Pages

31 July 2009

New website layout

I installed self-hosted Wordpress and put the entire Rainhat website on it, along with the Rainhat blog. It was a bit of a hassle, but now it's finally all done and I'm pretty happy with how it looks. The only function I wish wordpress would have is to be able to put up link and archive widgets on only certain pages, like only in the blog part and not on the static pages. The way it seems to be now is that if you put up a widget, it automatically appears on every page, unless you add separate sidebars only for the pages. But I'm not that great with coding, so I'm not even going to try.

We drove out to a forest and picked blueberries yesterday. The area looked like someone had already been there and cleared it of berries, but we managed to pick around 2 liters anyway. We decided that was enough and drove home and made a blueberry pie and Crème Anglaise. Fresh berries straight from the forest and into a pie. Delicious! :)

The neighbors seem to have stopped hammering, so I think I'm gonna try recording a bit.

25 July 2009

Intermediate stuff for complete beginners

I logged into my Twitter account yesterday and noticed that the amount of followers had suddenly dropped from 25 to 12, but now I can see all 12 in the list of followers. It makes more sense now. I guess the whole thing with the invisible followers was just a bug...?

This summer has been pretty crappy so far. It's been raining a lot lately, and it hasn't been very warm. Even in these parts of Sweden it should be more than +13 C in July... There was about one week of nice weather a couple of weeks ago, but the rest has been just rain. Bleh...

We have this tent-like thing in the garden. It's like a frame of metal tubes with a soft plastic shell over it. The roof and the corners are a flimsy kind of plastic and the actual walls are made of a very fine kind of net. The point of the whole thing is to be able to sit outside and enjoy the fresh air, while keeping the bugs out, and with a roof to keep you dry if it rains. Unfortunately, this thing was very cheap and the quality matches the price. The roof is leaking a bit and the shell is just a bit too small for the frame, so the mosquito net walls don't actually go all the way down to the ground. Now, I like rain, so last night I got this idea to go out into this tent thingy with a couple of candles and lanterns and just chill with a book while listening to the rain. When I got out there, I noticed that the place was just crawling with red beetles. Apparently they had found their way in under the walls and thought it was a good place to stay dry. There were hundreds of them. I went back inside the house and watched TV instead.

I finally figured out how to format links in different ways for different content boxes with CSS. I wanted the links in the main text box of my website to be red so you can see them. I also wanted the links to be black in another box, because red links just looked bad in it. But I couldn't figure out how to have both at the same time. After looking through a ridiculous amount of websites about CSS coding, I finally found one that explained this particular thing. Not surprisingly, it was quite easy to do. I just had to define each box I wanted to format as a different span class in the html and then define the format of the links in that class in the CSS code. Easy enough to do, once you know how.

With all the millions of tutorial sites out there, it's surprisingly hard to find a site that actually explains everything well and from the very start. Even on sites for beginners, most of them seem to either assume that you know stuff already and start with stuff that actually isn't so basic, or just leave important steps out, probably because they seem obvious to the writer. If you really, truly do not know anything whatsoever about the subject, those kind of sites are pretty useless.

16 July 2009

Artistic integrity, I guess

Heh, it seems I have gotten two new followers on twitter after my last post. So now I have 21 followers, but there's still only 7 followers visible in the list. Weirdness...

I'm getting bored out of my head with being at home all the time. I still haven't found a job, so I'm as broke as ever. Freakin' Swedish bureaucracy... I can't have any unemployment insurance either, because apparently the 2,5 years that I was working in Canada was too long to be abroad and it made me ineligible for it back here. So I haven't had any income at all in about 7 months now. Sucks @$$. On the bright side, I've had plenty of time to write and record music. I've recorded 8 out of 12 songs for my album. Lots of fun, but I'm not making any money off that yet either.

