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After avidly whiling away much of my lunch hour reading Andy King's "Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization", I was sitting back at my desk, when it suddenly dawned on me to check my employer's website, and I sure am glad I did!

The first thing I looked at was the web page source, and the first thing I discovered, was the very first line had nothing in it. That's right, a blank line. A gift to the internet god of sloth. Two lines farther on, I discovered the telltale signature of the generator: Microsoft Front Page. No surprise there! But then I began to get worried. Just how big was that lovely background graphic that makes the site look so high tech?

Uh-oh.

One hundred twenty-seven THOUSAND bytes. No wonder the load time was a wee bit sluggish.

And the lovely picture of the box which holds the product the company sells? About the same size. Only three graphics on the page, and already the total was up to over a quarter-megabyte of internet download just to see anything, and that's leaving out the little graphic that says "This page looks better in Microsoft Internet Explorer....Eventually."

Thank goodness I had just read Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization [buy at amazon] . by Andrew B. King and studied his accompanying website: websiteoptimization.com . I knew exactly how to make the images smaller. A LOT smaller. Not only that, I knew how important it was to speed up the website right away, immediately, tout de suite. Just 20 minutes later, I had chopped 230K off the company homepage, and it looked exactly the same.

The best part is, the tech support and sales people really appreciate this already, because when they get people on the phone, they used to have to sit there and pass the time of day for a while until the helpful website page downloaded, and now they'll be able to get right to work, helping customers and selling product.

We're going to tell the self-styled FrontPage-wielding "webmaster" that we moved the page to another server that's a lot faster (shhhh, don't tell!)

I have been meaning to write something funny for a while and the fact that my wife's cousin Madeleine killed herself yesterday is not going to stop me. You write what you have to write, and then you move on. Tomorrow I may be able to write about how suicide is a communication disorder, and that everyone should read harvey sacks' classic sociology article on suicide, "The Search for Help: No One to Turn To", but not now. Now I am going to write about forty-three or forty-four canvas directors chairs, and suicide be damned.

Art requires choices. To me this seems to be one of the most often neglected yet essential characteristics of art. Certainly it is one of art's principal values; maybe the only one remaining. Of course, life requires choices too, but in one's daily life the range of choices is quite constrained by a wide variety of sensible factors, such as the need to finish up in a given amount of time. Don't worry, I'll be getting to the funny part pretty soon.

Canvas chairs. I had always wanted some canvas directors chairs, and was extremely gratified to pick some up at a local yard sale for five dollars. I don't remember whether it was five dollars apiece or five dollars for all four of them, but that's beside the point. Now I had two more chairs than I needed, and the question arose: What to do with the extra two chairs, besides carry them around in the back of the SUV of course, which is always an option.

The canvas needed to be replaced anyway, so naturally the idea sprung into my mind pretty much fully worked out, of replacing the canvas with woven-canvas images of, much as I hate to admit it, popular and unpopular American Presidents. Since I had visited the Nixon Library and Presidential Birthplace not long before and noticed a lot of presidential gear for sale, it occurred to me that a Nixon directors chair might sell, and since it would definitely be a limited-edition item, it could be priced accordingly, to help recoup the initial investment in cheap canvas chairs, and of course canvas weaving equipment and loom pattern design software.

Dreams of wealth and fame or at the very least notoriety dancing in my brain, I immediately arranged a visit to a loom manufacturer located in the state where I live, in the interest of further research into the matter. A wide range of powerful looms is available, some of them quite gigantic. I heard the words "My wife would kill me if I put one of those in the living room" issue forth from my mouth, as I tried to comprehend how you would set up one of these mysterious machines to create whole cloth with the image of Richard Nixon woven into it. Somehow Nixon didn't seem to deserve it, even if I could sell the chair for a thousand dollars. Wouldn't it be a lot less trouble to silkscreen or paint the image on? The real sticking point with a woven canvas face, though, came when I realized that irregular patterns on one side of the cloth may necessitate long threads hanging loose on the other side of the cloth. The impracticality in a canvas chair of what would be just fine for a tapestry hanging on the wall pretty much doomed the woven canvas idea, at least for mass production.

