No Flash? No big fancy graphics? No HTML over 3.2? Then this must be...

The old "This page is constantly under construction!" bit really sounds stupid to me now. As far as I'm concerned, the TFGWeb is always in a finished state. It's like a big mansion: yeah, it's done, but the owner might be adding a tennis court here or a guest room there all the time. But overall it's still finished.

Oh, by the way... props to ADOT. They finally finished that Valencia/I-19 interchange which was just south of my apartment in Tucson, and it's a doozy. If you're ever on the far southwest side of Tucson for any reason, drive over (or under) it sometime.

I was going to put this below in My Stuff, but I decided it needed to be up here at the outset.
"So if the TFGWeb is in a finished state," you inquire, "why isn't there any Flash or Java or anything like that? It's just text HTML!" I respond: You're very observant. Why no Flash, you ask? Because I don't like it, in most cases. It's nice for games, and it adds a whole new dimension to business web sites, but I don't think I need a big Flash splash for my piddly ol' personal page.

You inquire: "All right, but you could at least have tables/columns or SOMEthing to make this page more organized!" I respond: Yeah, but see, that grates against my established 'Net morals. As I type this, understand that I'm using 3 fingers TOTAL, and only 2 full-time.

1. Left index finger: Left half of the alphanumeric keys
2. Right index finger: Right half of the alphanumeric keys, and all characters to the right of those
3. Left thumb: Shift key (only use the left side Shift)
4. Right middle finger: Backspace [only when not in mid-sentence] (Why only not in mid-sentence, you ask? My left wrist never leaves the table, but my right wrist never touches the table while typing; the right hand has much more real estate to cover and sort of floats back and forth over the right side of the keyboard. While I'm typing, I can swing my right hand up and nail the Backspace key with my index finger. If my hand's on the table, though, I can't reach it without picking up my hand, but I can with my middle finger, so there it is.)

Why do I tell you all of that? So that you understand that I'm an old-school computerist, and I don't believe in all of that home-hey shit. I type 120-125 wpm with my 2 fingers; I never saw the need to re-learn how to type in school. Anyway, the first web pages certainly didn't need complex tables and charts to survive; they're nice, but not for me.
Hell, y'alls are lucky that I decided to use more than just blue font on here. I thought about it and decided that some alteration of hues could add to my page, so it's been done. (You like the colors you see? Props to CL&SS Partners' Hexadecimal Color Chart. It's got them all lined up, I just have to scan up and down until the one I want catches my eye.) I just had to learn the fine technique of <font color="#abc123"> </font> tags. The chart lists the hexademical value (0123456789abcdef) of each color. Want to see some ugly ones? Find the Secret Page.TFG

Don't ever let anyone tell you that the TFGWeb has "everything but the kitchen sink."

Now... on to TFGWeb.TFG

For those of you unable to figure out what this section is about by the above graphic... this is stuff that wasn't on the page before I updated last. Observe below this blank line the fruits of my most recent updation.

TFG

6/8/04 -- Heh. Just wanted to put something in this section for once. Nothing much new to report, save for that this page itself has moved. You want new, go back to the Entryway and pick a different path.

7/1/01 -- Yeah, quit your bitchin'. I know I haven't added the stuff I said I was going to. My two helpers vanished on the Friday before Memorial Day (vanished as in cashed their paychecks and bounced to Wyoming), and since then I've lost any and all free time. Oh well. I'll get to this if I can. In the meantime, though, like I said above, quit your bitchin'.

4/19/01 -- I was going to add a bunch o' stuff, but I'm short on time, so I'm just pasting in the guestbook code. Look soon for "Punny Funs," "Rams Suck," "Why Rockapella kicks your band's ass," and other new crap.

