Category: Damn I'm Old

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You Can Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

I've spent the day pulling out what remains of my hair attempting to change some basic coding built-in to the template this blog uses. (That's why, if you happened to peek in at various times it looked wonky.)

I do not know CSS.  I was relatively proficient in HTML twenty years ago, but I haven't had much use of it since then.

All I wanted to do was to automatically have the blog posts appear in bold type, without having to use the deprecated <b> and </b> commands every. damn. time and maybe change the color of the font as well.

So like any  deprecated nerd, I went to the font of all wisdom, Google. That led me to several YouTube videos that explained how to do it. Unfortunately, even when following the instructions to the letter, I wasn't getting what I wanted. The titles would go bold and colored when you clicked on them and opened the individual pages, but it wasn't working on the main page. They remained stubbornly black and not bold.

I finally grabbed the CSS Style sheet off the blog and started pouring through the code. From what I learned from the videos I needed to find anything that said entry-title. Slowly but surely I went through and added the additional code—one entry at a time—to the Additional CSS pane in the editor until I got the desired results. This may ultimately have some unintended results, but we'll have to wait and see. All in all I'm satisfied with the results now, however.

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Thrills and Chills

Enigma: Screen Before The Mirror (2000)

I've been a fan of Enigma since they arrived on the scene thirty four (!) years ago. As I've written before, one of my most profound memories of Engima was their debut disc playing in my headphones as I took the 24 Divisadero Bus to The Lion's Pub on rainy San Francisco night a little over a month after the passing of my first partner in 1991.

Screen Before the Mirror, probably my favorite Enigma release, gives the astronomer geek in me chills from the very first track with the emotionless, disembodied female voice quietly reading off the astrometric statistics of Mars and those chills continue through the remainder of the album.

When I set out to rebuild my CD collection two years ago I really didn't have a roadmap set out of what to replace. My inventory of what I'd owned was catastrophically out of date, and while it had all been ripped to iTunes, discerning which of those 2200 albums in there had come from my original CD collection, were ripped from vinyl, or had been aquired from "other sources" was impossible to sort out.

My original inventory was a good jumping off point, but as I've learned over the past twenty four months or so, there are a lot of discs that I didn't realize were missing until I saw them on Amazon, eBay, or Discogs…or just out in the wild. So that's where this latest haul comes from. With the exception of Sympathique and Bare, none of these were in my records, but I knew I'd owned them all at some point.