For the genuine masochist, RSS is available here.

Comments

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

Very nice looking page there. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've just added the first review. Click on "Next" at the bottom of the page to read it. Still under construction...

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Woot, the apple rating scheme is back!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but Google's page manager isn't letting me do what I want, so I'm gonna have to make individual graphics for each number of apples. ;P

Wow...

[flaredragon.livejournal.com]

I must say, I am impressed. Makes me wish I still lived in Sutton where I had a small library for a next door neighbor. =( Definatly bookmarking the site. Off topic, I've noticed that your music-of-the-moment has been one of my tracks for the last couple of entries. You like them that much? ^^; Hurr... back on topic, that page gives you the sophistication and class I'd dream of having. But, I guess that will only happen as I get older... regardless, nice work Altivo. =) Thank you so much for sharing =)

Re: Wow...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Your music has plenty of sophistication, and yes, I like it that much. I downloaded about ten tracks while I was at work yesterday (I only have dialup at home) and then forgot to copy them to a CD to bring home. Grrr. I'm even tempted to go back and get them rather than wait for Monday.

I'll probably give your music a little plug on this new site. It's not going to be limited to books alone. I think you at least hinted that you had some CDs for sale, so I could point people in that direction?

I do an occasional podcast discussion of a furry author or book. May I use an excerpt from one of your tracks as an introductory selection some time? I always give full credit and a web or e-mail reference for contacting the musician.

Re: Wow...

[flaredragon.livejournal.com]

*nodnods* You may certainly use my music however you wish Altivo. I don't mind in the least. I do have 2 CDs for sale now, Under the Stars and Duality. Crossroads is going to be my 3rd attempt.

You had asked earlier what my method of recording is:

First, as you know my style of music is sheer improvisation, whatever floats across my mind and paws at any given moment. So most of what you hear is raw unedited music going straight from keyboard to computer. However, I've gotten my system to the point where a flubbed key doesn't ruin a good session.

First, I play the music of the moment, and Cakewalk 2003 records the hard midi data. Then, Cakewalk plays it back through the piano, and I monitor the song via Piano Roll and Staff views, listening for (what I think are) mistakes, and erasing the midi-event so it's like I never pressed the extra key. I can only recall adding in a note I had not played once or twice. Once the midi data is "cleaned", then I plug the piano output into the Line In on my soundcard, and bounce the sound off the computer. Cakewalk records it as a wave file, I export it and convert to mp3, and voila. It's like being able to edit a live performance. =) Nothing high class, but it's better than how I started, playing into an open air microphone. *laughs*

Re: Wow...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the explanation and the permission.

I was wondering if you had a MIDI step in there and that confirms it. If you've been manipulating the MIDI data, though, you're doing it very subtly. I detected nothing.

I have two MIDI equipped keyboards available here but rarely use them. My preference is for the theater-style Wurlitzer organ. I only wish I could afford to buy a big Allen or Rodgers. ;P

Re: Wow...

[flaredragon.livejournal.com]

Hurr, thanks for the compliments pony. =) The reason you probably can't detect anything is because like I said earlier, I don't add anything to the midi data, only remove. That makes it so the original flow of the song is unbroken and unaltered.

Ah, church organs... I'm very fond of organ music, and the times when I can jump behind a full organ have been few and far between. We have a small organ here, but it doesn't move the soul the way the real deal can.

Here's an old picture of me at the keys, since you're sharing. It's from before I moved to California, making it around a year and a half old. But you get the idea.

Re: Wow...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*starts to observe the appearance of almost Vulcan concentration in your expression but gets distracted by the crowd of plushies hanging out in the background*

They are plushies, aren't they?

Church organs are powerful, but the theater organ is my fave. The kind they used to put in movie houses to accompany silent films and entertain the audience during intermissions. Not many of them left in situ any more, though out there on the left coast they are a bit easier to find than here. The style of sound and playing is more like jazz or big band music than it is like church music. :)

Re: Wow...

[flaredragon.livejournal.com]

yep, that is a crowd of plushies... and thats only about half of them. *giggles* I love horse plushies, and I have a massive herd of them. Sadly, most are in boxes from moving still since I have nowhere relativly clean to put them (yet), but eventually all 80+ plushy horses will be roaming and grazing around the house. ^_^;

Re: Wow...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

80+?? That sounds wonderful. I have lots and lots of plushies, but horses are generally hard to get. I've been concentrating on equines for a while now and have only about 10 or so. Not a single donkey yet, either.

Re: Wow...

[flaredragon.livejournal.com]

neat quilt =)

I'll have to gather the herd up onto our bed and get a picture. To be fair, I have a lot of duplicates from when I worked at Toys R Us. They had an -excellent- line of horse plushies, but they've since changed companies and it went to total crap. Living near the Douglas plushy home store and having a unique plushy cart in the natick mall didn't help matters either. I have them in all sizes ranging from "fits in your palm" to the same size as your large one there, which looks like a TRU plush if I don't miss my guess.

