I got the O'Reilly and Assoc. books "CGI Programming for the WWW" and the "Java in a Nutshell" book on the last day before the price goes up to $20. Plus they had a %20 off deal for ORA books. I was tempted to get some other titles but I went cheapo.

I also got a paper portfolio which will work. The leather one in the size I needed was $80. The one I got will suffice (it's better than my previous painting movement method -- the rollup) and it cost only $7. So I "invested" the half of the rest of the money into books that I need to read and re-read, probably.

I love the little diagrams of how the CGI works with the HTTP daemon to give it the capability to do "dynamic" pages for the web. That's what I've been after all along, is a "growing" website, like a garden, that could be easily added to but as much automation I can dream up could be done for the "content source", which is a cogent human brain, and transcription methods such as voice recognition, body positioning monitoring, or good old-fashioned keyboards. The book describes the interaction of user, web server, and CGI in a way that reminded me of Pong. Remember pong, from the old Atari 2600 days (or the machine later named the 2600, but the one we had pre-dated the numeric moniker!) with the bouncing ball? It's like the genesis of computer generated graphical entertainment! Zork existed on unix networks long before Pong, however.

Now to think that I can step beyond the web server's interaction with the CGIs of the world, and create almost anything I can think of and somehow implement it in Java...it blows the mind. I saw in yesterday's paper how some guys had used Java to netcast baseball games. I was thinking, could we develop sprites quickly enough that represented a visual presence of musicians in a netcast live performance. I mean, so what if the musicians weren't like perfect holograms (yet) in cyberspace, but were like fuzzed out and blurred video effects that they could choreograph with java programmers before and during the performance? And then use Java to present a VRML "stage" with java-and-internet mediated presence of actual musicians playing music somewhere..perhaps in a real live cafe or bar? Maybe "flesh show" patrons could provide netcast commentary...from the "average persons" standpoint...or there could be professional critics on hand to simulcast a review to their parent network, and that could be a java plug-in for our product that they would pay a premium for? Does that make sense?