Well, I finally sat down and gave the site a new look. I hadn’t changed the old frontpage design since Pop Chaos first started up, some three years ago, and it was really beginning to show its age. At the time, I didn’t even know CSS, so I just implemented it with a hodgepodge of nested tables and font tags. It was serviceable, if a bit unwieldy, but it also gave off a sort of ‘escaped from 1996′ vibe. So I finally decided enough was enough, and slammed out some (hopefully) nice-looking CSS.
So, I hope you like the new design! Compare it to the old version and I hope you’ll agree things look a bit more modern now. And incidentally, if by some chance you really hate the new design, you can use that link to keep using the old one – it will still get my latest front-page ramblings. (It’s the magic of PHP.) I’ve updated the menu pages (Links, Contact, all that stuff) but I’m leaving all my old feature articles the way they are.
And hey, what’s that over on the sidebar? Why, it’s a link to my newly updated and spiffed-up resume! Go have a look, and then hire me already, okay?
-Jason
I recently got to go on a private tour of FermiLab. Big heavy extreme science kicks ass. I got lots of pictures, and was going to make a page out of them, but Dirk (a fellow tour-goer and good friend of mine, who incidentally draws comics) beat me to it. Rather than duplicate the effort, I’m simply going to link to his write-up of the event. (I bet you’ve never posed for a picture in front of the power supply for the injector for the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. Or laid down under it to get pictures of the diodes as big as your head, and other retro-futuristic-looking bits.)
What are you waiting for? Go gawk already! Feel the geek-envy flow through you!
-Jason
As my regular readers (all three of you) will no doubt have noticed, the site’s been down for quite some time. The reason for this is quite complex. Here’s the story:
I was just about to make another long-awaited update to the site, when suddenly one of those old “Behold the power of cheese” commercials came on TV. And I beheld the cheese’s power, and was converted. After making a pilgrimage to the Wisconsin Cheese Palace, I returned home only to find that the League of Nations had invaded my house and was using it to host all-night high-stakes Chutes and Ladders tournaments. I entered the tournament, hoping to win my house back, but I ended up winning the dictatorship of New Jersey instead. My reign over the Garden State was to be brief, as it turned out the residents didn’t like being ordered to turn their lights on and off in such a way as to make them form giant moving pictures visible from space. So I was impeached, found guilty of violating the Treaty of Ghent, and exiled to Niue, the tiny island in the south Pacific whose only export is the .nu top-level domain. There, I worked my way up from slave-labor coal miner to multi-billionaire domain-name kingpin in a matter of hours. (It’s the land of opportunity, after all.)
WIth my newfound wealth, I was able to return to America by stowing away aboard a cattle boat (it might not be obvious why great wealth was necessary to do this, but trust me, it was) and I soon arrived at sunny Area 51. (It was a very impressive boat, being able to sail into Nevada and all.) I was soon recruited by the secret team there that studies alien technology, and spent some time trying to duplicate an extraterrestrial computing device that could hold literally HUNDREDS of pieces of information at one time. Alas, I failed in this quest, and they drummed me out of the Marines for it, which confused me greatly because I’d never joined the Marines in the first place. But the stigma of being a failed jarhead followed me wherever I went, and I soon found myself sleeping under bridges and begging for crusts of bread from stray dogs. But this unfortunate turn of events was not to last long, for soon a life-changing event happened: I found out I was pregnant. Since I’ve been a male for my entire life, this came as an even bigger surprise than being drummed out of the Corps. (Hoo-rah.) So I switched from begging for plain crusts to begging for crusts from pickle-banana-peanutbutter sandwiches. I was unsuccessful, so I headed out to the pickle-banana-peanutbutter capital of the world: Boise, Idaho.
And it was there, upon Boise’s gold-paved streets and under its diamond-encrusted bridges, that I learned of the horrible conspiracy against the Pop Chaos project: the Illuminati and the Skull and Bones fraternity were colluding to screw up the popchaos.com DNS entry, and from there, DOMINATE THE WORLD! Well, I immediately saw my duty, and came storming back home to Chicago to reclaim my birthright. In an epic battle, I booted the League of Nations out of my house, forcing them to retreat to a small dome tent in my front yard, where they still reside. After plying my good friend Sam with pizza and old episodes of MST3K, he generously helped me unravel and repair the nefarious DNS sabotage that had kept my poor neglected site down for the many months of my adventures in the world.
The above story is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. Don’t even entertain the thought that I’ve just been neglecting the site, and didn’t notice the DNS glitch that brought it down, and that even after discovering it, I took several months to get off my ass and do something about it. I mean, come on, how likely is that compared to the ABSOLUTELY TRUE story I just told you?
-Jason