*whinnies happily*

Re: Wow...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yup, the big guy is ToysRUs. I got him thinking I could sleep with him when my mate's away but he's actually too big. The bay with the white blaze stays in bed with me and the two wuffies on the pillow in the background.

I'd have bought one of those big pegasi TRU has if they were natural colored instead of pink or lavender. I drew the line at purple horses.

My mate made the quilt. We collected fabrics with teddy bear prints for a decade or so, until the teddy bear fad was wound down. He made shirts for us out of some, but had huge amounts of most and decided to do a king sized quilt. The top was assembled several years ago, and then he got hung up during the quilting and put it aside. Last fall, without my knowledge, he secretly got it from the barn loft, cleaned it up, undid his first quilting attempt, added a new filling and backing, and rented time on a big free arm quilting machine to finish it for a birthday present to me. It's not real fancy, but for obvious reasons I love it. He has a quilt that I started way back in the 70s and he finished it. The fabrics are partly clothes that I wore in high school and college. It turned out nice, but he's a blanket stealer so I could never really share it with him. Now I have my own and don't have to shiver at night. ;)

Re: Wow...

[flaredragon.livejournal.com]

*giggles softly* Wow... thats wonderful indeed =) And yeah... I haven't found any natural colored pegasi. Would be too much to ask for one in my colorings, to be sure! *grins a bit* Sounds like you two have got it made, Tivo. I'm looking up to you more and more with each new thing I learn of you. *lowers his head respectfully*

Re: Wow...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*lowers his head respectfully*

Now, none of that. There's no hierarchy among friends.

We've had our rough spots, we still worry about money a lot even now. But the "secret" of an enduring, supportive relationship is not really secret. Communication, tolerance, and space. We each have our own space, our own activities, and our own time in addition to the time and activities that we share. Neither of us begrudges the other that, which is key. It will be 24 years together at the end of this June.

Re: Wow...

[flaredragon.livejournal.com]

Twenty four years... thats amazing and wonderful... I can only pray that Equus will still be by my side after that long, neigh... we've been together for around 16 months now. It's been hard... very hard. I don't know if it gets better, or worse... I would hope better. Right now the house doesn't really allow us time apart... theres only one of everything, one TV, one computer, one phone/internet line.. one bed, although we don't mind that one so much as it's an old creaky bed that's needed replacing for a while. About the only time we're apart is when Equus is at work, or I'm off at an event for the weekend. We have a long way to go... we have a lot of people behind us for support though, too.

*whuffles quietly*

Re: Wow...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Support is important, especially from those you can be with physically. But count me in there if you should need me.

My mate is a Gemini so he goes in for two of many things anyway, but sure, one bed. One TV because we don't watch it anyway. We do have two phone lines and two computers (more than two, actually... counting... five that are on the LAN at the moment, and about five that are in storage.) We've been in this house for the last 7+ years, though it's hard to believe time has gone by so fast. It's cramped. We had a lot more indoor space in our previous house, where here we have two huge barns and open fields.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I like the design a lot. How much is you and how much is template? Either way, you have my compliments. It looks like it'll be a cool website.

It looks to me like all of the style elements are embedded in the HTML page, not sitting off in a CSS stylesheet. Makes for a long stretch of code, but also means you can save the HTML file and have everything you need to move it elsewhere, except the graphics. That's very convenient.

I had to copy the HTML source, because it looks like there are some neat tricks I could learn from the style coding.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The design is mostly template. They have a whole stack of different templates much the way livejournal does, and you can just pick one. I didn't waste much time trying them out, I settled for anything reasonable that wasn't the default. Since you have to fill in the template rather than creating HTML offline and uploading it, I have to constantly stop myself from inserting raw HTML tags into my text. They don't work. Instead, they display as literals. Like this: <h2><i>heading here</i></h2>

CSS mostly drives me nuts. I learned HTML back when it was version 1.2 and have continued to write raw HTML with a text editor ever since. CSS seems to me to be trying to turn the web into a desktop publishing program. The trouble is, it does that at the expense of destroying the platform and display independence of the original concept. The guild newsletter I do every month is done without styles. I think it still looks fine, and will display on most browsers and at most screen resolutions without losing anything.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

CSS "complicates" things, from the standpoint of "The Web is just supposed to deliver information, it doesn't have to be pretty." But people were already bending and breaking HTML to make it do display things in a way it was never intended to do. CSS is an attempt to get around that bending and breaking by providing an approved way to do design.

I'm not meaning to say that everything on the web should be designed, by any means. I wish more people would avoid overcomplicating things when they just have information to deliver -- not everything needs to be "designed" for "maximum impact." The guild newsletter sounds like it's perfect for its job. On the other hand, LJ's templates probably would be impossible without CSS.

Me, I got into learning CSS because I'm a geek. But I see the advantages, which is probably due to my job more than anything.

[favouritewindow.livejournal.com]

Very interesting site - congrats :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, it looks "pretty", at least in a conservative sort of way. Thanks for looking at it.