Hi everyone... sorry it's been a while since you heard from me last, but I was working pretty hard on some writing projects for a while there, and then when I finally went to actually start an update, I ended up doing another whole structural redesign of the site again.  I still don't have that quite totally done, but since the last of the changes I have to make will be transparent to the general user, and it's been just about two full years since C&S first went live (the actual anniversary is on the 28th) I decided to go ahead and upload what I had done now, and finish the rest at my leisure.

It would take an age to list absolutely every little change I made this time around, though, so I will do some generalizing. The entire "Site Stuff" section has been updated with new information and graphics, and I added one completely new page with banners and code for people to use if they want to link back to C&S. The Books & Writing section has also been updated, and although the changes there are mainly cosmetic--new page headers and improved layouts, etc.--I did remove one dead link from the Recommended Fanfiction and added another in its place. The Nonfiction Corner has also had some cosmetic changes made, but there's actual new content there--I finally got my act together and uploaded the rest of our vacation photos from the trip that His Geekiness and I took back in June of '05 to South Dakota so I could see Survivor perform in Deadwood. (I'm hoping to do the ones from the Yellowstone trip that September next update, but we'll see if I make it; the next few months are going to be busy around our house...)

Finally, the Music section. There's been a LOT done here; I've made more cosmetic changes to the CD Tower, but it's the Hall of Hunks that's had the most work done on it. Most every page with an essay (including the individual artist pages) has had at least a minor edit job, and I've fiddled around quite a bit with the styling in some cases as well (changing link and text colors and so forth). The image galleries have also been re-coded (and the thumbnail indexes will hopefully take at least a bit less time to load now) and I've added information from an update or two back about which pics were added to which gallery on what date, so infrequent visitors can still figure out what's new and what's old even after I've taken the "NEW!" tags off the navigation links on the Sexiest Men In Rock. Oh, and I finally got around to removing that one accidental duplicate image from the Kip Winger Gallery, as well.

By the time I finished with all the structural changes, I ended up not having time to add as much actual new content as I would have liked, but there are a few new things to look at. Jimi Jamison's Artist Page has had another heavy revision made to its essay (hey, I couldn't NOT give my opinion on everything that's been happening in that fandom of late!) and I've also added several new Favorite Quotes. And of course I've added some new scans to the galleries; here's a listing:

15 New Pics in the Per Gessle & Roxette Gallery

7 New Pics in the Jimi Jamison Gallery

and 5 New Pics in the Survivor Band Gallery

That's all for now... hopefully I will be back again before another three months pass!  Enjoy!

Well, that was unexpected.  Quite out of the blue, I learned that the Rock & Pop Masters (of which Jimi Jamison is a member) were doing a show this past Saturday in Cheyenne, WY, which is well within driving distance of Denver. (And I ought to know--I went to high school there, and my parents lived there up until last April!) At first there was some uncertainty as to whether I'd be able to make the show, but I did, and--well, you can read all the gory details on the Concert Tales page, so I shan't repeat too many of them here. Suffice it to say that I'm VERY glad I went.

I've also added 58 new pics from the show to the Survivor Live Gallery--30 of Jimi, 6 of Barry Dunaway (who plays bass for RPM as well as Survivor), and 22 of various other RPM members. (You can tell where my particular bias happens to lie, can't you?  ) And I gotta say, I absolutely love my new digital camera! If you want a camera with loads of features and a monster zoom that takes great pics even on the auto settings, go check out the Konica-Minolta Dimage Z6--you will not regret it!

Anyway--this was kind of a spur-of-the-moment update, so that's the only real new content, although I did make a couple of minor design changes to all the artist profile and thumbnail index pages linked off The Sexiest Men In Rock while I was at it. So enjoy for now, and I'll hopefully be able to get some more new scans up in another few weeks. Have fun!

EDITED 7-2-06 TO ADD: I've just made one tiny change to The Sexiest Men In Rock page, since Ebay obligingly supplied that better pic of Jimi with long hair that I've been hoping for.

Hi everyone, this is a fairly small update, but it's something I've been wanting to do for ages, and that's put up a section for pics I've taken on our various road trips and so forth. I've only had time to organize one set so far, but more should be forthcoming in the next few weeks; you can find the link to the one I put up today at the Nonfiction Corner. Enjoy!

Well, here I am, back again at last... I apologize for the fact that it's been several months since I've done an update, but life has been rather a comedy of errors around here of late. At first, I was just busy after the last update (RL stuff--my dad was in the hospital with viral pneumonia for almost 2 weeks  ) and then I thought I was headed to see Survivor in concert again at the beginning of April, so I figured I might as well wait to do any more updates until I'd been and come home and could add more pics to the live gallery. Alas, the show was cancelled a couple of weeks beforehand (I swear I've got a curse on me about ticketed shows--this is the second one they've pulled the rug out from underneath me on  ) so I went ahead and started work on an update. But there was a ton to do, and I kept getting attacked by rabid plot bunnies when I was supposed to be coding, and then our scanner decided to finally kick the bucket, and... well, here we are.

But! I got a nice new scanner out of the deal, and there is obviously new stuff up now--first and foremost being this Site Updates blog, though the whole site's undergone something of an overhaul. Some of it will be transparent to the general user (I spent quite a bit of time just cleaning up the source code for existing pages, even if I didn't actually add anything new to them) but I have made some design changes which will hopefully be improvements. First off, I've added "breadcrumb" navigation links to the top of more or less every page on the site, so in theory, you should be able to get from any page to any other page within 4 or 5 mouse clicks at most. I've also added some additional navigation links on all the artist pages in the Hall of Hunks, so you can get to specific information and related pages more quickly and easily. I've also done a ton of work on all the image galleries--I've split all but a couple up into separate galleries for the specific artist and his associated band, and I've redone the individual image display pages AGAIN. I do navigate around my own site from time to time (read: constantly  ) and I found that there were a couple of things from the older design scheme that actually worked better than the new one I'd tried at the last update, so I sort of hybridized the two and applied those changes globally; I think this new way works much better.

