philip j. leitch/words

donald trump is an asshole.

i absolutely love these photos by natsumi hayashi of her levitating. we had a photo of us levitating for our engagement photos, rumor has it you can still see it in the lobby of our photographers studio. which reminds me, he told me i could have the big print if i ever stopped by to pick it up.

i shouldn’t be so lazy.

i’ve updated isfargoflooding.com in what is pretty much an entire overhaul of the entire thing. until the flood actually starts i will keep working to improve it as well as add additional towns and locations. wherever i can get a rss feed of the river levels i can easily add locations.

this weekend I added Grand Forks and Pembina. Wahpeton is next but requires a few additional changes than the other locations because the river is so much lower there in general, so none of my formulas worked quite right.

stupid math!

i made a web site with less words on it then this post has in it.

isfargoflooding.com

just got home from the first unglued indie/diy craft fest and that was crazy. insane even. it might have taken me standing in the basement women’s bathroom for about 10 minutes but damn if I didn’t get one of the last swag bags. and i guess i should have looked in it before getting home…there were coupons in there!

some very cool booths and if you read this before today is over i reckon you should get in your car, on your bike, or start walking over to the downtown american legion and check it out yourself.

i got a cute owl from gentry night studios out of the cities. former fargo old school scenester amy jo had a booth with her husband and a lot of really nice screen prints. the concrete jewelry from raine design were not only extremely cool but also inspiring. also their moss jewelry was almost equally as cool but i have a fondness for concrete. craft mission had a lot of nice stuff made from mostly recycled materials, bravo.

m is for miche had what seemed to be the most popular booth with extremely cool stuffed monsters. i wanted them all, unfortunately my car is getting fixed on monday and that is making a huge ding on my finances. urgh!

most interesting item definitely had to be miss hygiene jane’s menstrual pads which when i first approached the booth i thought were some type of wrap for your coffee, boy was i wrong. eek! unfortunately, or fortunately, they appear to not have a web site.

i really hope the unglued craft fest becomes more than a once a year event. maybe next time i’ll have time to put something together for a booth of my own.

i’m not big on lists but sometimes when things aren’t getting done and i’m wasting time doing things like watching the oscars(?!?!?) i neglect doing what i would be better spending my time doing.

so, my public todo list:

1. finish lightbox
2. finish setting up my etsy store
3. move mini-work area from porch to utility room
4. post interesting or at least useful crap on this site

we’ll see how many i get done by friday. if you’re betting i’d bet against me.

i can’t donate until I get paid again but in the meantime i encourage you to donate any amount you can to the brave Wisconsin senators that are making it possible to get Walker and his cronies to drop their union killing budget. they are all taking great risks with their political careers, but that’s what politicians should do…stand up for what they believe in.

you can donate here.

i wonder if there is a market out there for a dart training accessory for your dart board? hell, i don’t even know that somebody hasn’t already thought of it and i could already buy my idea. a quick google search for ‘dart trainer’ turns up some software but nothing like what I came up with over the weekend. so maybe i’m onto my $50 idea (i figure i could maybe sell two of them, who the hell wants to train for darts?) and should forge ahead with it.

don’t ask why i’d bother wasting time on the weekend thinking of ways to improve my dart game…it must have been a slow weekend. which it was, but you don’t care about that, you just want to know what this awesome device is that will teach you to throw darts like a drunken irishman.

only i don’t know if it will help you improve or not so i shouldn’t be bragging it up. yet.

so i will create my mockup, test it out and let you know what i find out. one thing for sure is it won’t make me worse at darts.

maybe kickstarter would help me fund it. now i’m on to something.

about the only thing i dislike about living in the country is the utter lack of high-speed internet. at the moment i am trying to download the CD3WD torrent and i’m getting anywhere between 60 days to 342 days. seriously, if the post-apocalyptic world starts anytime in the next 2 months (i’m trying to be optimistic here) my guide to surviving will not have finished dowloading.

i bet people in third world countries (where CD3WD is meant to be used now, not later) can get their hands on this sooner than i can. is it really that hard to get something faster than 1 Mbps to somebody living less than 20 miles from a fairly large metropolitan area? and i never even get close to those speeds, i’d be happy if i did… but i still think i should be able to expect better.

