interim site design

This design will stay for a while. I have a creative block. Or is that an excuse for a lack of talent? Anyway I am just not sure what kind of design I want. At the moment Im just toying with photoshop and trying to resist the temptatin to create some huge graphic monster of a site. I am torn between the desire to produce a pure HTML site and one that is a giant animated GIF.

Its true. I have too much time on my hands.

uptime

12:09AM up 18 days, 12:14, 1 user, load averages: 1.87, 1.64, 1.42
I am now becoming slightly obsessed with not rebooting my laptop. 18 days uptime is a personal best. I have had a couple of very close calls. At one point it got very confused and displayed what it called a "login window", which it wasn't, or at least it didnt look like one. But weird stuff was going on so I kinda hid the window in the corner of the screen, ignored It and tried to continue working. Eventually I decided to kill the process, which sent the whole thing crazy for 5 minutes. The reason I mention this is that firstly my obsession was such that I was willing to wait 5 mins in the hope it would sort it self out (it could have taken 20, I would have still waited), and secondly the fact that OSX did sort it self out.

It is worth noting that I am not your average user. I have a dark and dangerous compulsion to install every piece of beta software and dubious shareware that comes my way. I am sure that under normal use OSX wouldn’t have any issues. Although users of MS Office vX are having problems. Funny that.

Mode switching

There should be public information available warning against blogging or posting to a BBS whilst under the influence of Alcohol. I need to develop a "Drunk Mode Button" for sites I visit. Something that stops or delays any posts being made to any BBS or similar until you are sober again. Or perhaps a large "Drunk Nonsense" warning could be posted along with the potentially embarrassing or offensive drivel.

Friends don’t let other friends post drunk!

site update.

logo mania

Now that I've bellied up to the Genius Bar down at the local Photoshop tutorial web site, I am ready to create some serious pixel mayhem.
The new banner thing at the top of the page just doesn't fit in, so me thinks a complete redesign is in order! Not that there is much of a design at the moment, but I have always been a minimalist kinda guy.
Some credit for my new found skills must go to the Photoshop god that is Dan, who helped me work out a few things.

Time for bed now I reckon.

_blank or _top — A matter of etiquette?!

My site now uses frames. Having shunned frames for a while, I had forgotten to add the target name to my links. No big, I'll just add it in. But the real issue is this: Do I now have links open in an entirely new window or just into the same window? O'Reilly's "Web Design in a Nutshell" has this to say about the _blank target name "....it launches a new window, potentially leaving the user with a mess of open windows". Wise words I think, but I feel that perhaps they should have inserted the word idiot before the word user. So bearing that in mind I think I shall use the _blank attribute. To hell with all those idiot users who cannot, or will not, close windows! ;-)

Sheesh! I have too much time on my hands....

more logo nonsense

Having to decided to brush up on my Photoshop skills, so that I can make one of those swanky ultra over designed logo things that people with too much time on there hands make, I decided to click on over to the excellent Team Photoshop site.
This result is displayed above in all its bevelled glory. Now this is not what I wanted, but some of the tutorials seem very tricky to follow. I think maybe I have the latest and greatest version of Photoshop and plugins and some of these tutorials refer to older versions or, shudder, the Windows version. Here is a link to the effect I really wanted, and I'm buggered if I can get mine to look as good:Making a metallic sphere with text under glass

Ho-hum. Hopefully if I slave away all night over a hot laptop I will have something.

banner logo thing

I have decided I dont like it. Time for another change.

uptime

11:23PM up 16 days, 11:29, 1 user, load averages: 1.46, 1.38, 1.30

OSX is sooo cool. I am now fully converted. Praise be to Jobs.

digital anime girl

#!/usr/bin/girl
The weird thing is this person seems to be making a living out of producing a huge amount of blog-style sites all about her and her friends.

News & Stufff

Despite various promises to send news and stuff to my varied selection of friends, I have not done this. Its not because I don’t want to, I just seem to have a mental block about it.
So if you are reading this and wondering why you haven received a mail from me, now you know why. So sorry about that and a crimbo news email will be on its way soon. I promise.

Sun-Do

I have decided to add to the Hapkido training with some Sun-Do.
They compliment each other. Some parts of Sun-Do could be likened to Yoga, but Sun-Do has many more facets.
The plan at the moment is to be doing Hapkido three times a week and Sun-Do once. I reckon that should be enough for the moment. :-)

lard

It has been pointed out to me, by my good buddy L@, how lardy I look in the Dunk pictures.
I think maybe I will give up on the photo gallery, or at least until I have photos in which it doesn't make my neck look bigger than my head.
The whole pictures thing should get better once I have a digital camera. Which should be soon. (it wont make me thinner just easier to post fat photos ;-) I may have the option of a used one, or if not I have decided to get a new one. 35mm film or APS is so dead. I fully expect smaller format film to be a niche product very soon. Not that digital photography is new or anything, but I reckon it has now reached a good price/performance levels.

Site update.

Hapkido

I should drag my self down to Hapkido in the morning. The last class I went to completely tore my muscles down and left me aching for days. Its taken the best part of week to recover. No pain no gain I suppose.

Site Considerations

I'm not sure if I like the new site design. It still needs some work, its not really finished. However I think it looks a bit dated, so I dont know if I will continue with it.
But then I only get about two hits a day so its not like anyone notices. Except me, I guess, and I know I will never be happy with it. So I may as well not worry about it. :-)

EuroStile

The site also looks better if you have the EuroStile font installed. Which I assume most people dont. I wish that new fangled font embedding stuff worked.

I'd like to be able to say that this site is best viewed with OmniWeb but it is not. The sad truth truth is it looks best in IE5 or later.
In OmniWeb the frames render with borders on them. Which doesnt look good.

new site uploaded.