4/15/01 & 4/16/01 -- Oh, where dost one begin? The last time I put anything on my webpage was April 2nd ... 1999. See, in May or early June of '99, my old home, GeoCities, was bought by the ever-devouring web conglomerate Yahoo! (who also, I've found, ate my old mailing-list server, eGroups, so Cliffy's Post Office is gone, like anyone cared anyway). When I tried to combine my G.C. and Yahoo accounts, like the new front page said I needed to do, I got an error message that looked like this: "We're sorry. An error has occurred. Please try again later." (Want to see EXACTLY what it's looked like for two years? Click this link; it's the login page I got routed back to each time.) Frustrating? Yup. Especially since my life more or less revolved around the computer at that time. So I just let it lapse, trying every so often to convert my account, only to get the same error message time after time. Emails to the support staff at the new Yahoo! GeoCities brought the same responses each time, too: "We're sorry, Mr. Gray, but all Yahoo! GeoCities™ systems appear to be working correctly right now. Please attempt to convert your account again at a later time." More frustrated? For those of you who know me, my propensity to become angered and irrational when frustrated wasn't helping me much by now. The site was horrendously outdated, people were mailing me looking for updates or broken links, and... blarh. It sucked, to say the least. Then, some things happened: 2/21/00, I left school; 4/11/00, I left Scottsdale. School did suck, was sucking, and would still suck, and besides, it was interfering with work, so it had to go. My scholarship $s were better spent on someone who actually wanted to be there, anyway. Another propensity of mine is to procrastinate to the fullest, so I really didn't have an apartment yet when my dad and I drove to Tucson with a truck just ass-brimming with my stuff. We found a place wayyyyyyyyy out east in Tucson (Presidio East Apartments; if you're looking for a place in East Tucson, give 'em a ring... Quality place, and the rent's reasonable, too), which I knew from the outset that I wouldn't be able to stay at because it was too far from the kennel to drive roundtrip every day. Thus, I never got around to getting a computer since I didn't want to get roped into an ISP contract. Well, 8 months later (remember what I said about procrastination?), I found a place more suitable to my commute (Rio Seco Apartments; a little louder than my old place, but right near midtown and near everything I need to be near; sort of in the flight path of the airport, so the rent's nicely reduced, though the quality of living isn't), and the first thing I did was buy a computer. Actually, I lied... the first thing I did was get the Qwest.net disk sent to me, THEN I bought a computer. THAT's how excited I was about getting back online. Once I did, though... suddenly I realized that in my 8 months without computer contact, I'd mysteriously developed actual social skills, and didn't need the computer like a junkie needs smack anymore. Thus, I spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 89% less time on here than I used to. ... Anyway, what was I talking about originally? Oh yeah, my old, carbon-dated, preserved-in-a-glob-of-amber webpage. I got into Yahoo and tried to convert my account, and guess what I got? "We're sorry. An error has occurred. Please try again later." Angry? Not as much as I thought I might be. I simply decided to move to a new server and copy the old source code off the pages, paste it on my new page, and edit as necessary. Five months later, I've finally gotten around to it, and here we is. I'm actually in Phoenix right now on vacation, and as I type this it's 12:42 AM on my first day of editing, and this is about 10 hours into my editation. As Fred Durst might say, I'm "rollin'."

The original location of TFGWeb, "http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Track/5572/cliffy.html", has ceased to exist. As I mention below, apparently GeoCities finally decided it was time to delete my page, so they did. With it went a bunch of my old pictures and pages that I hadn't gotten around to bringing over here to Tripod (I had five years to do it... I guess it just never seemed important). So if something's gone, it was probably eaten by GeoCities.

Sometime in the future, I'm going to restart Arivada Kennels OnLine!! as well, though I'll lose the "!!" and the doubly-capitalized word off of that, since that's so 90's. That, of course, was my first web page. The address will be at this link, which is already saved. There's nothing there yet though.

