fine whine

I didn't post as much this year. Notable things about which I wrote nothing:

• Both of my grandfathers died in December. I still haven't figured out what I want to say about that.
• I failed once again to complete a 50,000 word novel in November. But I came up with a much better idea for next year's.
• Natalya turned 1 year old in October, meaning we could finally officially stop worrying about SIDS. Not that I ever did anyway.
• I left the fashion industry in September. I also read the complete Harry Potter series (for the first time) in under four weeks. These two events are not at all related.
• In August (I think) the guy housesitting for my neighbor across the street passed away in her house, and was not found for a week. I was one of the few people on the street who had ever even met the guy, and I didn't even know his name until he was already gone. In cleaning up her house, my neighbor gave me a nice desk ending the four years I'd used my computer with it and me both on the floor.
• I can't really remember much of anything from July. So ends the monthly portion of this wrap-up.*
• The two hundred or so photos I've posted on flickr aren't even a fraction of the over seven gigabytes of JPGs I've created this year.
• I survived watching 61 movies from India, most of which could be considered "Bollywood". Two I watched without any subtitles at all.
• The entire year passed without me attempting to access the internet with my mobile phone, despite it being capable of doing so.

More ideas may occur to me - I just didn't want to let December pass without any posts at all. Happy new year.

* The only other month-based item of note is in January, wherein I visited Chicago the weekend of B-Fest but was unable to attend it because I was in Illinois for less than a total of 24 hours. Eating dinner in the Signature Room of the John Hancock Tower was superb. Being back at my desk eighteen hours later was not.

For over three years the front page of my website has been relatively unchanged (take a look), and to be honest, it looked more like 2002 than 2004.

Until today. Today I finally switched over to a new design, and completely new underlying programming, that I began working on back in March. I'd intended it to be an April 1st prank (the working title was 417), a past-the-trend Web2.0 redesign, but April 1st came and went and I was nowhere near being able to flip the switch.

Well, now I've flipped it.

It's still not 100% complete - I really wanted to build my own photo gallery, and intend to do so still, but the two boxes of thumbnails on the front page are actually the result of a fair amount of coding, and more than a few tools for fetching the images from Flickr and showing them. A complete list of the tools I used and am using is beyond the scope of this post, but the number of them that I tried and didn't use would be four or five times as long.

I still have a long way to go with bringing all of the old stuff to match the new, but given what I'd done with those pages sometime between 2004 and now it won't really be that big of a deal to update them all together.

One thing I'd really like to highlight, though, is the code directory. Right now there's only one page there, the monkeymaker, but I think that my fellow Columbus residents* may find it to be useful. Launching that has been something I've meant to do for quite some time, but I never got around to writing up that post.

For that matter I'd been meaning to do the rest of these updates back in August when I discovered that my web hosting had changed, breaking almost all of what I'd coded, down to how I'd referenced filenames. I made enough of a nuisance with the hosting company to get some of what I needed fixed (Not bad considering how little money they'll ever make from me), but the rest of the broken stuff I needed to fix by hand.

It's been an interesting challenge - there are a lot of things that just don't work right, but coding around them has been almost fun, and certainly educational.

It's a never ending learning process, though - and if you happen to find something I still need to fix, or have any suggestions, please feel free to contact me. Thanks in advance if you do.

* At least the ones that use both Firefox and the local library with some regularity.

I just published two new posts, though they appear to be from last month. Both are relatively date-specific, and June only had one post so far.

However I'm still a few posts behind, at least as far as ones I'd meant to write are concerned. The one I really want to write pertains to a date in April, but that's a bit too far back to backdate* and anyway, the funny parts don't really have any connection to the date.

The challenge, of course, is to get it published sometime in the next two weeks so July also doesn't have only one post.

* Never mind the fact that I still have a draft from 2004 that I am intending to finish and publish sometime before I completely forget what happened that night.

Trying to write more frequently is difficult when I'd let so much time pass without posting anything. I didn't even post a link to the most recent threadless $10 sale (sorry!), surprisingly.

I've forgotten a few other things lately. Earlier this month*, for the first time this year, I incurred library fines. They raised the rates this year, some doubled, and I redoubled my efforts to get everything turned in on time.

Or at least, I meant to do so.

Considering I check out some 50-60 books, CDs and DVDs a month, I'd say that's pretty good that I went so long without slipping up. And even then, I only owe them forty cents.

Cheap though I may be, I must admit I've gotten a lot of entertainment out of them for forty cents.

* I suppose it's somewhat telling that I can't even remember what day it happened - considering I meant to remember it to write about it that's pretty bad. Good thing it wasn't anything important.

... looks like I forgot to post anything in February.

If you're reading this in a feed reader, you may not notice a difference, but most everybody else should notice that the site has had another face-lift. Ever since unveiling the drab brown scheme I'd meant to rewrite the site 'theme' files to be easier to update and change, but hadn't made much progress until a week or two ago with actually sitting down* and doing it.

Well, I've done enough for now, and I've gotten tired of the brown. The graphic up top there isn't really finished, but I can easily work on that over the next few months until I decide to change everything all over again.

In between, though, I intend to do some more writing. I've finished up another draft, and have two sitting pretty, almost finished, so watch this space. And let me know if you see anything strange or out of place.

You know, other than new posts, that is.

* Or laying down, on the floor, as the case may be, as I still have not yet built (or even begun building) the desk for my computer.