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This page was last updated on , but the first version of it I ever wrote ended up being uploaded - quite unintentionally - during Hallowe'en, October 31, 1997.
This fact is not meant to be spooky or have any special significance whatsoever, but I thought "what the hell, I'll mention it anyway."
Occultists tend to take 'coincidence' very seriously, and as it happens, I used to be rather heavily into the Occult, in particular: study of the Kabbalah. Come to think of it, I still am ... but that's another story.
Well, it's a simple enough story. I was born in Harvey, a small country town in Western Australia, in 1959. After my family finally moved to "the Big Smoke" (Perth), and I discovered the mixed blessings of urban life, I wanted to be involved with the technical side of The Movies. To tell the truth, I guess I secretly dreamt of working with Stanley Kubrick or something.
Around 1975, during my last year of high school, I moonlighted at nights as an apprentice cinema projectionist, and found I enjoyed it so much that I ended up doing it professionally for the next 20 years or so.
I've worked in just about every kind of cinema environment imaginable! From very big, old-fashioned 70mm movie palaces to tiny drive-ins; from University lecture theatres, luxury hotel convention centres and high-tech film laboratory theatrettes to small community recreation centres and most everything else in between.
For many years, during its exciting heyday, I was the Chief Projectionist / Technical Advisor at FTI, our State's Film and Television Institute. The Australian film industry was really thriving at this time (mid-70's to the early 80's), with award-winning documentaries galore, and even big, ground-breaking features like "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and "Mad Max 2". It really was quite a time.
Until 1991, I worked freelance in various capacities as a technician in audio, video and filmmaking post-production, and electronic design areas as well. I still do oddball audio / video electronic projects from time to time, as the need arises, or people ask for something unusual.
After that, I worked in various roles in corporate audiovisual multimedia for a quite a long while. Sadly, advances in digital electronics have slowly turned much of the traditional 'art' of film / video presentation into a soulless, largely automated process - like much of the modern world, some would say. Kind of like sitting through an uninspired PowerPoint presentation, if you know what I mean.
Although the equipment we use these days is sexier, and the lenses and electronics are much better, somehow it's all become much less fun. Corporate AV is so darn boring, too! Although, come to think of it, my colleagues and I showing "The Sting" (Robert Redford / Paul Newman, 1975) over 800 times eventually got a little tedious as well ...
In the same way that video technologies have changed forever the way we make films, computers are beginning to take over from video, to say the least. So considering my career path, it's not surprising that since the mid-80's I've been into computers, like just about everyone else these days, I guess.
I started around 1983 with a no-name XT running MS-DOS 2.1, and no hard disk - so remember that the next time you whinge about your machine needing an upgrade! I can still remember my tech friends coming over to visit, just to drool over my first hard disk, a Seagate RLL with a mind-blowing 30MB of storage. "You'll never fill that up", they all said.
The industry has come a long way, eh?
A great many rather hard-to-believe adventures intervened in my life throughout this period, which I may write about another day.
To cut to the chase, and a very long story short: nowadays, as a sideline, I build, repair and upgrade PC systems from home. I try to cater, especially, for pensioners and the less-wealthy people in my neighbourhood of Fremantle, Western Australia. I just generally help newbies get started on-line, and using their new scanners and software.
I just wish my generally very loyal clientele included a few eccentric millionaires. Oh well!
What's happening in Fremantle? Not a hell of a lot, really ... these days, Fremantle is pretty much a sleepy little seaport, priding itself on its arts & crafts, history, Federation architecture and its seldom-mentioned embarrassing oversupply of trendy coffee shops.
Fremantle's earlier heyday of intensive, very large-scale maritime activity is long gone, except when a US Navy carrier group comes to visit. The substantial local fishing fleet keeps busy, though. Today, it's tourism that is the lifeblood of the town. For some reason, on any sunny day in Fremantle, Japanese tourists bedecked with cameras can be seen everywhere, photographing anything, God bless 'em!
Anyone who gets seriously into computers for any period of time inevitably ends up at least having a peek at the World Wide Web. It's then only a matter of time until one investigates the possibilities of publishing one's own stuff on the Web, if only for the benefit of family and friends.
The coding protocol used on webpages is of course, HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. It turns out that when all is said and done, at least as far as the Purists are concerned, there is correct ('valid') HTML and incorrect ('invalid') HTML, and theoretically, that is that. Just what exactly constitutes one or the other changes all the time, and is constantly subject to revision and fierce debate.
Writing decent, original, and in particular, valid HTML that works correctly in all major browsers can be extremely tough. Sometimes it's damn near impossible and barely seems worth the trouble, which is why so many authors take the easy option, and write exclusively for Internet Explorer, even though a lot of them are unaware they're actually doing so. The trouble is, even IE varies considerably from version to version, and coding around these variations can be hard work. *Sigh*
Such authors take the view that "my pages look fine in my version of IE, and it's what my company's Word 2000 churns out anyway, and I wouldn't have a clue as to how to manually tweak it, so if your browser doesn't render it like mine does, well, tough!" I used to severely disdain this view as "coding arrogance and laziness", but I must say, the older I get, and the more frenetic life becomes, the more sympathy I am developing for this attitude.
I mean, life is short, and there are a lot of oddball browsers out there.