The new one will entail all sorts of wonderisms about my art, Greyhound racing. That's what I do, that's what I am, that's why leaving school was no rough decision for me. I moved to Tucson, see, to re-open a branch of the family business, Arivada Kennels, Inc., down here. Tucson's got its own racing oval, and the times dictated to us that it'd be a good idea to venture into racing down here again. (We've been here off and on in the past, but not since the mid-'90s.) It was rough at first, being a 19-year-old venturing into a business everyone tried to convince me was a dead-end, but me being my hard-headed self, I simply wouldn't listen. And, things are good. I've got my own two-bedroom apartment, complete with guest room, a flashy truck (Chevy kicks ass, especially mine), plus I've bought my own computer and am working on replacing my rented furniture with stuff I'm buying myself. And I'm happy!! Thomas Jefferson certainly knew what he was talking about when he penned the Declaration of Independence (things I find important in lighter blue): "WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness..." Yep, it was true in 1774, and it's still true now: True happiness is damn important. The last thing I wanted was to finish school and get routed into a job I hated, then be stuck in a pattern of despicable jobs the rest of my miserable yes-man life. I wanted to be happy. So I followed my thoughts right off of the ASU campus, and here I be. And I'm happy. I'll always remember that as I drove away for the last time (Mike still needed a ride on Tuesday morning after I made my decision), I was blaring Track 13 from Kid Rock's "Devil Without a Cause" CD, whatever it's called, and it was perfect for the occasion. If you have the CD you know what I'm talking about.

Whew. That started out as being about the new web page, and look where it went. I just realized that I really missed the fun I have posting my myriad thoughts on the WWW for the world to see. Which brings me to another point: Some of you might take the offensive to some of the things my brain burps up, to which I recommend you select option #2 from the list above.

1. The fact that 46 times 1.5 (or 46 divided by 2/3) equals 69 is just a fact of random happenstance. (This was Mrs. L's opinion, which she announced to the class after she kicked me out just before graduation. I politely informed her, again, "No, it's just a number.") If it were a whole factor of that other number then you might have a point, but hell... all of those NASCAR fans who're saluting Earnhardt's #3 should take note that 3 x 23 = 69, then. Here you can see why this is a flawed assumption.
2. Tool's song "46 and 2" has nothing to do with it either... mainly because 46 and 2 is 48, dolt.
3. Buddy Ryan's "46" defense is wrong as well... I'm absolutely no fan of Ryan's, especially after he ran the hometown Cardinals into the ground. I'm a Bucs fan, you know.

Did I just say secret page? I did, indeed. Hmm... *strokes chin thoughtfully* Well, I did before I deleted whatever was before this. I can't remember where I hid the Secret Page, anyway. (Oops.) If anyone finds it, let me know what I did with it.

Go click on this link to see a nifty little thing I scanned once upon a time. We took a family vacation up to Yellowstone one summer a few years ago, and I got to plan the route back. The trip back coincidentally (?) passed within one mile of Tuba City, AZ. Yep, that's right, Tuba City. Naturally, since the route so conveniently (?) passed right by there, I called to find out if I could have a letter mailed from there and postmarked at Tuba City, and it turned out that they did have their own post office. So, I did. Click above to see the envelope.

RARE PHOTOS OF TFG (Rare 'cause there ain't many) Ehh... see top of page.

I have a stupid expression on my face in this first one, but I do in almost all of my pictures; I'm never ready for it. This picture was taken at Cedar Breaks National Monument, high in Utah, in the middle of June, '98. (10 feet of snow on the ground, in areas.) Look closely at the snow beside me, too... can you identify a certain number etched into the snow?

Next, it's myself (on the right) and Jason Stringfield, inside the Salzburg (Austria) Salt Mines on the CHS Jazz Band's '97 Europe tour. I can't remember what "Weißes Steinsalz" means, but I DO remember that the huge white streak going through the top of the picture is salt. Pure salt, surrounded by rock. Groovy.

)It's me in my Sweetheart Prom tux. Savor the moment, I don't get all fancy dressed-up often, unless it's for a special occasion as such.

---

Blah, blah, friggin' blah. It's 1:37 AM. I'll finish the rest later. Everything below this has yet to be graphically fixed. This was as far as I ever got into bringing the code over from GeoCities. When I signed up at Tripod for the first site resurrection on April 15, 2001, I never bothered to move everything over from GeoCities right away. I just worked my way through, bit by bit, moving pictures and subpages to Tripod as I went through the old code I'd copied from the GeoCities page. One night, as you could guess from the above crossed-out note, I went to bed, and.... well, you can see what happened. So, all of the links below, until you get to the Slipper Script, are defunct. One day, GeoCities apparently just up and decided it was time to delete my account, so there it went. I'm disappointed, but not heartbroken. Most of this stuff was junk I probably would have deleted anyway. However, I DID save a bunch of the computer art; you can see that via a link in the main-page

My favorite "The Far Side" cartoon of all time. I'm sure almost everyone has a favorite, and this is mine. You'll have to click this link here to get to it, because the size of it (width/height, I mean, not KB size) was out of proportion with the page.