But not for a full-scale installation! A visit to the Ronald Reagan Library blew the lid to my imagination clean off! For about three-quarters of the way through the exhibit space, just before you get to the full-scale replica of the oval office, which is a very nice space, is a pantheon if you will of all the presidents with their images constructed out of automobile license plates from their state. Believe it.

Well, this is so obvious now. If presidents can have their images made of license plates, why can they not have canvas chairs in a full-scale installation? They can! And since there is no need to be practical about weaving the seats, other assumptions are out the window, too. The chairs don't need to be of a uniform size: George Bush can get a slightly smaller chair than other presidents, while Bill Clinton can get a double-wide. Maybe Millard Fillmore would have a tiny chair made of toothpicks and tissue paper instead of canvas. Is there a president for whom a purple chair outfitted with black leather would be appropriate? Once the decision to create has been made, the choices from which art is formed can come into play.

Here is exactly how you can create a weblog summary by reading your RSS 2.0 feed: you just install Apache xalan XSL processor, which is free, read the file through an XSL sheet which is short enough to give here, and output your html file to put on your site. I always like installing java-based programs like xalan, because there's no question of which operating system you're running on.

Once you get used to the weird command line, that is. Oddly enough when I typed in the URL as the IN argument, the program ran just perfectly and produced output. This gives me the idea that you might use xalan to create your own homebrew RSS aggregator. Make sure you type it all on one line:

java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN http://www.thedailychannel.com/rss20.xml -XSL summary.xsl -OUT archiveindex.html

But the IN argument can be a file on your local system, too, and that's how I ended up using it after I used RubyJournal to generate a comprehensive RSS of posts from the last three or four months.

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">

 <xsl:template match="/"><html><xsl:apply-templates/></html>
  </xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="item">
<p class="ahd"><xsl:element name="a">
<xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="link"/></xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select="title"/></xsl:element>  
 ... (<xsl:value-of select="substring(pubDate,0,17)"/>)
</p>
<p class="ads">
<xsl:value-of select="substring-before(description,'.')"/>
<a href="{link}">[more...]</a>
</p>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="channel/title"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/link"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/description"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/language"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/image"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/copyright"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/lastBuildDate"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/docs"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/generator"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/managingEditor"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/webMaster"/>
<xsl:template match="channel/ttl"/>

</xsl:stylesheet>

After I generated the archiveindex.html file, I slapped a few css styles in the front for quicker loading, like I was reading about on the websiteoptimization.com website (accompanying book: Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization [buy at amazon] . by Andrew B. King), and voila, I have an Index of Previous Journal Entries.I still have to invent an automatic process to keep it up to date, but I'm pretty happy now that the main page isn't loaded up with the last two weeks of posts.

I had a couple of edifying minor adventures getting the xsl sheet to work the way I wanted, which maybe I can tell you about this evening, but right now breakfast is calling, so that will just have to wait.

I just visited the Lauren Goldberg's website. She's one of the best-organized web designers I know of. Indeed, if she presented the information she has shared on the webdesignlist over the past couple of years, her site would be one of the highest-traffic sites on the web. But I had a moment of sadness as I looked at her portfolio.

The web designs in her portfolio on lauren3g.com have now been replaced on the client sites (she provides links). The new designs provide less information, but don't look as good.

We made pancakes from scratch this past weekend, using the pancake recipe published on this very website. What I learned from the experience surprised me.

By examining some records on the "server computer" that brings you thedailychannel.com, I discovered an interesting link. As it turned out, a housewife who had once lived somewhere in the American Midwest was looking into her kitchen cupboard. She saw flour, she saw baking soda. Here is what she said...

"I can't believe I had never made pancakes from scratch, as old as I am today. I found a recipe here and they were the best pancakes I had ever eaten. My kids loved them, and I would do it again. I haven't figured out the economics yet, but I think it's less expensive, too, than the mix I always used."