Archive for October, 2003

Let the games begin

Monday, October 20th, 2003

It’s done! I’ve finally finished (to some degree of completion, however minimal that might be) the portfolio section of my site. It leaves out a number of my applications from work and this blog, but I think it’s a reasonable reflection of my work over the past several years.

Looking over the entries, I have to say: I use a lot of blue. And by a lot, I mean a LOT. If you look through the Employee section of the portfolio, fully three-quarters of the sites are primarily blue. I could improve this ratio a bit by including other sites (I’ve got a green one, a golden one, and a red one currently in production at Nextel), but I’m reluctant to do so given that 1) I’ve already posted eight sites, and 2) the sites that I left off are either too similar to ones already posted or are too minimalist to show up very well on the portfolio.

I guess that means I’ll have to make a concerted effort to work on non-blue sites in the near term - which also means that I won’t be adding this blog to the list for a little while.

Even though I love that little Buddha.

Migraines

Sunday, October 19th, 2003

Today’s been less than stellar from a pain point of view - out til 2 this morning celebrating a friend’s birthday, woke up at 8 with a migraine, took pills, suffered til 10 and went back to sleep.

Woke up at 12:30, still with pain, took pill, ran errands, and only now am I starting to feel better. Hopefully the improvement will continue; Lacie and I are having dinner with friends tonight, and it’d suck to be pissy during that.

Now, to work!

I never noticed…

Saturday, October 18th, 2003

So I’m sitting here working on an entry for the ReUseit design contest, and I’m looking closely at the original to see if there are any hints of inspriation to be found there. Imagine my surprise at my sudden realization that there’s no real navigation there!

I mean, think about it - most sites have some sort of global navigation mechanism that persists across the site. Nielsen’s site doesn’t - the front page is just a portal, much like Yahoo-of-old. I’m wracking my brain, but I can’t think of another high-profile site that does that… Strange, very strange.

Interesting take on the Pledge case…

Friday, October 17th, 2003

Lately, the big news about the Supreme Court has been their acceptance of the Pledge of Allegiance case - whether the inclusion of ‘under God’ in the pledge is a violation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.

I’m not entirely sure where I stand on this; I’d certainly prefer the ‘under God’ be stricken from the Pledge, but I’m not rabid about it (and in fact, a similar situation has arisen in the planning for mine and Lacie’s wedding). Because of this ambivalence (or apathy?), I haven’t been paying too much attention to the arguments on each side. This article from the Post, however, caught my eye: “What Atheists Want“. It presents an interesting take on the situation - pro-atheist but anti-lawsuit - that I think is very close to what I’d hold if I were spent more time thinking on this…

UPDATE: The author of this piece - Chris Mooney - also participated in a Live Online chat on the Post’s website.

SECOND UPDATE: This is what I get for posting at first blush, I guess. Mooney also has a website with a blog.

Bitten in the @#$

Thursday, October 16th, 2003

So I’m at work today dealing with a user’s issue, and I discover a whole can of worms that I had never noticed with one of the systems I’ve built. Turns out that at some point within the last three months, some number of users’ records were corrupted.

No big deal, right? I just write a script that goes in and fixes everything.

Or at least, that’s what I thought. Turns out that the old workaround for a separate issue (resolved a month ago) forced people to enter user records INCORRECTLY, so between the record-corruption and the originally-incorrect data, it’s nigh-impossible to figure out what the RIGHT information is for any particular user.

Sigh. Chalk another one up in the “fix all known issues ASAP” column.