Not too much, we actually got to watch a video at home after the girls
went to bed. We saw Blues Brothers 2000 and, rather than write
a Review of the movie, I reviewed
the critics who didn't like it.
I'll review the movie at some point too, but first I want to get it on
DVD. Of course, we don't have a DVD player, but, why be conventional?
Also updated the MHTON page, but didn't rename it that. I'll let you
look for it. It's all Mindy's fault.
May 30, 1999 - Morning session
We just got back from seeing Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom
Menace (thanks again for babysitting on such short notice, Lisa and
Jennifer!). We really liked it. One question: how come the computer
graphics of the animals (for which they used ridiculously expensive
computer systems with proprietary software) looked so fake and the
computer graphics of space ships, landscapes, etc. (for which they used
Electric Image from Play Incorporated
which you can get for $2,000 (and if you buy now you get a FREE iMac
computer!) for your Macintosh) looked perfect? Oh, I guess I just
answered my own question. As Kiki would say, Play Rocks!
May 29, 1999 - Morning session
Hey! All you Kiki fans! (I know what a fan you are, Jonathan!) Kiki
now has a Live Internet TV Show every night on
Play TV, starting at 11 pm Pacific
time. NOW I get the Internet.
May 26, 1999 - Morning session
A few minor changes here and there. You'll have to look for them.
Unless you have something better to do, that is.
May 24, 1999 - Morning session
No, nothing new yet. I'm sleeping.
May 20, 1999 - Morning session
You know, considering how long both computers and music have been major
parts of my life, I find it incredible that it was only today that I
bought the necessary MIDI cables to make my piano talk to my computer.
I've already made a MIDI version of a verse of Maria, although
it's not quite good enough to publish. There will soon be embedded
MIDI music on these pages, so go get your MIDI browser plug-ins while
you can!
The new sound card and MIDI cabling, and the new Red Hat Linux 6.0
operating system have, indeed, been taking up my time, so there's still
nothing else new here. But, soon, I will be back to my daily updates.
I have some great new features in mind, like What's In Anna's Garden
and Tom/Bill Similarities.
Not much done last weekend. We were celebrating our anniversary. We
have some other, internal computer stuff to do this week, so we probably
won't have too many updates this week, either.
May 14, 1999 - Mini-afternoon session #1
Waaaaaaah! We can't get DSL! We're too far away from the
switcher/substation/whatever-thing! Waaaaaaaah!
May 14, 1999 - Morning session #2
Added the Tom and Traci's WeddingPerformer 98 Show. I needed to take
off the Anna and Fiona show and one of the
NightwatchA Gift for Mary audio samples. They will return some day. I
might setup some sort of rotation for the multimedia files, since I will
only be adding more. I also need to start using MP3 for the audio
samples.
May 12, 1999 - Morning session
We have another winner! Check out the
What's In Traci's Garden page. Oh,
and Mindy, this is not Jeopardy; you don't need to put your answer in
the form of a question. I'm glad you like the
Nightwatch page. I think the artwork
looks better on the Internet than it does on the album! We need to do
the next album in a more computer-friendly format. One-and-a-half
megabytes for a minute of music is much too much. We should talk to
Thomas Dolby (see below).
Although I am very excited about MIDI files, and about RMF files (Rich
Music Format - a format created by
Beatnik, Inc., [deleted - this was inexcusable namedropping]
I think I will go to bed early tonight. I really
should say this is an Evening session, since it isn't quite midnight
yet.
OK, I stayed up much later than I initially planned, just to prepare
this website for censored. But, this site will get
some cool new stuff soon. Very soon. Even if I need to forego sleep
until the Ides of May.
May 11, 1999 - Afternoon session
Just another idea about the Wave file music samples on the
Nightwatch page. You can always copy the
file to your disk to play it directly from your hard disk. Windows
and the Mac OS come with Wave file players that don't require
streaming from the Internet. You Unix people out there, you know
better than I do how to listen to these files.
That was supposed to be "Film at 11," not "News at 11."
Added a subtle hint to the What's In Traci's
Garden page. If you look really closely, you might be able to get
the right answer. Was starting Wheel of Fortune this difficult
for Merv Griffin?
Specified a background color for the pages of pictures.
May 10, 1999 - Evening session
Added information to the Nightwatch page
about their album A Gift for Mary.
Messed with stuff related to David Cuny. Most of it was his idea,
honest.
Tom Maguire has been found! News at 11.
I just tried out the .wav samples I put on the
Nightwatch page over the Internet.
They sound better than I expected. I you don't have a wav-file
plug-in for your browser, there are many available for free on the
Internet. Apple's Quicktime Player is what showed up on my computer
to play the .wav file over the Internet (which you can find at
www.apple.com), but when I played them locally with my browser the
Beatnik player popped up (which you can get at www.beatnik.com). Why
the difference, I have no idea. (I like a Jedi speak!)
added another band to my Music Page,
this one
Moses and the Graven Image.
