-
You can now page me via ICQ
- I've decided to give the ICQ software a try.
If I'm connected to the Internet, you can get a notification I'm online and/or send me
instantaneous messages. It sounds pretty nifty, and I'll keep it open to the general
public for a trial period. So if you wanna say hey or ask a question or whatever,
page me! My ICQ number is 8591604.
-
The Gumbo Pages become a cdnow.com affiliate
- Get your CDs here! I've added easy links to cdnow.com
for all the CDs I recommend here, in my monthly updated list
and in theBest Of lists. Selling out, you ask?
Well, the pittance that I make off this helps defray the cost of running
this website, which is considerable, and I still don't accept ads.
So there! Buy CDs!
- Gumbo's Best Albums of 1997
- Yeah, I know, I procrastinated putting it up. So what else is new?
One reason is because the list is so huge this year -- there was so
much great music it was hard to choose only 10 ... so I chose 63
instead.
- We're back on WebCom!
-
After nearly a year being hosted by the now-defunct
iWebStudio, The
Gumbo Pages have made the move back to Web Communications, the web
hosting service where this all got started, as of November 1997. Their
tempting offer to come back was too good to pass up,
and it's nice to be back home. - A lesson in stupidity
- Yesterday (September 18, 1997), I found out that The Gumbo Pages made it into the
prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. You won't
believe why. Oh, by the way, in case you're not aware of this ... you shouldn't drink poison.
You might end up in the hospital or even dead. And you might end up on
CNN, too.
- Font!
- I changed the font on the home page, as an experiment. I think it's a little bit
easier to read. But it was a pain in the ass to do it to each list and table cell and
still remain HTML-compliant. I'm not sure if I'll do it to more pages or not. I hope
you find it a bit easier to read.
- The Gumbo Pages Bookshop's brand-new Roots and Traditional Music section!
- I've forged ahead with putting my lists of recommended books into the Bookshop, making it easy
and safe for you to order them for yourself, online. All the listed books are linked directly to
Amazon.com Books, "Earth's Largest Bookstore" -- just click on the title to order!
-
I bought a Mac! Woohoooooo!!
- Yes folks, I've finally done it. I trashed my obsolete Amiga and bought a computer that
I can do things with, and for which -- *gasp* -- people actually write commercial software!
Actually, technically, I didn't buy an Apple Macintosh -- I bought a Power Computing PowerBase 200, running Mac OS 8. I like it a lot.
About a month after I bought the machine, Apple revoked the licenses for most clone-makers and bought out Power Computing's complete Mac "core assets". You know, I really really really want to support Apple, 'cause I hate the Wintel near-megamonopoly, but when I hear stuff like this I want to whap Steve Jobs over the head with a big Nerf bat. Here, have a gun ... why don't you shoot yourself in the OTHER foot now? Well, he claims that the clone licenses cost Apple money, but shouldn't we concentrate on getting the OS on as many platforms as we can, and not get so stuck on hardware manufacture? Do you see B*ll the G*t*s making hardware? But I digress ...
I also bought Photoshop and a bunch of graphics programs and am actually using BBEdit as a text and HTML editor (but hey, I still like to write my HTML by hand). Welcome me to the modern era, if you please.
But what does this mean, you ask? It means that The Gumbo Pages is getting primed for a major structural and graphic redesign. Not only is it still gonna be packed with the same content as before, and more ... but it's gonna look really cool too.
And yes, it will still be cross-browser compliant, will not be too graphics-intensive, will not take forever to load, and will still be optimized for Lynx. I want anyone and everyone to be able to navigate it, no matter what browser they use. But having said that, I do want the site to look nice from a graphic design point of view. (I still love Lynx, by the way ... when I just want the info without having to wait for lots of pretty but useless graphics to load, I telnet into my shell and fire up Lynx. It rocks. But I digress again ...)
- "Gumbo" is now live on the Web!
- KCRW went live with its audio feed onto the World Wide Web on Friday, August 15, 1997!
My weekly roots and traditional music radio program, "Gumbo", can now be heard live on the Web on Sunday nights, 10:00pm to midnight, Pacific Time; Sunday night/Monday morning midnight to 2:00am Central Time; Monday 1:00 to 3:00am Eastern Time; Mondays 0600 to 0800 GMT/UTC, and Mondays 0700 to 0900 Central European Time.
Okay, I realize that this is a tad unrealistic for you non-Pacific coast listeners. I'm working on the possibility of storing each week's show on the server so that it can be retrieved anytime, on demand. Success of this venture will be whether or not I can sweet-talk the KCRW Webmasters into taking the time to do this. *flutter eyelashes* Josh! Ethan! What kinda wine y'all like?
