My latest project (after I did my random User Friendly redirector last night at 1am) is to play with GTK. The end goal is to create a clone of Homesite, done to about (hopefully) 2.5 level (after 2.5 and when HS got bought by Allair it turned to a bloated pig).

Anyway, I spent the night a couple nights ago getting back into C/C++, figuring out the signal handling and widget creation/use etc. Very fun stuff, now to make it do something!

05/30/99

Well, an eventful couple of days. I went hiking with my buddy Cat5 on saturday, up to a place called Cascade Falls (up behind in the wilds of deep Mission). The first part of the hike was bounding from boulder to boulder, in the wonderful hot sun, truely a great day. After a bit (a km? 2? who knows) though it became a little more technical, and involved climbing along the edges, trying to avoid getting into the cold glacier water. A couple of times we needed to walk in the water up to ankle depth. At the place called First Pool I tried to scale along the side (I'm really happy that I had my 5.10 approach shoes on). About halfway along the semi-vertical wall over a pool of very cold looking water I got stuck. Couldn't go forward. Discussing it with neil (who, by the way looks a bit like Stef), we decided that it would be better to go over to the other side, and cross "down there " (indicating back around 30 feet). So I try to go back. Now downclimbing is hard (think about trying to run the hurdles backwards), but this is side to side climbing... should be easy right. Well, after a bit I decided that I couldn't so I dropped down into the water. Oh man was it COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Many bad words were said when I got my head above water again.

Anyway to make a long story short, we got wet, got to third pool, decided it was too dangerous to go further without rope or similar safety stuff, and came back, sunning ourselves on a large rock in the boiling sun on the way. An awsome day.

Funnily enough I had 2 memorable dreams over the weekend. On Friday night/Saturday morning I dreamt that Neil had called and wanted me to go early, and meet him at 10:30 not 11:30, and that when we went hiking it was bike riding above my old school up the road to the microwave tower.... and my bike had a flat or something and there were these two kids there... or something like that.

The other dream was related to a "making of" show for Star Wars: Episde 1. I dreamt I was watching it and kept on being interrupted by the phone or people or something... truely weird. The one neat thing I remember was showing a screw up for a big huge jump stunt which appeared to be between walkways high above nothingness... Obi-wan did the jump but came up short, and fell into.... water. The whole stunt was done just above a huge pool and when he fell he just plunged into the water. Kinda interesting.

05/28/99

Well, had a great time with the gang down at the Irish Heather tonight... things broke off a little early and I found myself in the strange position of going home before it was tomorrow (today). Of course, I could have gone and slept, but no, of course, not, that just wouldn't be right.

So instead I went and played with layer masks again. There is a good tutorial on them at http://webpedia.com/design/graphics/masterps/index4.html. I tried to duplicate some of the stuff in there in the GIMP but their channel ops are not as mature (you can't copy a channel for example. I'll throw it to one of the mailing lists though, maybe some kind developer will take pity on me and add it in.

My yet-unstarted, yet soon to be awsome project of writing a version of HomeSite (which was bought from it's writer by Allaire and turned into a bloated POS) for X using GTK and, thanks to this I'll actually be able to embed the netscape html rendering widget into the application (writing my own HTML renderer is not something I want to do... esp when my greatest GTK app yet is a box with a button that says "hello world"). Anyway, it's a matter of time. I finished up some work on a webpage I was contracted to do. Now before you laugh, the design is not mine, all I did was reproduce what they wanted. Also it's not done yet, so some of the stuff that's broken will be fixed soon. But it's out of my court (finally) so I can start working on some other projects.

05/25/99

Well, Star Wars Episode 1 rocked. There's been a lot of talk on the net lately about if it sucked, how it sucked, how it rocked, etc, and here is my short and sweet review: Too many computer animated critters, amazing lightsaber battles, good story, great lead in for Episode II. I say (to those who disagree and say it sucked), just think about what the story is really about, what it is setting up to happen, and what has to happen in the next 2 movies. In the wait between getting out of the 12:15am show and going into the 3:30am show me and my buddy Cat5 talked about it and just sort of going through what goes on between Episode I and IV made the movie a whole lot better and made a whole lot more sense.

Ok, I'm going for that 8 hours of sleep tonight folks, I just had some stuff to get out of my head before hitting the hay.

05/13/99

Yes, that's right folks, only 5 days to go before the premiere of Star Wars, The Phantom Menace. Thanks to Zoid, Tiktok and Celt, there are a buch of tickets ready for the 12:15am (the 12:01am show was not in a THX theatre) show. I'm so so hyped. Screw the critics, forget the hype, this is star wars baby!