It is what you do with inspiration that matters.
Writing, music, and the graphic arts influence our minds, giving rise to thoughts and emotions. The more controlled and directed that effect, the closer "art" approaches to esthetic engineering.
My prehistoric fantasy A Drum Is Empty -- still in editing mode with shiny new beta readers crawling all over it.
Work on various sequels continues apace. Or astumble. Off and on, anyway.
What does all that have to do with? Well, you could call me an artist, or a writer, or a musician--but those are limited labels. Life can't be chopped up and stuck into little pigeonholes. Everything is connected. Whether I am writing a song or designing a website, all of me is involved. I am an esthetic engineer. I see the patterns, make the connections, communicate as clearly as possible.
E-mail me if you have any questions.
No animals were harmed in the construction of this website.
On the other hand, I would like to put some lying pigs out of business. See right column...
Use a good HOSTS file. The HOSTS file tells your web browser where to look first for anything referenced by a URL on a page - an image, an ad, a pop-up telling you to click on something bad.
In Windows XP the HOSTS file hangs out in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\ - yeah, I thought that was odd too. In 9X it's in Windows, Win2000 I dunno... It is a plain text file with no extension (three or more letters or numbers after a dot, like Readme.txt)
It can save you a lot of trouble, even keep your browser from being hijacked (changing your home page) and protect your kiddies from porn pop-ups. If you see anything in red at the top of this section of the page, you need it.
You can get a variety of ready-made HOSTS files here and there on the Web. A very good one is available from MVPS. I am currently using a hybrid of that and a list of bad sites that I found here. You can download mine HERE. It is a zip-compressed file, you must extract it and save the HOSTS to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\. You will need to have administrator rights for this. This file is not guaranteed to stop everything, but it will do a lot to clean up your surfing experience. If you have any problems with it, crave Google ads, or want to visit porn and/or cracking sites, you will have to edit it. Funkytoad's Hoster is excellent for that.
NOTE that a large HOSTS file can cause an extreme slowdown in WindowsXP/2000! This may be remedied by shutting down the DNS client service. That may not be an option...more info and links. Also see instructions at MVPS. If you need the DNS service on all the time for any reason, you will have to do without the big one.Ack!
This page - and pretty much the whole site - is designed to fit any size browser window comfortably, and adjust to your font size preferences. If you are using an older browser that does not support CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), it should still be readable and its content will be displayed in a reasonably logical order.
Some things, such as font styles and sizes, may vary acording to your browser settings. I hope you're not using a phone, because I haven't gotten around to adapting it for that yet...don't have one to test it on - LOL
If you want to see what the site should look like, use anything but Internet Explorer, which is not guaranteed to give perfect results here. Sites that are designed specifically for IE often don't work well for anything else. Try FireFox - it's cool.
Oh - and hang on to your towel!
(...ask a cat how to pronounce that)
Arual's lil house on the peninsula -- archive of one incarnation of my first site. Good for a laff.
Unlimited Opportunity!
Merchants of Deception
Visit the site, read the free book. Think.
Download/view my MLM PowerPoint Presentation - entertaining "infomercial" (right-click and "Save as" to download) ca. 2MB
View the Flash version
(OMG, yes, Flash, right here in FFTS!)Security conscious?
Hate ads?
Ads? What ads? I don't see any ads. Click above to see why.
My web portfolio
I also install content management systems and forums, and create themes for them. Emphasis on manageability, usability -- not on bells and bloat.
Your website - a short survival guide
Miscellany:
K-Meleon is the best browser, IMHO, but... whatever peels your banana...
All artwork on this site (except for the occasional link-banner) is my own original work.
©2006 L. Haglund AKA Matera the Mad__