Do you know how long it took me to figure out the Tandy 1000 home computer? Years. Do you know how long it took me to figure out the old Macs they used in school? To figure out just what I was supposed to do on Prodigy? Then Windows 95 came along and AOL and all of that crap I had to figure out. A few years later I was going to AOL keyword "My FTP Space" and I felt like I was a genius. Frontpage and I, we're just starting to get along. Blogger templates are easy as pie.

Now, it's the CGI, CSS, PHP, MySQL where I start to get hazy. There's no room in my head for this stuff after years of tinkering around with every new thing that came along.

Still, Movable Type templates aren't easy to come by and far from what I want, so I'll just have to figure this stuff out.

christianstella.com is up and running, but don't expect an actual launch for at least a week. What's there now is the bare bones of a blog. I will say though, today I sucessfully made the blog three columns AND imported all 802 of the blog posts on this blog. All of my comments are lost in the switch, but they'll always be here in Blogger hell, if anyone would ever care. Also, the post titles are merely the first 5 words of each post, which almost never gives any clue to what the post is about... but is just a LITTLE bit easier than going through and updating 802 posts by hand.

For the first time in over a year, the first page of my archives isn't plagued with strange symbols throughout the text. So, thanks to Movable Type on that. And the little search box actually searches, something I've found Blogger's to never do.

The title of the new blog... well that's something I'll have to explain when the site actually goes live.

It's not that I have blog envy, it's just that I am obsessed with details. It's not that this blog will no longer exist, it's that it will be making a move sometime soon. Like many others, I am bidding farewell to Blogger in search of bigger and better and less whiny things.

I knew that I was going to do something worthwhile with christianstella.com, some day. I'll be relaunching my blog there as soon as I can get everything together. I'm not sure how easy transferring my archives will be, but this address will be up indefinitely just in case. For now, I'll continue to update here as well.

How silly that now I'm paying to blog. I just bought my own webspace with Moveable Type pre-installed in lieu of a more content driven blog/website. Keeping the two seperate seems even sillier.

Depending on how all of this goes, I may also move Ribcage off of my father's server and rebuild the site in Moveable Type as well. Though, I kind of like the charm of my MS Word pasted into MS Paint stories. Either way, the web address, ribcage.org, won't change.

Our audio commentary went well, I believe. Only one broken wine glass. Right now, I'm remastering The Robert Cake's audio and it's a nightmare. Not much I can do there. The movie will be quite louder, but that's about it. Louder is better than nothing though. I believe Anthony is doing a little less of a film effect than before as well--which will mean a clearer picture.

There are some things that I am not allowed to talk about. Really cool stuff pertaining my family and the new book, Eating Stella Style. Then again, I've gone through this same top secret stuff before and nothing materialized. I don't know though, this time it sounds for real. There are some chickens that are so far off that I shouldn't even mention them.

For the record, I slept thirteen hours last night.

And now there is a new story over at Ribcage.

We Can Forget About the Adobe

Next week is BIG.

The signs all said, "Whitestone Bridge Delayed: Use Throgs Neck" and they looked like they meant it. Then it's in the toll line for that very bridge--the Whitestone, that Anthony says, "Shit, I was supposed to get gas."

The Jaguar, it tells you how many miles until you run out of gas. At that moment, waiting to get onto a delayed bridge, the little screen said, "24 miles."

Then that disappeared and a red light came on and the only thing the screen had left to say was, "Low Fuel."

We crossed the bridge blindly. Damn if you don't want to run out of fucking gas on the Whitestone fucking Bridge. Bridges adjacent to the city are scary enough to drive over these days.

We found gas in a small town that looked like something out of rural Rhode Island. Can't believe you can spit on the Whitestone Bridge from a small town like that. Quaint little homes from two centuries ago and it's the first exit off of one of the busiest bridges in the country. We had to drive almost a mile into town just to find a gas station! Aren't there more idiots like us that drive over congested bridges on no gallons of gas?

The good news is that we finally made it to the airport; apprehended Ryan for commentary recording tomorrow.

Tomorrow is also a Wednesday. I need to finish a story, do I ever. Think, adobes. That's right.

I'd work on it now, but I'm afraid that letters are unicorns at the moment. Whatever that means. I feel like I haven't slept since I was conceived. I want to lay down and I want to be asleep and I want to be asleep for twelve hours before the sun shining through the damn sunlights has turned our family room/bedroom into the afternoon oven that it turns into and I wake up in a sweat, aggrivated and unable to fall back asleep. Today, the room got up to 83 degrees. Ridiculous. Exactly what are the benefits of two radiating heat windows on the ceiling? Light schmight! Thomas Edison is so cool. He invented fake light, you know.

Um, goodnight now.

Let's Forget About the Adobe.

Elise is almost finished with a new painting. Her first painting since this...



I suppose I'll have a picture of the new one (of which I'll keep a mystery) in the coming days.

Now, I'm trying to convince her that her next painting should be an old man slumped in a chair and all over him are these little pods that you can't quite make out. They're attached to his skin a hundred times over, these pods. Flying in the air, there are dozens of beautiful butterflies.

My last idea--it's Superman petting a horse. A beautiful pasture and Superman is just standing next to a horse, holding the reigns in one hand and petting the horse's neck with the other.

My idea before that--a sky with four or five different color blimps flying in the background. Far down below, on the ground there is an entire festival going on. A festival with a great big banner reading, "Blimp Day!"

My idea before that--it's grocery store aisles and pushing a cart in the background is a skeleton. A skeleton and the only things he has in his cart are many, many gallons of milk.

Sometimes, I have nothing better to do.

Received layout samples for Eating Stella Style from Simon and Schuster today. Looks mostly like my father's last book. There was a discussion over the ink color. I think it was decided on black. Yes, that would be standard--but the last book was blue text and I wasn't a very big fan of that.

My name is on the title page. I should take a photo. I mean, it was supposed to be there and all, but it was nice to SEE it there. Of course the title is wrong on this sample page, so I won't take a photo.

This weekend will be fully devoted to the copedit and then Ryan is flying in and we're recording that commentary for our movie, so I've decided to go a different route with my Ribcage story this week. Actually, I've already started writing this week's story and even though it isn't the BIG one, it's quite necessary to the plot. I don't feel I've earned the BIG story yet. I have big plans for that story too, some interesting typesetting and a little more thought is necessary. I am far too busy to wrap my head around that.

For the record, I've already got an exclusive story for the next Ribcage book. Broken Record Syndrome. It's a fantastic little story, just unimportant to the current storyline. (Unlike the exclusive story in the first book, Standing Where It's Sturdy and Safe, which is not only in my top five favorite Ribcage stories, but a great bit of backstory.) The next Ribcage book, it should have many exclusive stories. I've been quite prolific. Now that I know the story all the way through, things are coming to me faster. Sad to say, I plan to wrap the series up within another year.