VanRamblings Whinges and Whines, But Gains a New Skill

February 20, 2006VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

VanRamblings has found itself just a tad busy of late, what with preparing for the 2nd anniversary of our blog (click here and scroll to the bottom of the page for our first post, and thank you Michael for repairing our archive facility), as well as completing our term project for a Dreamweaver Level 1 course, a part of UBC’s Multimedia and Web Development programme, not to mention working full-time in our airless office in downtown Vancouver.
As we thought we’d failed our first HTML Authoring course (actually, we got a ‘B’ — or so the letter from the department read when it arrived this past Friday), the pressure was on us to do better on the Dreamweaver term project. Now, you’d think what with posting to VanRamblings sporadically over the past two years, and possessing the sort of superior computing skills we believe are ours, that the Dreamweaver course would be a breeze.
Think again.
Participating in the Dreamweaver course and working on the term project proved to be the most arduous work in which we’d engaged in the past 20 years. VanRamblings hasn’t had more than 4 hours sleep any night in the past two weeks putting our project together, as our life became consumed with building a website from scratch and uploading it to the ’Net.
And believe us when we say that the project is a llloonngg way from being “finished,” although we’re going to submit the website we’ll present to you below later tonight anyway, and seek to “repair” it, build on it, and transform it as we acquire greater Dreamweaver skills, and gain skill in the use of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as the other programmes in the Adobe Creative Suite, and Macromedia Flash (like this).
So, without further ado, please find VanRamblings’ term project for Dreamweaver Level 1, a tentative first step for VanRamblings, and a website for one of our favourite restaurants, http://lansrestaurant.com.

If I Can’t Dance, It’s Not My Revolution!

February 11, 2006MusicRaymond Tomlin

No one has ever said that VanRamblings’ taste in music isn’t electic. We love country and jazz, ambient and progressive house, as well as folk and old-timey bluegrass, straight-ahead pop and melancholy female vocalists (think Cat Power, Jenny Lewis, Imogen Heap, and our favourite sad chanteuse of all, Gemma Hayes).
But most of all, VanRamblings’ loves Jude — who, apart from being our son, is also a dj (DjNameless to be precise), a producer, a recording engineer, an old schooler — and an ESL teacher in Japan.
Today VanRamblings wants you to get up off the sofa and move your feet to the beat. And what specific beat might that be? Yep, you guessed it.
VanRamblings is pleased to present “Something They Feel” by DjNameless, and encourages you to download the sweetest mix of funky progressive old school house music you’re ever gonna hear — 43 minutes and 32 seconds of pure aural bliss. Thank you Jude for a terrific aural treat! Everyone enjoy!

Internet Explorer 7 Now Available For Download

February 5, 2006Web & TechRaymond Tomlin

Long thought to be a particularly insecure web browser, Internet Explorer has finally gotten the makeover long promised by Microsoft.
This past Tuesday, Bill Gates and company made their next generation browser available to the public, and although some critics are not thrilled, other critics are taking a wait and see attitude.
With Firefox’s dramatic inroads into the browser market this past year (now installed on 25% of user’s computers as their primary browser) Microsoft had to do something. And they have.
So, what’s the big whoop about Internet Explorer 7?
Well, there’s tabbed browsing for a start, with an interface that seems to this observer to be a tad friendlier than Firefox’s much earlier entry into the realm of tabbed browsing. There’s the new Zoom feature (just like Opera, the favourite next generation browser of many VanRamblings’ readers). Readily accessible zooming allows old fogeys (like me) to zoom in and out of a page and not have to strain to read the often tiny print on a web page.
There’s also a whole bunch of other new features, including security protection (with a built-in phishing filter and a one-click browser history delete facility). Mention should be made, too, of IE7’s much enhanced search feature, which now includes Google, Yahoo and AOL.
Internet Explorer 7 is now available for download, so you may want to become the first person on your block to download IE7 (caveat emptor).
Note: A reader takes VanRamblings to task for not mentioning that IE7 is in beta version, and as such is itself insecure. Thanks to Sara for helping to keep VanRamblings on the straight and narrow (and by the way, IE6 or IE7, VanRamblings’ rendering in either Microsoft product sucks. We recommend either Firefox 1.5 — long our default browser — or Opera 8.5). The final version of Internet Explorer 7 is set to be released in June 2006.
Update … users report that Internet Explorer 7 is riddled with bugs: Now, Sara isn’t saying I told you so, although she might. Web maven and master of all he surveys — that would be VanRamblings’ webmaster, Michael Klassen — passes along this timely ZDNet article detailing the many, many bugs that early adopters of IE7 have found, ranging from a denial of service vulnerability to a conflict with McAfee security software, and so much more.

Miranda Lambert: VanRamblings Is Simply Smitten

January 30, 2006MusicRaymond Tomlin

The last time VanRamblings fell as head-over-
heels in love with a country artist as we have with Miranda Lambert was when we first heard Allison Moorer on her 1998 début, Alabama Song.
Since then, it’s been something of a drought for us, although we’ve managed to get by quite nicely with Kasey Chambers’ rollickin’ début, not to mention, an occasional listen to Iris DeMent (who we also love), Julie Miller, Lee Ann Womack, the Kinleys, Lucinda Williams (great in concert!), Tammy Cochran, Tift Merritt and Alison Krauss.
Then along comes Miranda Lambert, who we first heard about from music critic for The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones, when on a year-end music panel on The Charlie Rose Show he called Lambert “the best new artist of the year, rock, country or pop.” And we’ve been smitten ever since.
Like most traditional progressive country artists, Miranda Lambert sings from the heart, as she writes about what she knows, about the people travelling down the back roads of the southern United States. One can hardly imagine Britney Spears singing a song about a Greyhound Bound For Nowhere. Miranda Lambert sings roots music of the first order.