SteveCastellano.com

In spite of all the talk about web design, smoking, RSS, Unix, and CGI scripts, I’d like to point out that our main focus here at the headquarters of the vast Steve Castellano Internet Empire™ is and shall remain music, except when it’s advertising. Or web design.

Most of the action, if you don’t mind calling it that, has been taking place on the music links page of late. I’ve been doing some research on DIY synthesis, and that is evident from the addition of a DIY category. Some spillover into the Enthusiasts and Experts category is also in evidence.

These DIY folks do tend to blur the distinction between Manufacturers and Enthusiasts in some cases. So I think the distinction should therefore be cases. If you are printing schematics on your page and selling PCBs that you make in your basement, I consider you to be an Enthusiast, and there’s no shame in that. But if you are making complete kits that include cases, and especially if you are also offering completed projects for sale, I think you have joined the ranks of Manufacturers.

If you suspect that all this research will soon come to fruition in the museum, and if this prospect interests you, then you should consider subscribing to the RSS feed.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to watch over someone’s shoulder while they’re visiting your website. If you find yourself pointing at their screen and saying things like, “the link! click the link!” and “what are you, grayscale-blind?” – as I did yesterday – you might want to consider a redesign.

My aversion to the underscore can be traced back to my days working alongside an old-school hot-metal-era typesetter, who would look over my shoulder and offer such helpful tips as, “yeah, we would never do that in my day.” One of the many nuggets of typesetting wisdom that he imparted to me was the fact that there is no good reason to underscore. And as a tribute to his tutelage, I’ve tried to carry that aesthetic over to my web design – with somewhat predictable results.

So witness please, my first design-driven (rather than purely utilitarian) Blosxom flavour. I suspect there is a tidier way to do it with CSS rather than tables, but the urgency inspired in me as a result of the realisation that the difference between #444444 and #000000 was not nearly drastic enough for most casual observers to distinguish between the muffin that is the text and the blueberries that are the links demanded that I work quickly with simple, familiar code, and leave the business of teaching myself new tricks for another day.

…smoking, that is.

I read over the previous post and decided that I wasn’t irritable enough, so I put out my last cigarette at 11:30 on Monday night.

Actually it was this that kind of pushed me over the edge.

And because this is not a blog, I feel obliged to point out that the purpose of this post is not to tell you that I’ve quit smoking, but rather to alert you to a new site addition, in the form of a motivational counter that my pal John whipped up for me. He calls it “quiTrack.” I prefer “Smokulator.”

Now can we please change the subject.

One month into the new dynamic configuration, I have deleted my first comment spam.

I know that this one in particular was submitted by a real live person (as they submitted twice to an entry that was not accepting writebacks, took the time to see if the spam was posted, and then moved on to another entry that was), so I’m going to indulge myself in an explanation as to how moronic this behaviour is. I don’t know if these people read. I feel strongly that if they do, they should read more. Starting with the following:

more …

Perversion for Profit is a light-hearted public service composition that weaves together the timeless themes of sexual perversion, adolescent mental health, and communism. Archival recording supplied by the Internet Moving Images Archive (at archive.org) in association with Prelinger Archives.

Time:	4:12
Size:	4.9 MB
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Johnny and Jenny is a musical documentary about a well-publicized crime that occurred not quite ten years ago. The song was written not long after the event, but I only got around to recording it recently.

I’ve been busy.

Time:	2:25
Size:	3.0 MB
Download MP3

Daddy’s Little Girl is the title theme from a documentary that explores a woman’s relationship with her father in the years following her parents’ divorce. The original, recorded in the mid 90s, is on a DAT somewhere, but as I have no DAT machine, and my current studio is superior to the one in which the original was recorded, I decided to re-arrange it and post the new version.

Time:	1:01
Size:	1.2 MB
Download MP3