if anybody would like to download the torrent, burn it to disc and snail mail it to me I would be eternally grateful. and, should the world end anytime soon i’d save you a spot in my bunker.

i am going to build a charcoal foundry. yup, gonna do it.

my good friend ross is going to join in the fun as we attempt, and hopefully succeed, in building our own foundry based on this book i bought ‘Charcoal Foundry (Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap Book 1)’. it is the first in a series of seven books all building upon the previous book on your quest to build your own metal working shop. the book was cheap, it sounds fun and since i’m 99% convinced that we’ll soon be living in a dystopian, ass-backwards world it won’t hurt to have a foundry on hand. right?

i’m not so interested in following through on all seven books, but if our experience with book 1 ends up working i could see myself going a few books in to see how much we can accomplish. the main goal, for me, is to come out of it being able to use the foundry to cast an army of stormtroopers. anything beyond that is pure gravy.

For the past year and a half my job requires that I do a lot of html that is going to be viewed in email clients. I would estimate that 75% of my work time is spent either designing or coding html email. So that means a lot of old-school, 90s table in a table in a table in a table and spacer gifs galore. While it isn’t as glamorous as my previous job I get to work at home and if I can say so myself I am a total fucking master of putting tables inside of tables inside of tables now.

Anyway, Outlook 2007/2010 has been my biggest headache (i’m leaving older versions of Lotus out of this since I highly doubt anybody that actually is forced to use it expects much from it) until yesterday. Yesterday, I made a giant leap forward in forever banishing those Outlook headaches.

Enter the 10px by 10px spacer.gif.

Numerous people on the web claim to be the inventor of this html hack so i’m not going to give credence to any of them, just to say they are out there and you can find them if you know how to work the Google. The other part of my personal fix was to be sure the preceding block of copy had a <br> tag after it but before my spacer.

In my case the spacers were mainly causing Outlook problems when they were used in place of paragraphs or line breaks between copy. See, the client likes things to be precise and “just like the design” so we sometimes revert to using spacers to match the design spacing. But Outlook 2007/2010 for whatever reason refuses to let you resize a spacer.gif if it is under 10px square.

Try it, it won’t work. Say you want a 1px spacer to be 200x10 and you end up with a spacer that is 66px wide. I can’t explain it. None of the fine people before me that found the glitch in the first place can explain it.

But use a 10px spacer and you can resize it to your heart’s content. Bigger, yup. Smaller, yup. It just works.

Just remember though if you’re using it to mimic paragraphs you need to use that <br> tag otherwise Outlook will try to put the image after the last word in the preceding paragraph. And no, display: block; doesn’t help, I guess Outlook also ignores that useful bit of HTML email code as well.

I have 27 books on my Kindle and the majority of those were free downloads but I do have 7 that are loanable. And I’m not reading any of them now, so if you’d like to borrow a book just let me know.

• A Dog Named Slugger
• Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks
• The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!
• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
• American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right
• Shopping for Time: How to Do It All and Not Be Overwhelmed
• Paranoia

All but Paranoia and A Dog Named Slugger I bought. You might still be able to get both of those for free.

...at maintaining a blog.

the imac i bought towards the end of 2006 appears to have died over the weekend. actually the monitor died, the computer itself seems to be chugging along still…well, other than the finder which is stuck in (not responding) purgatory. i’ve been able to save all my files, i’m not going to lose anything out of this. my only concern is that i don’t have a plan for transferring my itunes library which is kept on my drobo. hopefully migration assistant can help, if not i’m gonna have a long, long night.

i’m giving amazon referral links a try. i highly doubt that anybody will buy anything from them but i promise to only provide links for items that i’ve bought myself and recommend. which is one reason i want to try this rather than some random ads or other affiliate garbage. not really doing this to make money anyway… unless of course you want to give me some money, in that case i’m doing this to make money.

just heard about this today but it sounds like a good book plus an interesting idea. read more about it here.

i’m gonna pick it up but would have preferred a kindle version, oh well.

i’ve got comments up and running for farchives entries which is where i expect people would care to comment. you do need to be a registered member which for the time being is my single line of defense against spammers.

