Oh the young scamps. Jason and EOD play “swap the designs”. Which brings me to my other idea. I’m thinking about putting this current template out for anyone to use once the redesign comes into affect. Should anyone want it of course. I’ll make some kind of .zip file of it all and people can download it, use it for their sites or bugger around with it to their heart’s content. Whether anyone will of course is a completely other matter…
Stayed up until 1am last night (big deal – half an hour later than normal) to watch the MTV Movie Awards on Channel 4. Why can’t the Oscars be like that? It was great fun!
The redesign is proceeding apace, and with it comes all the usual anxieties – that the new design isn’t as good as the last, that it isn’t as clear, that it doesn’t fill the page as well, that it basically just doesn’t have the spark of the last one. Of course I haven’t got the slightest idea whether or not any of that is true or not. How could I? I’ve been staring at it for hours. My latest attempt to acheive something exciting with it involves the introduction of a new colour. Unlike much of my other work, this page at present contains absolutely no orange. This must change immediately…
I’ve been inside all day, on one of the nicest days of the year, and why? Because I’m finally getting some redesigning done – getting some code together which isn’t completely awful. Picture the scene – I’ve got a mock-up in Photoshop of what I want to achieve, I have worked out how I should go about achieving it, I set to work, and gradually (very gradually) it comes together. I’m quite proud of it – I’m using a rather clever table structure (or at least I think I am), when suddenly I decide to check it in Netscape.
Of course the structure is all completely in place, and working perfectly. Except that the cell background, which is fundamental to the design of the page, is suddenly replicated in every cell of the nested tables within it. I slap my head in horror. “Of course”, I say, (scream?) ” I had completely forgotten that Netscape 4.x cannot handle images as cell backgrounds very well. But if I make it a page background, it’s going to make the page slow to download. Damn it! I wonder if anyone has any ideas as to how I can get around this problem without using a background image? Hmmm.”
This story seemed more interesting when I started writing it.
Weblogs (at least those with online diary content) are strange things. They force you to make decisions about which parts of your life are open to everyone and which parts of your life should remain discreetly behind closed doors. Even more so, they force you to decide (at some level) which parts of your life are entertaining enough to be open to everyone.
With a few exceptions (28th birthday, the Yell Awards, Mark and Vance in the UK, Groucho Club), I have hardly been writing about my life at all recently – and when I look back over my archive I can see that this trend started when I last saw Max. [cross referenced for your pleasure: 11 June, 17 June] For a long time after the last disaster, it was almost like excised my personal life completely. I just got on with business. As a direct result of being gutted, I felt I had no inside left to write about…
But over the last couple of weeks it has all been seeping back. The run-up to my birthday was very much one of those times when you look around you and think to yourself – “what have I achieved?”, “why do I bother?”. This is pretty much run of the mill stuff, except that this year I started thinking about questions like – “why am I alone?”. A few years ago I pretty much made peace with being single – it seemed to me that my life was going pretty well without the additional luxury of actually going out with people. After all, if you want fantasy, romance and love you can rent a trashy video. And there’s very little else that a relationship can provide that you can’t find somewhere else.
And yet in the background now, I feel the questions still lurking, unanswered. I don’t really know what’s caused their reappearance – I went to see High Fidelity last weekend, and that compounded the anxieties of my birthday. I had some unromantic, but highly enjoyable … fun. Then I watched Dawson’s Creek with Mella, and watched her invest huge amounts of energy in the burgeoning relationship of Pacey and Joey. We got incredibly drunk on vodka and talked. She put her finger on part of the problem almost immediately – she said that getting older would be fine if it came with all the trappings it is supposed to. The late twenty-something should have a reasonable job with career prospects, a relationship that has lasted a while and should be thinking about things like mortgages and making some kind of long-term committment. To be that age without those things – well it’s like some kind of cruel joke.
Anyway. I’ve decided to let you in on the joke, I think. I think that’s what this posts about – it’s about getting some personal content out there again – picking up my guts from off the floor and putting them onto the web. It may not be entertaining, but it’s as real as you can get. And maybe that’s more important.
It’s a site that has been all around the British media, praised almost without exception for its biting wit and foul mouth. It’s a site that takes a bastion of British life – the Radio Times – and then rips it to shreds, exposing the hypocrisy and pointessness of television in the UK and television in general. It’s a site that probably 9/10s of all British people have already seen, and which only 1% of the world outside the country will even vaguely understand. So why am I mentioning it? Because it’s bloody bloody funny…
So there’s this guy at work called Duncan, and he’s a designer with this large consultancy firm, but the poor love hasn’t had a web site for ages, which I thought was a bit lame really, because if you are a web-designer you really should have something that you can show people, or that demonstrates that you are committed to the medium etc etc. So I come in today, and he’s compiled this interesting interface to a small directory of interesting design sites.
You can always trust the opinions of someone who likes Hunky Dory.
Further to yesterday’s post, there is more about the legal difficulties of mp3.com and napster over at Wired news at the moment. I’m in the middle of discussing it with people over at alt.security.pgp as well at the moment. I don’t think it is necessarily the ideal place to have the discussion, but I needed to know if it was technically possible, and it looked like the best place to start…