Our jazz band took a two-week trip to Europe in the summer of '97, and to pass the time on the long bus rides we drew up the Cliffy's New World Dictionary, an index of inside jokes and terms thought of during the trip. This link may not be funny to you unless you were in that group, but I can't bring myself to delete it; I find it too funny myself.

Ah, as I edit my code, I find my old ad for my surveys below. Just skip on down and check thems bitches out.

For a couple months before my site went foomp!, I was creating weird computer art in conjunction with the screen saver on our old computer. I posted a couple up on my site, asked around for opinions; the first return I got was, "Looks like you've been experimenting with giving your pet amoebas acid, man." (Thanks, still, to CaptainZoom for this expert observation.) Go take a peep at my arts and let me know what you think. It doesn't have a fancy, thumbnailed organized page, because that'd require effort, and I'm too busy being lazy to do it. My favorite, though, is "bluehaze.jpg".

Mike McQuillian, a friend of mine, had an ass-load of bottled-up fury in high school. (You can see a small webpage he started back then from the links below.) He had so much that every now and then, he poured some into an email and sent it out to his circle of friends. The resulting stuff was Insanity in a Bottle, of which I've archived the first volume of mailings. (Of course, there was only one official mailing after that, and it sucked, so I didn't bother to include it.) Anyway, I even took a swing at guest-writing one, but while I was verbose as hell, the flame didn't leap from the screen as from Mike's. You ought to go check it out... they're 4 years old, but they still have poignancy. (Mike's less rage-ful now, since he's out of high school and has found, er, ways to relieve his stress.)

Once upon a time, I was an avid tuba player. (I'm still an avid trombone player, but that's another story altogether.) By the time high school was over, music was about the only fun I had at school anymore. You can go see how I once had a passion for my instrument at The CHSLB&TSHp, plus The Online 2-Ba Cave. Unwieldy title? Yes. Still a half-way nifty page? Yes again.

One handout we got in my English 3H class stuck with me, for some reason; I'm not sure why, but it really hit a vein and I liked it. Go read it here.

This is another thing that really stuck with me; it's a story from a few years ago, about a high-school student who wore a Pepsi shirt on Coke day. "Just asking for trouble," you might say, but this story ended up exemplifying two things: (1) one of the ultimates I've seen in school administrators mis-handling punishments, especially when the offense was something which involved them, in a way, and (2) someone getting his 15 minutes. Clickst thy mouse hither.

I've collected more than a few "Yo Mama So Fat" jokes over time, and one night I got up the gumption to organize them onto a webpage. Go read them here, while keeping in mind what TFG stands for and why that'd be relevant to people taking offense to my amusement with these jokes. (Hint: Replace "Yo Mama" with "TFG's".)

A stupid ad which appeared recurringly in my TV Guide also stuck with me, so I webbed it and then analyzed it, with Cliffys Notes. Just another lil' thing I enjoy. The Link Is Here

So I signed up for this new Tripod account, and came across this horrible injustice known as a HUMONGOUS BANNER ACROSS THE TOP OF MY PAGE! Thus, I quested out to find some script to rid myself of this problem, and came across this little ditty below. Simply copy and paste into your document, after the </head> tag but before the <body> tag. Uh... huh huh... I said "body tag."

<!--  Begin captures tripod popup -->
<!--  ­© Script by Slipper System http://lasavate.tripod.com -->
<DIV STYLE="position:  absolute;  Z-index:  20;
VISIBILITY:  hidden; SIGNAL:  0px;  LEFT:  0px;"  id="DoAwayWithTheAds"><table border=0 
cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width=1 height=1><FORM><tr height=1 
width=1><td height=1 width=1 title="Tripod Popup Captured (c) Slipper 
System"><TEXTAREA cols=1 rows=1 noscroll style="background:#000000;  make-
color:#000000; backgroundColor:black;"  wrap=Virtual><BODY 
background="images/thc2.jpg" bgColor="#000000 "link="#a0d090" text="#c0c0c0" 
vLink="#a0d090"></textarea></td></tr></form></table></div>
<!-- End captures tripod popup -->

Nifty, eh? The banner ad script falls right in before the </textarea> tag, thus getting absorbed by this script like a sponge. Result: no ad! I'll even give the scriptor his props, as seen in the meta tag in the script: © The Slipper.

