Tag: Nintendo DS

website maintenance

For a few months, I’ve been extremely frustrated about a little bug in the index.html page for my main website. (kyleclements.com)

the page worked just fine in FireFox 3.6 on my laptop. But for some reason, the image would fail to render on every other browser out there. I checked multiple computers, I loaded my website on smart phones, Wii’s, and Macs. I even tried it out on the Opera mini browser for my NDS.

No image.

What the hell is going on?

My machine was getting kinda crashy, so I wiped it clean and did a full re-install of everything.

I upgraded my OS to Ubuntu 11.04 (I was still on 9.04, so this was quite a jump), which features the brand new shiny FireFox 4 web browser.

And….the image would load. Damn!

I installed chromium.

The image wouldn’t load.

At this point, I was getting pretty angry, because it was looking more and more like it was a website coding error, not a browser error.

That means the mistake is my fault. Better look at the page source.

I was missing a single < / a > tag. I left one of my links open, and that was the source of all my problems.

Finally, after 4 months, my website will work right again! Time to upload this file and get to work.

I opened up Filezilla and tried to upload my fixed file, and it just erased my index.html page instead. I spent an hour tweaking setting, visiting my web host’s website and dealing with support, nothing. That 4kb file just didn’t want to upload.

Before calling it quites for the night, I figured, ‘lets try something new.’

I installed gFTP, hit upload, and 2 seconds later, my website was up and running.

By the end of it, I had a better faster lightweight browser and a better faster lightweight FTP client. And a functional website.

How I Started Listening to Audiobooks While Painting

It’s amazing how quickly an idea can spread though a community or subculture. One particularly aggressive meme that is working it’s way though the Toronto artist community is audio books. Listening to an audio book while working seems to be a rapidly growing trend.

I had always heard of audio books, but I never had the slightest bit of interest in them. In 2005, While talking to Nicholas Di Genova in his studio space in Toronto, he happened to mention that his latest audio book had arrived in the mail. He was a member of some sort of audio book club. Based on his description, it worked like Netflix, only with audio books instead of movies. He paid a monthly fee, and they sent him a book. When he returned it, they sent him the next one on the list. At the time, I was still blaring Nine Inch Nails and Skinny Puppy while working, and the idea of listening to a dry, boring audio book did not seem at all appealing. I was an expressionist painter who worked long hours, and I needed fast and interesting music to keep me going. I couldn’t imagine enjoying listening to someone read a book. But this conversation with Nik successfully planted a seed in the back of my mind. It just needed some time to sprout.

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