Does anyone else notice I keep playing in bands that play one or two
songs, then disappear into the obscurity from which they came? At
last, I can start suffering and write that symphony.
May 7, 1999 - Evening session ("Evening session?" You don't
have evening sessions!)
Finally added some Recipes. Well,
one recipe. But it's a good one!
Don't worry, Mom and Dad. I promise to put up more pictures
of your grandchildren later today. I'm sorry it's been so long.
Just updated all the pages to use stylesheets, and embedded
HTML for browsers that don't support them entirely. If there are any
more difficult-to-read color combinations, or ugly colors, etc., please
e-mail me and I'll see what else I
can do.
May 7, 1999 - Afternoon session
OK. AOL's browser does not support everything I am doing in the
stylesheets, so let's see what it can do. The following should all
look the same: white background with a blue strip on the top that
fades to white, yellow lettering over the blue, a line of black text
on the white, an "unvisited" link that is blue on white and a "visited"
link that is purple on white. The test pages can be found by clicking
on the following links:
If one of our kind AOL viewers could look at the pages, see which ones
look the way I just described them, and
e-mail me with the results, I would
be most grateful. Actually, if anyone wants to check them out and
report the results, that would be great. Thanks. I do what testing I
can with Netscape 4.0, Internet Explorer 4.0, CompuServe 4.0, IBM
WebExplorer 1.2 for OS/2 Warp 4 and Lynx for Linux, but, apparently,
that's not enough.
May 7, 1999 - Another morning session (after a couple of hours sleep)
What is up with AOL's browser? Apparently, things look completely
differently on AOL. I am looking into why the backgrounds aren't
showing up correctly any more. I think this is all a plot by Steve
Case to get me to join AOL again. That's why he bought CompuServe,
too. It's all to get my business.
May 7, 1999 - Morning session
Lots of rewriting using Cascading Style Sheets. You shouldn't see much
of a difference, but hopefully those of you who have had text color
problems (e.g., yellow text on a white background) will no longer
experience those problems. If you do,
let me know.
Added some new pages for some bands I've been in, which you can find on
my Music Page.
May 6, 1999 - Morning session
Too... tired.... Must... sle
Awww, I can't get to sleep. I updated
this page and the
Other Web Sites page with some hidden
information. I will expose it when I have approval from the source of
the information. I am very careful about such things, you know.
May 5, 1999 - Afternoon session
This information is currentlyno longer restricted.
I just had to add a link for
Cesar Camargo Mariano. He has a sister, Lena, who is also a
musician. The first time I went to see her perform, she said from the
stage, "Hello. You must be Tom. Oh, I know all about you. You're
famous!" She was also kind enough to sing at our wedding. Things
haven't been the same since she moved to the Midwest.
May 5, 1999 - Thomas's Morning session (2:00 am - 4:15 am)
Updated the Other Web Sites page with an
interesting site,
Countdown TV,
which is showing 24-hour-a-day Internet TV coverage of the ticket
lines for the new Star Wars movie. Hmmm. How could people, with
nothing better to do than stand in line for MONTHS to get
tickets to a movie, broadcast real, 24-hour-a-day, live television?
Must be more Play technology!
Maybe I should move from Software to Marketing ;-)
Did some Play work, utilizing this very web site. For about 10 minutes,
you could have downloaded a test version of a show I packaged in
Performer 98. It's a nice little show of
balloons, blowing back and forth in the wind, while some quiet jazz
plays in the background. I might save a non-test version and put it up
here. It makes a great screen-saver.
Traci just reminded me that it is Cinco de Mayo. I should have figured
that out when I typed the date May 5.
May 4, 1999 - Thomas's Morning session (2:30 am - 4:00 am)
Happy Birthday, Jonathan!
Not much writing tonight. I'm reading. I'm learning everything I need
to know about Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Extensible Markup
Language (XML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to make this an even
more awesome website. I'm also reading about Intellectual Property on
the Internet, to know what I can do with other people's stuff, and
what other people can do with mine.
Sorry to all of our AOL viewers. Apparently, the AOL browser handles
HTML comments differently than do my copies of Netscape Navigator,
CompuServe Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
I will try to prevent mostly-blank pages in the future.
May 2, 1999 - Thomas's Morning session
(11:45 pm - 1:30 am2:15 am 2:30 am)
OK. Due to overwhelming, unsolicited support, this
page will stay. And I even added the approximate times of the
session at the suggestion of one of our many regular viewers. I can't
guarantee I'll keep doing that, but, hey, we are responsive to our
viewers' desires here at Riso World.
Traci worked a little on her page, but she
doesn't like the way it's coming out.
I am thinking about getting rid of this What's New page, since I make
changes all over the site every day, and just highlight the biggest
changes here, but people look here, go to the linked pages, and never
see all other changes. Maybe I'll add a site map with new pages
highlighted or something.
May 1, 1999 - Thomas's Morning session
Not much tonight. Made some cosmetic changes and added a page for
Saint Joseph in honor of his feast day
today.
Traci worked on her page tonight, too. I don't
know if she wanted it published now, but what the heck.