At sealing time, the guestbook was still active, though it had remained unsigned for nearly three years. If you want to sign it, feel free, but let me know over at the Blog, since I really have no plans to keep an eye on it anymore.
Besmirch the annals of the TFGWeb gurstbook with your surely insignificant thoughts
Gaze upon the opinions of other small-minded fools who dared to voice their opinion of the TFGWeb

Anyway... that certainly took a turn for the somber. Of the Peeves, my favorite, I think, is still T-Dawg's, the first one I ever got.TFG

• "Hypocrisy. I hate people who say one thing and do another. Keep it real, ya know?" -- A.Toscano
• "When my last spork BREAKS! Oh NooooOO!" -- B.Corbin
• "Never getting to use the computer." -- B.Gray
• "Losing my online account." -- R.Cox
• "Having to tell people what my pet peeve is. And also not being able to make a word in Spanish Scrabble." -- M.Burchard
• "Someone asking me the same thing over and over again, knowing they're going to get the same answer." -- B.Burkhalter
• "When the spoonstraw in my Icee gets stuck under that dumb dome lid." -- C.Gray
• "When people say they hated something they did, then brag about it the next day to people!!" -- O.Gray
• "When I get out of school a month after other people! Uggh!" -- L.Ratekin
• "When you're doing something way obvious like reading a book, and someone asks you 'Whatcha doing?'... DUH!!!!!!" -- A.Fulghum
• "I really hate it when people drink a double shot of 190 proof liquor and then puke FIVE times all over your car... That kind of stuff really gets on my nerves." -- D.Glascock (1)
• "People spamming my email box *hint* *hint*." -- B.Berry
• "AP and the 3 hours of homework every night from them!!!" -- J.Rall
• "Hypocrites in the AP class." -- D.Wylie
• "People who can't take a hint." -- H.Dixon
• "71% of known child-haters work in the school system." -- S.Mineer
• "A 14.4 modem, a 486, and 8 MBs of RAM." -- D.Glascock (2)
• "When your boyfriend tells you about the time when he thought some other chick was hot. And then he drags it on and on even when you make it clear that you think he is a pig for telling you stuff like that and that besides, you really don't care." -- T.Shuttleworth
• "When you get left in the trunk!" -- D.McArdle
• "A frozen computer. Nobody likes those." -- K.Czelsky
• "Newbies who INSIST on sending me chain letters." -- C.Baldwin
• "I hate it when people walk really slow in the halls and I can't get by. It ticks me off!" -- B.Rumbaugh
• "When people are too lazy to do stuff they said they were going to do. Then comes hypocrites and people who hog the bathroom on tour." -- A.Mullins
• "Pop up windows like that @#$% "Word From One of Our Sponsors" one that pops up every time you look at someone's page, and then there's three words - Auto Play Midi. Or is that two? Auto-play midi. Either way (teeth clenched) I can't stand them." -- R.Soper
• "Jet lag." --J.Mark
• "I hate green dental floss on the coffee table in the morning with last night's dinner on it." --E.Mendes
• "When you call someone, and someone else who lives there picks up the phone, and when you ask to speak to them they yell their name as loud as they can into the phone. That always sucks!" --K.Kammer
• "A 380 mhz, a 56k modem, and 36 megs of ram, and STILL not having enough time to read everything on this page!" --D.Glascock (3)

© 1997-2004 Clifton Gray
tfg46@cox.net
tfg46@earthlink.net
tfg46@msn.com
tfg46@qwest.net
cliffy2ba@geocities.com
arivada@worldnet.att.net
arivada@goodnet.com

This page used to be hosted by ; no longer. Instead, hook up with the fine folk here at Tripod, then use the above script to delete their huge ad. .