we’ll see how that goes.

i can’t be the only person that hoarded a bunch of fargo scene artifacts, can i?

if you have anything you’d like to share let me know, i’d be happy to post it in the farchives.

if all goes according to plan i hope to add comments today. i’m hoping a few of you will have some great memories of some of this stuff i am/will be posting.

it was nice talking to you at the amrep 25th anniversary show. sorry we couldn’t talk longer but i didn’t want you to think i forgot our discussion — you might have since you were 20x more drunk than i was (I wasn’t drunk at all).

because you were so sincere in your comments i’m going to give it 110% to get all this fargo stuff i’ve got lying about posted for all to enjoy. why keep it to myself?

xo,
p

p.s. boss hog ruled!

since everybody else seems to have written a story about the rumored $99 refresh i figured i better as well.

if true it sounds like a good move. i’d probably buy one, i mean i bought the first one.

between work and buying an iPad i’ve found it easy to neglect what i wasn’t going to neglect…namely this 19th attempt at maintaining any sort of online bloggy-type presence.

now that my wife has hijacked the iPad i seem to have my time back, so here i am. as far as those jsbx and huggy bear live shows i was going to split up, well i realized my original digitization of them sucked. so i’ll be redoing those and posting them as soon as i get around to it (which could in theory be when i attempt my 46th online bloggy-type presence).

i promise, promise, promise to split up the blues explosion live at ralph’s corner and huggy bear live at the fargo elk’s lodge audio this weekend and get both shows posted.

the previous photo is of jennifer’s veil playing on the main floor of the broadway junction (now known as Dempsey’s). posted mainly since i heard from my old, good friend joel lee after posting the mercy beat songs. unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, i don’t have any photos of the mercy beat so this was the next best thing.

joel and i were members of both the mercy beat and jennifer’s veil back in the wild west days of the early moorhead-fargo punk scene.

now that the deck is completed i can get back to what i really want to master, the art of the hypertufa planter. last fall i started and with the basics down i plan to go big with the next one i do.

i really have no idea what got me interested in mixing concrete, vermiculite and peat moss together and then pouring that into molds to turn into planters. i think mostly i’ve become somewhat bored only creating digital things. i miss the days of laying out yahtzeen by hand, making buttons, screenprinting and taking and developing photos.

i miss using my hands on something other than a keyboard and mouse.

haven’t checked out fbft in a long time and it seems to be down. uff da.

looking for volunteers to help me move fbft from media wiki to expressionengine wiki, the pay is horrible but the scenester karma points are tremendous.

picked up a Black & Decker DR250B drill (after the one we borrowed from the neighbor turned out to suck) to make the deck work go faster and was quite happy with it. actually performed better than the slighty more expensive, although older, drill we already had. of course jess used the new drill while i used our older one. joys of marriage!

• rss feeds
• register/login
• photo gallery entries on home page
• finish deck
• buy iPad
• NEW! buy second iPad for wife

sort of. the upload problem is only partially solved. it appears that i will have to split up the digitized shows instead of uploading them as one huge track. either expressionengine doesn’t like the large files or dreamhost doesn’t like them. i’m too lazy to figure out which it is and fix that now, easier to let wiretap studio split them up while i work on other things (like my actual work).

i have figured out the problem with the music uploads (goofy directory path) so i’ll have huggy bear and jsbx up soon with more coming.

what exactly are the farchives? they are my lame-ass non-creative name for all the great stuff i recently found in my garage. the fargo archives for lack of a better word and in the spirit of making words up by mashing them together we get farchive. unfortunately while i’ve managed to digitize quite a good share of music, i’m having some trouble working with expression engine after nearly a year of not working with it. not exactly like riding a bike, but i’m catching on pretty quick.

i’ve been digging up some old flyers too so those will eventually get posted to the farchive.

and who knows what else i might find…

here we go again… starting another site that maybe i’ll stick with for longer than a few months. a place for my ramblings, rants, photography and most of all the treasure trove of recordings from the 80s through 90s moorhead/fargo punk scene. that includes not only classic local bands like the blacklisted and floored but some great recordings of bands passing through town like unwound and jon spencer blues explosion.

so, here we go.