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Home page subject categories: About this site |
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| How to get the most out of this web site | |
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Find out about the importance of keeping the Internet accessible for everyone. |
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To hear the sound files, you need to download the RealAudio player. Once installed, you can hear what my voice sounds like. |
| Access Trouble | If you have trouble accessing this site, see the technical notes near the end of this page |
| Browser Problems | If you find these pages hard to read, here's some adjustments you can make |
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Find out about privacy issues on the Internet |
| Introduction | What this site is all about and how to get the most out of it - Hippie Memorial - Credits |
The Editor's Desk |
What's new on this site, feedback on your email and other editor's column stuff: This Monthly column is posted close to the 9th of every month |
To reduce the clutter, I have turned the list into a nice little table:
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Sites about the Haight-Ashbury and the Hippies |
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My Haight-Ashbury Archives |
This is all the stuff I've written and collected about the Haight-Ashbury over the years. If you've got questions about the era or the people involved with it, there's a good chance you'll find the answer in here. |
| The Head Shop | Here's where you can find the latest information on CD-ROMS, books, recordings, computer programs and other items that Hippies find groovy. |
| Other Haight-Ashbury Related Sites | This is where you can find out what's going on in the Haight-Ashbury right now. It includes everything from the Haight-Ashbury Free Press to the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, plus maps of the area and what is located where, and it even has some historical sites and research sites in case you get stuck with writing a term paper on the subject. |
| Hippies in the Here and Now | Like the above page, this one is about Hippies in the Here and Now, but in other places besides the Haight-Ashbury. |
| Ken Kesey and the Pranksters | This is all the stuff on the web about Ken Kesey, the Pranksters and the Cuckoo's Nest. You can check out his web site and check out several others, download all sorts of photos of Ken, the Furthur Bus and other stuff, or you can visit the shock shop, groove on the Disturbed Ward or check out the scene in the operating room on MS, where they do the lobotomies. |
| The Hippie Radio Station | Ken Kesey wasn't the only one who had a band of Pranksters. I had my own, and our prank was to start a Hippie radio station where it would be least appreciated ...in Dallas, Texas. Man, you should have seen how it upset the squares, and this is the story about that. |
| Progressive Sites for Social Change | Environmental and networking gophers, and other progressive sites. |
"Thousands of people drive to the middle of nowhere, build a city out of the dust, live, create, and party in it for a week, then burn it to the ground. No spectators permitted."
Bohemians have always had in interest in altered states of consciousness. Drugs are one way to alter consciousness, but there are many other ways that don't involve the use of drugs. That's what most of these sites are about.
You know, like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Lew Welch and all their friends. Plus jazz, poetry readings, bongo playing, smoking "tea", wild drunken orgies and even homosexual beatniks carrying on in the dormitories down at Columbia University (or so the Dean thought). Ah, those were the days, although I think us Hippies managed to outdo the Beats in several ways...
Remember when the fat lady sang and the so-called Summer of Love went belly up? Well, after drug dealers started murdering each other left and right and Hippies got tired of being hassled by the police, runaway teenagers and rubbernecking tourists, the general consensus was that the Haight-Ashbury was no longer a groovy place to hang out, so we all split, including the Grateful Dead. But that only left a little mess (actually, the park department thought it was pretty big, but they hadn't seen nothin' yet).
The Hippie scene kept growing around the country until we were over 400,000 strong. When every one of them (minus Ken Kesey and myself) shows up at a bash called Woodstock and the fat lady (actually Jimi Hendrix) sings, man, that left a mess like nobody had ever seen before, and it took them months to get it cleaned up. I think that was the last mess the Hippies ever made. The next year, we had Earth Day instead. In case you're wondering why Kesey and I didn't make the Woodstock scene, like all I can say is it was one hell of a bummer for both of us, man, and not one caused by drugs either. Actually, it was caused by the squares' reaction to drugs, but I don't want to go into that and I don't think Kesey does either. Anyone got a good GIF of this mess?
(3-5-98)
Call 1-800-HIP-CATS of course! No man, scratch that. If you call that number, there's no telling what might happen. It might even cause your server to crash or some equally bad bummer, so e-mail me at colinp1@mindspring.com instead!
Whenever you have trouble accessing this (or any other site on the Internet), it's usually an indication of server overload. Server overload occurs whenever too many people try to access a server at any given time. This can cause pages to take forever to load, server timeouts, or error messages to occur. It makes the web page appear to malfunction, even though there's nothing wrong with it. The best thing to do when this happens is to bookmark the site and try it again later. In the meantime, try accessing a site in another time zone.
Please understand that there's nothing a webmaster can do to prevent this problem, it's just the nature of the Internet. Servers can only handle so much bandwidth, and when that gets exceeded, things jam up. Some commercial sites solve the problem by putting up mirror sites in other time zones, but that can be expensive and is usually not an option for non-commercial sites like this one.
Web sites on the west coast tend to get hit the hardest, because we start getting hit with traffic from the east coast, then with traffic from all the other time zones to the east of us. The reverse is not true because when traffic from the west coast starts hitting them, traffic from their own time zone has died down. The trick is to figure out the best time to access sites on each time zone. Hint: weekends are a very good time to access web sites because business related traffic is very light and students are usually doing other things besides using the Internet to do their assignments. Weekday afternoons seem to be the worst time to access web sites.
Sometimes when a site is not jammed up, you might get an error message.
One of the most common is the 404 error. What that means is that
the web page you tried to access is no longer on the server. Whenever you
encounter such an error, you should e-mail the webmaster and let them know
the URL of the bad link and what page it occurred on. One time, someone
wrote about a bad link, but they failed to mention which page it was on
and I had to search the whole web site to find it, and we're talking about
over 100 pages on this site. Back to top of page
Because of the differences in web browsers and computer monitors, writing a web page that will look great in all of them is impossible. Webmasters can only hope to write a page that will appear properly in the majority of cases. For example, Netscape 6.1 has a new feature called My Sidebar. Very few web pages are written to display properly when it is in place since it changes the aspect ratio of the display. You should close it first before you surf the web. To do so, click on View and uncheck My Sidebar.
Most web sites are written for the the following display settings: 800x600 and the browser window fully maximized. If you use a higher resolution than that, you may have trouble reading the text. As a check, you should be seeing six copies of the background graphic (the Haight-Ashbury street sign) in the horizontal (side by side) direction. People have written me about this problem in the past, but the new monitors seem to be better about this. Nobody has written about it in the last five years, so I assume it's no longer a problem. You may also have to adjust the brightness or contrast of your monitor to get the clearest picture.
Copyright: Except as noted, all the text and graphics on this site are copyright © Colin Pringle, and are shareware. Nothing may be used for commercial purposes without permission.
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Copyright © 1995-2002 Colin Pringle (colinp1@mindspring.com)
Filename: index.htm
(Please mention this filename when reporting bad links or other problems
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Last revision: 5-21-2002
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