I have written around 45 songs lately, but in my opinion most of them are crap, so I don't want to use them for anything. Counting all the songs that I think might be good enough to perform, I have about 45 minutes worth of music. I will keep writing more songs until I have a full 60 minutes worth of songs I think are good enough. Then I will start looking for gigs. Maybe I'm being too picky, but I refuse to do a concert with songs that I don't like. If I don't like the songs, I feel they don't represent me, and so I don't want anyone to hear them. I'd rather wait until I have something I can be somewhat proud of than try to make money with something I would be ashamed of.

15 July 2009

Tweetin' and stuff

Twitter confuses me. I have an account where I post random stuff and updates about Rainhat. At the moment I have 19 followers, but when I click on the link to see who's following me, there are only 7 users in the list. For the seven that are visible, I can if so choose block them from following me. Not that I have any reason to do so, but theoretically I could. But what about the other 12 followers? If I for some reason wanted to block them, I couldn't, since I can't even see them. Doesn't make much sense to me. Also, how can the 12 not be in the list? I've never seen any option that would allow me to follow someone secretly. Do the 12 even exist at all? Who knows.

Anyway, feel free to follow me on Twitter if you like. My username is Rainhat.

I've been having fun with tweaking the layout of my other blog. I found some interesting websites with info on how to add a third column and such. All kinds of fun layout editing. After all the messing around with my website, I think I'm starting to kind of understand how html and css work. There's always more I could learn, of course, but I got it to do what I wanted, so I'm happy.

08 July 2009

Vampire mode

I'm very good at turning the days upside down, staying up all night and sleeping all day. Especially if I have no particular times to keep, which I don't right now, since I don't have a job. There just aren't very many of those buggers around. Me not having a driver's license doesn't seem to help either, since many job ads request those. Maybe I should finally get my butt in gear and get one... Only reason I don't have one yet is that I never really needed one. I always lived in places where I could get anywhere by bike, bus or train. The damn things are freakin' expensive here in Sweden too... Gah!

Oh, well. No job means lots of spare time, and I've spent pretty much all of it working on music, writing and recording songs. I'm not making any money on it (yet), but if I keep at it, maybe I will. I really need a new steel string acoustic guitar. The one I have is a no-name Epiphone copy of some kind that I bought in Hungary. It sounds like crap. But guitars are a bit expensive too, so it will just have to do for now.

01 July 2009

Rum and beer

It's incredibly hot right now. 30 degrees in the shade outside. Aaargh...

I went to the library a couple of days ago and borrowed some books. I found some books about working in the cultural field, with music, art, etc, how the taxes and such work. There was a book called "100 pages about bookkeeping for those who hate it", but so far that one was incredibly boring. It definitely doesn't make you like it any more. I also borrowed Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse five" and "The rum diary" by Hunter S. Thompson, but I didn't look at those yet.

We went to the liquor store the other day and bought a bunch of different kinds of beer, one can or bottle of each. I don't care much for the Swedish beers I've had before, so I wanted to try something new and see if there's anything I like.
Here's a short list of what we tried, along with completely subjective opinions about them:

Crocodile - It says on the can that it won a gold medal in the biggest European beer competition. There couldn't have been much competition going on... Not very impressive. Tastes ok, but is quite flat. Not much aftertaste at all.

Åbro sommaröl - This was a thorough disappointment. It didn't taste like anything at all. Seriously. Nothing at all. It was like carbonated water. No flavour whatsoever. Good if you don't care about the taste and just want to get severely drunk very quickly, I guess.

Sarek - This was slightly better, though not remarkable in any way. A pretty neutral, unoriginal light lager. Tastes like beer, not much else. No aftertaste at all.

Åbro sigill - An ecological beer. It was pretty decent, it has a bit more flavour than the average bland beer, but still nothing special. Bonus points for being ecological though.

Bellmann 6.0 - This one was pretty good. The best one out of the ones we tried so far.

Saku kuld - An Estonian beer. Not bad at all. It's quite mild, but without being tasteless. Quite ok, but pretty neutral.

Also: 4 cl of Captain Morgan spiced rum + 10 cl of Piña Colada mix + 15 cl of pineapple juice = a tasty and dangerously easy to drink mixture. Getsh you drrrunk quite eashily... (hic!)