With Microsoft's dictatorial insistence of bundling IE with every version of Windows, most users automatically and unquestioningly use IE exclusively because it's simply *there* ... this also means, of course, that those terribly bloated, non-compliant Word 2000 webpages render wonderfully for them, albeit very slowly. The fact that even on the Macintosh, IE is the best browser is a huge factor as well. Sometimes I do pity the competition.
I first learnt to write HTML manually, aided by on-line tutorials and a few magazine articles. I reluctantly maintain, even today, that it's really the only way to completely bypass that vaguely unsettling feeling of 'not being in real control' which plagues newcomers to authoring with WYSIWYG (graphical-interface, What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor programs. This goes double for many ISP's online "webpage creator" services. Writing HTML by hand is not hard to learn, but it takes more than 5 minutes, in spite of what many optimistically-titled books would suggest.
Over the years, like many of us, I've dabbled with many different whiz-bang WYSIWYG HTML editors, such as FrontPage, HotDog, Word 2000 and of course, Dreamweaver, plus many others. Each of them had their strengths, and several of them were fun, easy to use and powerful. With very few exceptions, however, bloated and proprietary coding tended to be the end result, cross-browser usability a real problem and debugging JavaScript a nightmare.
With WYSIWYG editors, one always seems to eventually need to get one's hands dirty, and tinker with the code by hand, especially when JavaScript or subtle table errors are involved, which is most of the time.
The unpalatable truth, unfortunately, is that the only way to really learn HTML is the old-fashioned, hands-on approach - even if that means starting with the humble Windows Notepad.
After trying 'em all, these days I find myself mostly relying upon Arachnophilia, a powerful and totally customisable text-based editor. It's free, very small and fast, and I like the author's general world-view.
This doesn't mean his program is 'hard to use' by any means, and it is immensely popular amongst authors who can think for themselves - but in all fairness, I'd have to concede that it's not really suitable for total HTML novices, either. It's fabulous for the intermediate-to-advanced author.
Amongst the popular WYSIWYG editors, with versions 2000 and 2002, FrontPage has improved out of all recognition. It's particularly adroit at quick, intuitive table creation, and understandably a favourite of the MS Office crowd. I like it quite a lot now, and having easy access to Office's tools, such as its excellent spell-checking, is invaluable - for those who like that sort of thing.
Dreamweaver 4.01 is undeniably gorgeous - and it seems to get better with every release. I'm currently making the somewhat painful transition to using it routinely. It's deservedly considered the Rolls-Royce of editors, and an excellent WYSIWYG compromise for hand-coding purists, but not even its keenest fans would deny it's a real System Resources hog. It is highly customisable, but doing so is not a job for the faint-hearted. One huge advantage it has is its very slick site-wide Templates Updating feature, making it a favourite amongst managers of large sites.
However, at the end of the day, text-based editors like Arachnophilia still really come into their own when it's time for a quick, hands-on patch-up job, or one that's needed in a big hurry.
For instance: check out this "Green Star Brigade Reclaim Land in Fremantle" press release page that I knocked up for local activists, the Green Star Brigade - it took all of 20 minutes from start to finish, all accomplished with Arachnophilia. (The Opposition party won the election, and the Freeway Bypass was indeed abandoned. We often wonder if that little page helped influence events - I like to kid myself that it did, of course.)
If you're interested, some years ago, I wrote a little essay that told a little of my very early HTML learning curve experiences, and some of what I'd gleaned up to that point. It's very out-of-date, and a new, revised version is nearly ready to replace it, but as well has discussing "web design politics", it has a couple of newbie HTML design-related links. I guess it's as much a time capsule of my skills-level from a few years ago, as anything else.
So, this modest site of mine is primarily to facilitate friends and family keeping in touch, like most people's home pages. It also serves as a touchstone for my computer customers. But it's also ongoing 'homework' for myself.
I am trying to learn the not-so-easy compromise of using HTML 4.0's slick capabilities, cross-browser JavaScript, DHTML and CSS whilst following 'good web practice' principles, and keeping the code valid ... er ... at least, mostly valid! You can't see much of this publicly, yet - but behind the scenes I've being a busy beaver, and the results will hopefully manifest one day soon ...
This page is dedicated with love to my gal.
Her name is France, and she's from Québec, Canada. France ran the Canadian office of Sub Pop Records, the independent Seattle-based label that released Nirvana's and Soundgarden's first albums.
We first met in an Internet chat room (oz.org IRC) on June 25, 1997, and quickly became close Internet buddies. She flew to Australia to stay with me for a month during Christmas, 1997 ... one thing led to another ... and to cut a very long story short:
After much hard work and gnashing of teeth, we finally worked our way through the maelstrom that is the Australian Department of Immigration's requirements for her permanent return. We married on August 21, 1998, and began living happily ever after.
As if all that wasn't dramatic enough ... (*phew*) ... and almost as if to help speed up the Immigration process - quite contrary to any plans we may have had, we also managed to conceive twin baby girls. So much for my "near-sterile sperm count", I guess.
The girls were finally born on October 13, 1998, after an unusually long pregnancy (for a twin birth) and a pretty goddamn long delivery. Their names are Véronique and Cordelia, and with a little bit of help from their Mother, they maintain their own webpages. France also has quite substantial websites of her own - these are all linked below.
I hope you get a chance to look through the rest of our sites, and maybe check out some of our links sometime. But that's it for me, for now - thanks for visiting. Please visit again soon to see how things are progressing for us all, and to email me (or France) any thoughts you may have.
Feel free to email us!columbus@iinet.net.au
france@iinet.net.au |
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