There's also new content:

7 New pics in the Nelson Gallery

21 New pics in the Kip Winger Gallery (Though I did replace one older image that I didn't like as well, and I noticed while I was uploading everything that I accidentally included one repeat. Oops.  Will fix that next update...)

14 New pics in the Winger Band Gallery

3 New pics in the Jimi Jamison Gallery

3 New pics in the Survivor Band Gallery

and 6 New pics in the John Waite & Bad English Gallery

I've also changed Jimi Jamison's portrait image in the Sexiest Men In Rock listing--yes, again.  That Too Hot To Sleep shot was lovely, but dark--this new one is much easier to see, and shows off that sweet smile of his to boot. (I may eventually replace it again if I can come up with a better one of him with long hair, though  ) His artist page has also seen some changes; the essay has been more or less totally rewritten (and this version includes a small personal review of Survivor's new CD, Reach) and there's a new page linked from it where you can see a scan of the poster that he autographed for me at my meet-and-greet last summer. (Yes, I'm showing off. I'm allowed.   ) The list of favorite songs has been updated, as well.

So--I think that's everything for now. Watch for another update in hopefully not more than a few weeks; I've got lots of new stuff still to scan. Until then, though, enjoy!

This update took me a bit longer than I had anticipated, but there also ended up being much more to do than I had originally thought! You may have already noticed that there's been some fairly significant site design changes; I've been learning a lot about the finer points of cascading style sheets recently, and I've implemented some of the things I've learned to hopefully make the whole site look better to everyone who visits, particularly those of you with small screen resolutions. I've also updated a couple of pages at The CD Tower to reflect some recent acquisitions to my collection (they're mainly confined to the Jazz, Instrumentals, and New Age category--I haven't been buying a lot of new rock music of late) and added a batch of new links to the References & Resources for Writers.

I've also done some redesigning in the image galleries in the Hall of Hunks. For one thing, a couple of them were getting so huge that I decided to split them up in order to keep loading times for the thumbnail indexes down; there are now separate galleries for Benjamin Orr and The Cars as a band, and also for Joey Tempest and Europe. I've made some design changes to the individual image display pages in those galleries as well, namely replacing the textual navigation links with buttons. (Hopefully those are self-explanatory, but just in case: The one with the house icon brings you back to the main site index, the up arrow takes you to the thumbnail index for whichever gallery you're in, and the right and left arrows take you to the next and previous images within that gallery, respectively.) I intend to eventually implement this particular design change in ALL of the image galleries on the site, but that's a bloody ton of pages to edit and it'll take me a good while to fix them all, so for now the changes are confined to the four galleries I've already mentioned, plus the Jareth Gallery and the various Jimi Jamison Galleries (Still Images, Video Captures, and Live Pics).

There is also new content in the galleries! I've added some new still images (see below for a complete listing) and you may notice that these newest pics have been tagged with my username and site URL. This is something I've resisted doing on scanned pics for some time, mainly because I know perfectly well that I have no legal claim to those images; I've just converted them from hardcopy to digital and uploaded them to the web. But after much deliberation, I've decided that the tagging is a necessary evil, although I've tried to keep them small and discreet enough not to interfere too much with the real meat of each image, as it were. (I will also not be tagging things retroactively--it's it's already on the site and not tagged, it will stay that way. But all new scans from now on WILL be tagged.) Oh, and I made a fortuitous discovery while messing around with some of the enhancing functions on the GIMP (the image manipulation software which comes bundled with RedHat Linux) that's allowed me to salvage a number of "marginal" shots from the pics I took at the two Survivor concerts I went to this past summer. So, here's all the links to the new stuff:

1 New pic in the Europe Band Gallery (I usually try to wait until I have at least a handful of new images to do an update, but since I was redoing that gallery anyway I decided to go ahead and put this one up since I had it to hand...)

3 New pics in the Ben Orr Gallery (I've also re-added a much larger scan of an old photo)

7 New pics in the Cars Band Gallery

8 New pics in the Jimi Jamison & Survivor Gallery (plus one larger and clearer scan of an old photo, as well)

9 new pics in the Survivor Live in Denver, CO Gallery

and 14 new pics in the Survivor Live in Deadwood, SD Gallery (although the "net gain" here is actually 13, since I did remove one older image--there were a couple in there that were so similar to one another that I decided to drop one)

You'll notice in those last two galleries that the new pics are sort of scattered amongst the old--that's because I went through and redid ALL of those concert shots as I was working on this update. That is, I took the original images that came straight off my digital camera, cleaned each one up again with all the new techniques I'd learned, and then resized and re-tagged them. So each set is in the order that they were actually taken at the shows, and if you had any pics saved from when the galleries first went up, you might want to check these new sets out in detail; it's likely that you'll see at least a slight improvement in quality over the older pics in just about every shot.

One final note: I had hoped to be able to automate the galleries with a CGI script to save myself some work each time I do a site update, but I've looked through at least half a dozen different script archives and haven't been able to come up with one which will do everything I want/need it to. So I guess I'm going to have to do what any geek worth their salt would do: learn PHP and write a custom script.  (Although the Gods alone know how long that's going to take, so don't expect it anytime in the near future!)

Hope everyone's having a great new year!