About JayceLand's New Look

Well times change and so do I. In the last few years, I've transitioned further from going out to live music all the time to seeing mostly movies and only a handful of shows a month. So I decided to further pare down the number of events I list on the site.

My standing rule is that this site should be as easy for me as possible. I had toyed with a user-generated site and all kinds of fancy databases (which may still come) but that is most certainly not easy. And then there's the whole fragile way I generate the site each week — pretty much unchanged since 2001 — using FileMaker Pro 5 databases on a Macintosh Classic, exporting the data, and using some Unix scripts to make a HTML file. The workflow is quick (i.e. easy) although it's fairly convoluted.

So I decided the new site would be a weekly blog post with highlights of things-to-do — things I will very likely do (rather than "have a passing interest in doing" as it stands now). If you're only interested in the events lists, you can link straight to the events category and skip all my regular blog posts. The JayceLand home page will now redirect to the normal blog. To keep my sanity, I'm going to stop numbering them — the last numbered update was #705 on July 12, 2012. (And even then: 705 weeks of posting events … enough is enough!)

In addition, I'm dropping most of the internal links. You can Google a band just as well as I can. And I don't think I need to remind everyone the address of the Bug Jar (along with a link to Google Maps.) So it'll all look a lot more vanilla. And be much easier for me which, well, is the whole point.

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The Astonishing Train-Wreck of How JayceLand Gets Made

This year I decided I'd begin the process of replacing the Macintosh PowerBook G3 Firewire that just turned 10 years old yesterday. I had upgraded it to the maximum 2GB RAM and it's still a fine machine. It's just showing its age with sheer speed, particularly with browsing websites to find information about events and bands. So last month I ordered a Mac Mini (mid-2010) — that's apparently the clumsy official name, by the way — and started working with it. Well, having started from OS 8.1 on the PowerBook and as far back as System 7 on the LC III I had out of college, a huge portion of the software I have runs, as they say now, "in the Classic environment." OS X 10.3.9 suported Classic, largely because it ran on PowerPC hardware.

Well the Mac Mini has Intel chips and would never boot up any of the Classic systems. As such, support for it was dropped a few OS X releases ago. I figured I'd give the emulator SheepShaver a go — it professes to run nearly all software in Classic with the caveat that it apparently crashes a lot. I succeeded in getting it to boot up a Classic session (and ran comparable to the Powerbook) but it would not run FileMaker Pro. That's the software package that I use a lot. So big bummer there. I really don't want to buy the latest version because it's rather expensive and I'd prefer to go with something open-source and with a little more staying power (such as MySQL which seems to have a big enough head of steam that it'll be around for a while.)

The dilemma was how to continue to do work; the solution is a mess. I keep the PowerBook running most of the time specifically to have access to FileMaker Pro 5 and Quicken Deluxe '98 (only the name is not Y2K compliant). I wrote an AppleScript that does two things. First, when one of several scripts I wrote for FileMaker Pro request opening a website, it sends the request to the Mac Mini and opens it there. Second, and more terrifying, is that it synchronizes the clipboard between the two machines, so if I copy the name of a book in FileMaker Pro, it's available on the Mac Mini clipboard so I can search Amazon, and if I copy a Google Maps link, it's available on the PowerBook and in FileMaker Pro.

I decided that I'd start migrating to something new, and it looks like that time is now. I don't intend on making JayceLand look or work any different (just as when I integrated the WordPress blog), but I might shoot for bring it up-to-date in terms of, say, 2005 or so. I have long considered making the whole website web-only rather than the hodge-podge I have had for the last 10 years or so. And up until now, it would have violated the one rule I have about JayceLand: it should be the least amount of work for me. But man, this whole AppleScripted FileMaker Pro'd PowerPC-Classic-OS X-Intel thing is quite a hassle.

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