13 July 2001
24 Count/Goddess at Rudz
It was very hard to get going today, after spending a LONG night at Rudz. We thought 24 Count was going to open for Goddess. It turns out that Goddess played first, meaning 24 Count did not come until after 11.
Goddess turned out to be one of the better opening bands we've seen. They are sort of a funky goth-alt-rock band fronted by an odd chick (who, my friend Dave will be pleased to hear, was wearing a 38 Special Tour De Force shirt from 1984 -- another band whose quest for excellent has been unwavering, or at least their website claims this). I don't know if any new musical ground was broken, but they were fun and funky.
24 Count rocked the place. Their dual guitarists really drive the sound, and in their live shows they sound much more like Bush than on their studio tracks (which remind me of Bare Naked Ladies and Pearl Jam). I really like their energy, and they seem like a bunch of nice guys.
On the way out, we had a short chat with Joe, the sound guy at Rudz. We thought it was high time we complimented him on the excellent work he does there. No matter whether it's an opening band or a headliner, an unknown or a notable, his setup and sound work are always top notch. I need to know more highly competent people like Joe and fewer idiots!
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Tonight, the portal got some needed updating. I added Climb to the Stars to the journal/blogs section; it's a site I discovered when planning my table-free, standards-compliant redesign, and its author is worth reading. I also added Web Design and Web Security sections, so I don't have to scramble trying to find stuff when I'm away from my home machine.
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During a wide-ranging discussion with Callie earlier, I was commenting on the weblog. In its print incarnation, Reductio ad Absurdum was a regular column that pointed out absurd writings we (and our readers) had found in print, with appropriate derisive commentary. The column's purpose (and publication's for that matter) was to entertain those of libertarian/conservative bent, and to rankle those opposed to us; I think we were fairly successful on both counts. The weblog is a little different. I still point out the essential idiocy of the Left (and the occasional idiocy of the Right, squishy Middle, and even Libertarians) with usually derisive commentary. But I also try to draw attention to worthwhile arguments or events. And sometimes I highlight writing that raises genuine questions. I'm a little curious what the breakdown would be, in percentages (but not curious enough actually to go through and compute it). I also wonder if it wouldn't be useful somehow to identify each category of blogged item (which would be very easy to do with stylesheets -- making it an easy future addition should I decide to go that route). I've refrained so far from doing something along those lines because I don't think authors in any medium should do ALL the work for readers, and while it may sound elitist, I'm really disinterested in the laziest of readers.
This article on separating layout from design reminded me of my earlier thoughts. The author makes perhaps the best argument I have seen for separating layout from design. Instead of simply offering the standard "layout should be separated from design" assertion as evidence of the proposition (which many advocates of the position do), the author argues that advanced layout controls (Cascading Style Sheets) offer authors and readers the true promise of the web medium: going beyond simply imitating what one can do on paper, and taking full advantage of a digital, interactive universe of pixels. As Frank Lloyd Wright (and Henry Cameron and Howard Roark) argued for new uses of new materials instead of imitating old uses of new materials, so too the author argues in favor of new uses of a new medium. And THAT ties back to my earlier thoughts -- just because I *could* make use of CSS to help out readers and make things more sophisticated, would it really serve my purposes to do so? Answer right now: I don't think so.
[Posted @ 11:26 PM CST]