- Acadiana's Musical Instrument Makers
- Well, I finally got up off my butt and got this started. If you feel a yearning to play
Cajun music, and you're not fiddler or guitarist (hell, you can get those more or less anywhere),
here's a list of where you can get those truly Cajun instruments -- accordion, frottoir (rubboard)
and ti-fer (triangle). That oughta get you off to a pretty good start.
- You know you're a native New Orleanian if ...
- Gumbo Pages reader and correspondent Greg Beron sent in this
hilarious compilation of observations, which are absolutely priceless and
will generally only make sense of you're a native. (A couple of months later, I
discovered that these were swiped from a Gambit article-contest, where New
Orleanians were asked to send them in.) I've added a few of
my own from family, friends and Gumbo Pages correspondents; feel free to
add more!
- The Crawfish-Sea Urchin Tale is now illustrated!
- FINALLY, I managed to get the slides that were taken at this
legendary event scanned onto a Photo CD, then converted into JPEGS (with
the help of my roomie Chris
Gaal ... thanks Chris!). You now get to see the look on my face as I
was eating raw sea urchin for the first time, and the same for Hiroki as he
had to suck a crawfish head. Priceless stuff.
- Hometown Boy Makes Good!
- A reporter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune
wrote an article about me and my little web site ... I've made it into
the hometown paper! Woohoo! It was really nice, too. I'll see if I can
get permission to reproduce it here.
- http://www.gumbopages.com ... WOOHOOOOO!!
- The Gumbo Pages is now the proud owner of its own domain, and has
moved off of the Webcom WWW server. Quadrupling their "excess" web
traffic rates was mighty unsporting of Webcom, so I've found greener
pastures -- a friendly little webspace provider in Glendale,
California called iWebStudio, who
do a great job and whose prices are more in line with my way of thinking
(i.e., reality). A million thanks to Henry Ho and all the iWebStudio
folk for making it all happen.
UPDATE YOUR LINKS AND BOOKMARKS! That new domain and URL once again ... http://www.gumbopages.com
- Metric conversions!
- So now ... will all you Europeans and Asians and Australians and
South Americans and Africans finally quit bitching that The Creole and
Cajun Recipe Page (along with the rest of the United States) refuses to
join the rest of the planet and measure things with the metric system?
Well, I may not have joined, but at least I've made it a tad more
convenient for you to convert the measurements I use in these recipes.
Look, I'm far too old and set in my ways to switch now ...
- The Gumbo Pages Bookshop
- I've converted my recommended books list into an online bookstore!
I got an invitation from Amazon.com
Books, an enormous online bookstore with a million titles on hand, to
be an associate. Now, all of my books that are on my recommended
booklist are available for purchase online through Amazon.com -- all you
have to do is click on the title. And remember ... if y'all buy books
through my site, I get a small percentage, which will go toward defraying
my horrendously large charges for keeping this website up. So buy some
books!
- "Gumbo" Music on RealAudio!
- Finally, I've begun to get some of the live performances from my
radio program up on the Web. I'll be building an entire page of
RealAudio format selections from past "Gumbo" live
performances, and so far you can hear the entire 90-minute acoustic and electric performance
by the Massachusetts-based band Cordelia's
Dad. Check it out!
- MAJOR GRAPHIC REDESIGN! *gleeeeep!*
- Yes, I finally realized that even though I'm Mister
Lynx loyalist, about 80-90% of the world is looking at these pages with other,
more graphics-friendly browsers. So I decided to reorganize the sections
into tables, and I got rid of the background on the home page (I'm gradually
falling out of love with backgrounds). I think the home page design
definitely needs more work, but it's getting there. And of course, I
coded the tables so that they look nice with the current version of Lynx.
If you need it or want it and don't have it, get it.
Lemme know if you like it or not.
- Kudos!
- More and more people have been finding the site, and it's been
getting some terrific reviews from a variety of sources ... *warm and
fuzzy feeling*. I've moved all references to these to the nicely buried
self-conratulatory back-slap page referenced in the above link. I've also
picked up some awards, which are displayed on this page as well. I
appreciate them very much, but I wish that just once one
of these awards would be accompanied by a big stinking cash prize ...
- Letters, we get letters, we get stacks and stacks of letters ...
- Check out the new "vast wasteland" link on the
New Orleans Non-Commercial Radio Page, which
takes you to a page that's a response to some, um, fan mail.
- CDA Unconstitutional!
