On The
Inter-Web:
austinrich
(at) gmail (dot) com
(Now Accepting Spam And Mail-Bombs.)
The Old-Fashioned
Way:
A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. I.t.'s. N.o.t. J.u.s.t. A.
W.o.r.d. A.n.y.m.o.r.
2Ø57 SE Pine
Portland, OR
97214
(Now Accepting Large Checks And Hookers)
Not Even Close To 7596
People Have Viewed This Page In All Its Glory Since February 28th,
2ØØ1, But We Can Lie To Ourselves, Right?
Site Information
Unless otherwise stated, all content on this page was written by none other than Austin Rich (austin (at) gmail (dot) com). To do so, I used a couple of different text editors. Kate is a Linux-based generic text editor, and loads .html & .php files fairly easily. The cool thing about it is that it shows all the tags in different colors, so you can tell if you left a tag open and if it's a text altering tag or a link. Quite useful. Additionally, I used Openoffice.org to do some or the more complex table arrangements and other .html code that I don't know how to do off-hand. Admittedly, I could look it up and do it on my own, but sometimes sloth wins out in the long run. Openoffice.org apparently runs cross-platform these days, so check it out. However, most of the actual code was written by my brother Kyle, who has done a great job of maintaining the site. I, for the most part, just create the content. He does the real work.
The site has been designed with Mozilla Firefox in mind. While I'm sure it'll load easily in other browsers, I understand that Firefox can now be run in Windows (as well as on Macs), so I highly recommend downloading it and using that. Kyle and I have been tweaking the code to work well at any resolution, but in the event something looks bad, let us know and we'll get on it. I'm curious to know what it looks like on other browsers and at other resolutions.
There are many .mp3s on this site, and the process for creating / editing them is pretty straightforward. I have a Pioneer Stereo system, and for all vinyl & cassette sound sources I use that to play the original material. The record player is a PL-514 (quite old), and the cassette deck is at CT-W355R (dual cassette). It all runs through a SX-251R Receiver, which in turn runs into my sound card. I don't know the brand of card as I put it straight into my machine after purchase, but it gets good sound quality and plays nice with Linux, which is what I bought it to do. I picked it up at Belmont Computers here in Portland, which is a great store with very reasonable prices for all sorts of hardware. For hand-held recordings (mostly for the Audio Blog entries), I use a GE Brand AVR Variable Speed Cassette Recorder. For initial recording I use a program called Gramofile which runs via the command line, and for the final editing I use a program called Audacity. I'm not 100% satisfied with the interface with this program, but it is the best one I've found for sound manipulation in Linux. (Suggestions?) Finally, for the .mp3 creation, I do it all using Lame via the command line, baby. Hell yeah. For CD conversion, I use Ripperx, which is a pretty reasonable program and can do straight to mp3 conversion as well. Highly recommended. When making CDs, I've come to use Cdrdao via the command line, which is tedious, but offers more flexibility and works better than any GUI utility I've found so far. Check it out. It's worth it.
The graphics (what few of them exit) are on this site were all manipulated & edited using The Gimp. This is the only graphical editing program I've been able to find for Linux that is fully featured and can compete with some of the higher-end graphical editing programs in Windows. For the most part any given image that I want to use on my site only really ends up being cropped and possibly rotated so it sits better on a horizontal or vertical axis. Still, it's worth getting for all you starting-out Linux people. I should point out that The Gimp does take a long time to load, but it can convert between nearly any image file format, and is quite useful when you find a weird graphic on-line that you want to convert to a specific file-format. There are many other Linux-based graphical editing programs, but the ability to rotate images by degrees is what sold me on this one. Check it out.
Unfortunately, my scanner does NOT work with Linux. This is the first huge stumbling block I've run into, as a lot of images that I created in my pre-Linux days were, in fact, done with a scanner. Apparently there aren't very many drivers that run with Parallel Port scanners, as most of the new brands are all USB. Since I have an older, off-brand scanner (Visioneer PaperPort 3100), there probably isn't much need to create drivers for it. However, it's the only scanner I have, so this and my webcam (a Logitech that has no serial number) are currently the only reason I keep a Windows partition on my desktop. I mention this more as a warning to Parallel Port scanner-type people out there, and not as a complaint. I'm sure that, given time, I can ditch the partition and run both pieces of hardware just fine.
My particular computer that I do all my web site building (and computing in general) is sort of a Frankenstein machine that has been built over the last couple of years, which I named Arthur Dent when I first got it. The idea was that I was getting back into computing, which I felt like I knew almost nothing about compared to my friends, that my computer and I would be entering a Universe that neither of us knew anything about. I guess that makes all my friends crew-mates on the Heart Of Gold in my life, so to speak. My brother Kyle built the original version of it, and then my friends at RackmØunt Industries have helped make upgrades. Brian donated a new mother board and many other components on a hardware level, and then later kungfuramone and I did another rebuild from the ground up. Finally, my dad gave me the monitor & scanner that I currently use, while the camera was a gift from Mr. Rant. I just purchased my very first brand-new piece of hardware, a Printer (an HP Deskjet 3520), so I'm pretty excited about that. kungfuramone helped me install Linux on my machine (I guess it's Libranet, which is a Debian distribution... he's more the expert on that than I am). I use KDE as my GUI, which I've found to be the most reliable one on the market. Check it out, you will not regret it. (I'm not as technical regarding hardware and software, so I couldn't give you any better information regarding the specs of my machine for the techies out there.)
I just recenting started using a Toshiba Tecra 8000 Laptom (with a Pentium II processor). This was a gift from my dad. It's got a much small resolution and has some limitations, but for the most part I've grown really attached to it, and a lot of Blogging and website updates come from it, now. Such is life.
This site is hosted by RackmØunt Industries, supervised by Brian. He also wrote the code for the counter, the news page, the mailing list, as well as the guestbook. The official RackmØunt Industries site has links to some really good web resources as well, and information about web hosting can be found there, too. In addition to web services, you can also get e-mail and helpful hints about how to use the inter-web in general. Shout outs to Brian over and over again. Thanks dude.