need help? well, you've come to the right place: this is the help section for the dredwerkz website. hopefully we can answer your question here, if not, you can always e-mail the address on the main page for additional assistance. first, a brief faq:

general questions

1. what does dredwerkz mean?
2. who are these guys?
3. where is the dredwerkz?
4. i don't understand...what's the point?
5. how did this all get started?
6. why is your site so ugly? where are the images?

staff questions

1. are those your real names?
2. can i contribute articles/reviews?

section questions

1. the advice page gave me bad advice and now i'm blind/deaf/dead as a result. how can i sue you?
2. why doesn't the news/icing/etc. section work?
3. what is each section about?

general questions:

1) what does dredwerkz mean/stand for?

dredwerkz is actually a reference to a quake3 level. some people are turned off to this explanation, while others have no idea what quake3 is/was. rest assured, despite the odd nomenclature, none of us are really into computer games, or all the appropriate associated psychopathology. it just happened that several years ago, we were playing the game, and i thought it was a cool name. there's no underlying subtext.

2) who are these guys?

that would be telling...although hints are sprinkled liberally throughout. if you read enough blog entries, you'll pick up on who we are. of course, you could always simply come to the house and see for yourself.

3) where is the dredwerkz?

the overtaxed, underepresented district of columbia, which happens to be, ironically, the capital of the united states of america. in the past we were located at 1800 vermont Ave. NW, washington DC 20001; a block south of the U St./African American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo Metro stop, at the intersection of 11th St. and Vermont Ave. right at the end of the triangle formed by the angle of those two roads. it *was* a big white house covered with ivy and surrounded by an expansive rose garden, marble chip paths and boatloads of character.

now, however, we're in limbo. i'd like to think that the 'werkz has moved to 1657 Newton St. NW...but i'm not sure if it has or not yet. only time will tell.

4) i don't understand...what's the point?

one could ask the same question about numerous other websites with equally obscure purposes. weblogs, by nature, tend to be online diaries. the dredwerkz website, by contrast, is more a reflection of dc seen through the prism of our eyes. it's not a personal website by any means, although personal opinion does filter onto it. instead, it has reviews of district restaurants, movies and clubs. it has advice for unrepresented citizens of all sorts. and it has news for those who want the latest scoop on a variety of issues. each of these sections have evolved slowly, and some are only now just becoming fully fleshed out. hopefully we'll reach critical mass shortly and more people will visit, enriching the experience for all.

5) how did this all get started?

for a brief overview of the history of the dredwerkz, click this article. it will cover the past times and dark early days of the 'werkz.

6) why is your site so ugly? where are the images?

I've heard this question quite a bit. Presumably, a website without images is an ugly monster that shouldn't exist, according to this line of thought. To answer simply: images take a long time to load, and provide very little additional information. Once SVG becomes more widely adopted, you can expect some cooler looking images and logos on the site. Until that happens, though, it will remain mostly text. As the main title suggests: it degrades well. In lynx, the site looks great. In phoenix, it looks perfect. In browsers with faulty css implementations, it looks odd. (These are bad browsers and I'm not coding around their problems.) Finally, if information is what you need, whether through reviews, advice or blog posts, then the site achieves what it set out to do. Criticizing a toaster because it doesn't have a cool logo is silly. Likewise, consider the dredwerkz to be made of stainless steel without much decoration. Functional, yes. Aesthetically pleasing, perhaps less so.

Staff questions:

1) are those your real names?

no, of course not. it's a reference to the david fincher movie 'fight club' starring three actors: brad pitt, edward norton and helena bonham carter.

2) can i contribute articles/reviews?

yes. you should e-mail us at the address located at the bottom of the main page. you can either be enshrined in the fun family of the dredwerkz as a full member (heh heh) or you can merely be a contributing person. we'll iron out the details over e-mail.

Section questions:

1) the advice page gave me bad advice and now i'm blind/deaf/dead/etc. as a result. how can i sue you??

let me get this straight...you went to a random webpage, e-mailed a random group of strangers, asking for advice, took said advice and managed to hurt yourself? caveat emptor baby, at least in the marketplace of ideas known as the internet. realistically though, this text is an official disclaimer stressing that no one, under any cirumstances, should follow the advice given in the advice section. we'll probably add some stupid legalese on the page itself to make this clear, but for now, this will have to do. so get over yourself.

2) why doesn't the news/icing/etc. section work?

The site, as of today, is not fully complete. It will probably always have some rough edges, but it's taken awhile to get it to the point where it is now: namely, updated several times a day with information on a wide range of issues. I'm hoping that once the one-year anniversary rolls around things will be more or less set. the icing section, well, check the next question for an explanation of the sections.