- Now that the odious Communications Decency Act has been overturned,
I've moved my thoughts about it to another area of the site, but it's
still there, as I think the ideas behind the fight are still important.
If you're remotely interested, you can still see my old
Black Thursday page, and my thoughts on
civil disobedience of the act,
unnecessary for the moment, but perhaps necessary again if we forget what
we just went through.
- Chuck's Photo Gallery
- So I finally broke down and scanned some pix. Most of 'em don't
look like me, but there they are. The good thing is, though, I'm
planning to add a travelogue and LOTS of pictures that I'll be taking
during my March 1996 trip to Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Ljubljana (Slovenia),
Budapest and Prague. Stay tuned!
- The 1996 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
- Jazzfest '95 is now but a memory, but check out my Jazzfest page to
review who was there, and to read my annual excruciatingly-detailed
account of my Fest escapades, wallowing in food and music. This tells
y'all how it's s'posed ta be done, and just forget about this burnout
threshhold thing ... Check out the new official
Jazzfest home page.
Also check out The Insider's Guide To Jazzfest, newly added in September 1995. Even if it's your first time, read this and you'll be Jazzfesting like an old seasoned pro.
- The Insurgent Country Roundup
- This section was getting kinda big in the Bands
page, and deserved a page if its own. "Alternative country",
country/punk, whatever you want to call it ... this is some of the best
and most exciting American music being made today. Check it out. And
let me know if you can think of a better word than "vault" for
this page.
- The Krewe of Pontchartrain
- I'm pleased and thrilled to be the online host for the first
Carnival Krewe (Mardi Gras club/parading organization) to have a home
page on the Web. Pontchartrain is a relatively young krewe (only 20
years old!), but is a mighty fine one. Check out their parade route,
photos from past parades, and find out how you can ride! (Defunct!)
- We hit the Top 5%! I can now die fulfilled!
-
The Gumbo Pages was chosen as being one of the Top 5% best sites on
the World Wide Web by The Point Survey,
a web reviewing service which has now been bought out by Lycos.
And the best thing of all about this award is ... that and 75 cents will get me a cup
of café au lait at Café Du Monde. This logo appears on so many goddamned
web sites nowadays that it's been reduced to ... well, meaningless bullshit. But the
news came on a day when I was about as down and depressed as I could possibly have been,
and it made me feel better. It's worth it for that alone. So there. - The Gumbo Pages are now searchable!
- Yes indeed, there will now be search links in the table of contents
and at the top of every sub-home page. At the search page, enter a word
or series of words that describe what you may be looking for, and you'll
get back a list of hotlinks to articles within The Gumbo Pages if your
search was successful.
Apparently the search option is already a hit; about 800 people per week are making use of it so far. Not bad!
- Friends of mine who've got Web pages of their own.
- As more and more friends of mine start getting their own homepages,
I thought I'd provide some links to them; some of them were sweet enough
to provide links to me. Now you'll get to see some of the people who'll
admit to knowing me, and in a few cases, people whom I myself may admit
to knowing ... [Deprecated in 2009 -- see "Friends" in the Looka! sidebar now]
- Chuck's virtual refrigerator door.
- I've got tons of old text files cluttering my home directory at my
Internet provider, and my disk storage situation is getting out of hand.
I, being quite the pack rat, couldn't bear to just delete them. Some of
'em are pretty damned interesting. So I thought I'd stick them here on
The Gumbo Pages in the off chance that y'all might find them interesting
as well. This will be a constantly growing page.
- New Orleans' Great Restaurants: Chuck's Picks
- I've finally got this page up. I haven't quite finished all the
reviews, but if you're heading to New Orleans you'll have a pretty
extensive list of what I think are the best places to eat in The City.
This section will definitely be growing.
- New Orleans' Great Watering Holes: Chuck's Picks
- I've finally got this page up too. The listings are there, but I'm
still workin' on da reviews (hey, I don't do this for a living, ya know!).
If you want to wet your whistle in the Crescent City, here are the best
and most atmospheric places to do it. Under construction, and growing.
- Project Evangeline: Cajun history and Culture on CD-ROM
- Louisianian Gary Dauphin of Apple Computers has just released a
marvelous educational tool, initially geared toward students in
Louisiana. History, language, music, culture and a lot of
myth-dispelling are contained in this first multi-media Cajun CD-ROM;
check it out!
- The Gumbo Pages' Guestbook
- The Guest Book has been a big hit since I added it last February,
both with visitors and myself! I really love hearing from y'all, so please
sign in and add your name to the list of visitors. Don't forget to tell
us what you think!
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