Playing Catch-Up
Catching up on this site, work obligations, chores…you name it. I’ve quite fallen by the wayside lately in terms of responsibilities. I dunno…ever since Christmas, I’ve really been slacking hardcore. Except when it comes to this site. I just spent the last week straight going flat-out on the new design here, but for a change, I’m finally satisfied. Not since this domain went online have I really liked the design I gave it, culminating with Oddball 3.0, which was all about technology with a slapped-on, partially borrowed template acting like a facade. It was pathetic and stupid.
I spent some time over at the CSS Zen Garden, as well as probably far too much time reading other blogs, trying to see what other people are doing out there on the Intarweb, and what they’re accomplishing with the content management system I use. Saw a few things that impressed me and a lot of things that didn’t. I also saw a lot of the same canned templates used everywhere, which, while great for casual users or non-techie type people, is a total no-no for someone like me whose job it is to be a web designer!
So, I went back to Oddball Headquarters and swept the whole template-y goodness of OU 3.0 under the rug. To make a long story short, the result of all that labor is what you see here. I realize that it may be a little fragile—Opera does somewhat weird things to it for virtually no reason that I can see—but on Firefox, Mozilla and IE it looks and acts fine, which is all I really care about at this point. And it all validates as XHTML Strict, so huzzah.
But enough about this joint; there will be a whole post on that later, so best we move on to other things. Since I fragged my lower back moving a table a couple weekends ago, what have I been up to? Redesigning this site, mostly, but I’ve also picked up some new Xbox games which I’ll be talking about before too long, playing Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines which is an awesome game over on the PC platform, listening to my XM radio, and basically just relaxing. I’ve gotten really behind on a good number of things, particularly washing my car and relations with one of my freelance clients, so I’m going to get that stuff back on the straight and narrow this weekend.
The Netflix goodness continues. We’re about to wrap up the Chobits anime series, which has been funny, light-hearted, dramatic and beautiful all along the way. We’ve also started watching the HBO series Six Feet Under, which has also been phenomenal (and much more interesting than The Sopranos, I thought). And after seeing The Chronicles of Riddick, I’m interested in trying out the PC game that goes along with it. Some have said that the game is the sleeper hit of 2004.
Next month is my birthday, and thanks to my parents’ Vacation Club membership, we’re all going to spend the weekend of the 25th at Disney World. It’ll be fun to get back up there, mostly because the food is so damn good. Plus, Orlando is home to the best Thai restaurant I’ve been to this side of the Andaman Sea, and one of Apple’s personal favorite destinations which we always must visit at least once whenever we’re in the vicinity. It’ll probably be jam-packin’ with people, though—Disney World, I mean—because historically the President’s Day week has always been mad crowded. But it’s also been somewhat of a historic tradition for me to spend my birthday there, at least on some past occasions, so that’ll be cool. Hopefully this time I won’t be sick as a dog like that one time in 1992 or whenever it was. Lord, did that suck.
I managed to find the first two CDs of original score for the Chobits series and it’s great stuff. It has some light, bouncy melodies akin to Kimagure Orange Road and few REALLY cute vocal tracks that feature dialog samples from Chii. It’s quite hilarious stuff. I’ve been playing it nonstop for the last couple of days…yeah, I’m like that. I still need to get some more China Dolls. Fortunately I have the XM radio to entertain me at home now. I’ve been liking the dance music channels, actually, as well as the ‘80s station and some of the news/talk stuff.
Gotta stop now—got some work to do. It’s 4:00 and I can’t WAIT to leave today.
Categorized as Life