3)what is each section about?

The origins section contains...

The news section contains...

all information contained within the dredwerkz site is copyrighted as of the date posted to the site unless otherwise noted.

after a solid morning of attempting to work with ratm's the ghost of tom joad running through my head, the overarching dullness overcame me and i lost it. now, before i say anything else, go see the kick-ass powerpuff girls movie at the theatre. i'll hope to have a review up by tonight...but let me say now that it satisfies on many levels. (the fact that probably five out of the thirty-five people in the audience were under fifteen years old was cool, as well...a mother came in and asked us if she was in the right theatre when she saw us there: brilliant!) i'm also messing with some of the backend code on the site to develop a hierarchy that shows up under mozilla's site navigation bar. i'll let everyone know when it's finished...

evidently, some people have been asking about becoming guest reviewers...i am wholeheartedly in favor of this. while i never envisioned the site becoming the sort of slashdot/blog/comment laden/driven work like waferbaby, i would like it to become more of a community than it currently is. coming from the newspaper school of content, where it comes from a single group of people to a larger audience, i was never a giant fan of the community created content for a simple reason: most people are idiots. if you get enough people together, you'll almost always wind up with content that stinks, just like trying to please too many people. instead, a small group of people can focus on their strengths, avoiding the crazies and outliers of regular life. that said, it's always nice to broaden one's focus: i also never intended to be the main contributer to the site, but helena and brad aren't enamoured of the blog, and so think that they are contributing just as much as yours truly. if that was the case, it would be much easier...however, between making sure all the coding is cool, and that everything validates each day, and writing blog entries and the occasional review, i could use some more backup. if you want to help the 'werkz out, just e-mail us by using the sysop at dredwerkz.com address below. we'd love to have you on board!

just found a super-cool easter egg: if you've got mozilla, type in about:mozilla into the location bar and enjoy the scripture! interestingly, internet explorer also does something odd when you type in the same words...

remember the dreaded tps reports from the classic film, office space? well, i'm currently engaged in the same sort of mind-numbing drivel that would be better performed by trained monkeys. unlike tps reports, the report i have to fill out is only due each month, yet to brutally paraphrase scrooge mcduck, it's a poor excuse to pick a man's pocket every fifth of the month! these reports consist of a few numbers per server: the amount of available memory, how full the hard drives are, etc. etc. taken as a whole, the report is completely indecipherable, because unless there's a red flag (cpu processor average over 80%) there's no way to know if things are getting better or worse. worst of all, each number has to be manually divined from several different sources, resulting in a process that takes a few hours yet yields very little. i don't even think anyone reads the damn thing! certainly i've never heard of any person making a recommendation based upon the evidence found in the monthly server reports...hearsay is a bigger impetus down here, as in "i heard that people over at XYZ agency have this, so we should too!"

yes, it was a hot fourth of july here in uncle's sam's beach house. (not to be confused with the home of uncle sam, otherwise known as troy. i'm sure after a morning of surfing i'll have plenty to echo, but for now, it can all be summed up by this piece about the fifth of july. read it!

the party animals website is now up and running...allowing us to visit all the party animals in the district. i love the party animals, but you've got to wonder why it was easier to spread thousands of pounds of easily destroyable art through the streets than to get voting representation.

damn! couldn't have said this better myself. any consequences eh?

remember those heady days of meaningless news? well, they're back, if this article is the canary in the coal mine. maybe its the heat here in dc that's simply causing useful stories to melt...on the other hand, with thoughtful editorials like this, perhaps a rogue features editor merely lobbied the online folks to elevate the fish story. in other middle of the road news...my vbone idea received a serious boost in potential when motorola announced a new series of products called canopy enabling wirless access at 10mbs over a five mile range. here's the scoop. now i just need 30 grand and i'm in business!

first of all, let me once again strike out against the bizarre server maintenance that my hosting provider continues to perform. this time, they enabled the mindless frontpage server extensions, which conveniently broke php and the website along with it. grr. if it wasn't so cheap, i'd actually consider moving...

second, i did have the unusual experience of seeing a high-speed chase involving a minivan last night on the streets of the district. as i was walking along, a minivan passed me going about sixty miles an hour (on a residential steet), slammed on the brakes and pulled a hard right onto a one-way street, tires squealing the whole way. meanwhile, sirens started to blare and soon two police cars rolled by...i tried to point them towards the one-way street but they were going too fast to notice. next, a cop on a bicycle came by and i asked if he was looking for a minivan: he said he was. i told him which direction it had gone and he took off down the one-way street...a few seconds later multiple police cars came flying back down the street towards where the van had gone. the bike cop must have radioed them in. odd to see so many vehicles after a minivan.