design – Jeff James

Back to Earth

Just watched the Red Dwarf: Back to Earth miniseries. I didn’t mind so much that it ignored the cliffhanger that ended series eight because I hadn’t watched Red Dwarf in a while and basically forgot everything that happened in the older series.

I did mind, however, the fact that they completely fouled up the sound design for the show. Previous series of Red Dwarf have always had a laugh track, either a live audience or added in after the fact, but this time around they decided to forgo a laugh track to “make it more cinematic”.

Unfortunately, they forgot to put in anything else in its place except for a rare musical cue. Most of the show was airless and quiet, and the so-so comedy fell flat. I’m not saying it would have been hilarious if they’d scored it properly, but I think there’s a certain alchemy to sound design in comedy, and Back to Earth played more like a rough cut that was missing its polish.

Excuse the Dust

Screwing Things Up

Hi folks. As you may have noticed, I’ve been tinkering with the design of my site. I got tired of the fact that my blog had become dominated by links from my Delicious account and embedded videos, so I decided to revamp the structure of things around here. I also felt like freshening things up with a new theme choice. I hope you like it.

Some of the changes were more drastic than others. First off, I deleted all of the posts that were nothing but digests listing my Delicious activity. Although it was nice to have some of those links front-and-center, you can get the same effect by viewing my page on the Delicious website. I decided it was a bit redundant to continually post those links to the front page here. However, they are included in the sidebar in the Lifestream section, along with events from a number of other social websites.

As for the video posts, they’re still here, but I’ve decided to treat them more like a sideblog instead of the major source of content they had become. The most recent video I’ve come across will always be at the top of my sidebar, and any older posts are available on the Watching page.

Part of what this new version of my site means is that the front page may not be updated as often, but when it does get an update, I’m hoping that the posts will be more full of content instead of the shorter posts that have become the norm around here.

Making Web Design Fun Again

You know, back in the day, I thoroughly enjoyed web design and coding. But then along came a job that sucked all of the fun out of the whole process and ruined it completely for me. I don’t work for them anymore – it’s been more than two years now – but whenever I’ve been presented with possibilities of web design since then, whether on my own website or on someone else’s, I have never enjoyed the work, and in fact I’ve often had a hard time getting myself to do it, even when money was involved.

That’s all changed recently, though, thanks to our friend WordPress. For whatever reason, installing WordPress has made it fun again for me to tinker with my website, as you may have noticed if you’ve check this place regularly. This doesn’t change my stance on doing web design work, however… I like that this is fun, and I don’t want to change that, especially since I sit in front of a computer working all day. If I’m going to sit in front of a computer at home, it might as well be fun.

Along those lines, I decided to refresh the unsquare.com main page a little bit. The page has basically been a list of the websites I host for a long time, and it still serves that purpose, but I found a way to make it just a little bit more useful.

If you check there now, it’ll show you the first post of all of the blogs I currently host, which is a good way to check and see how recently everyone has updated their site. You could always download a newsreader, I suppose, but this works, too… I used a free PHP script called SimplePie to pull in the RSS data. It was dead simple to use, and that’s the way I like it.

I also added a few more random “styles” to the main page. This mostly involved digging around through the stock art available on the stock.xchng website. It’s a great website, and I didn’t even dig very deeply – I just browsed through the most downloaded stock pictures to find some interesting ones.

What I gleaned from this is that people like to download pictures of handshakes:

And pictures of people looking professional:

Also good are images that exemplify some sort of abstract business concept about the shrinking world, globalization and connectivity:

I’m not really going for the “business website” look, however, so I didn’t use any of those images on my frontpage. I’ll probably keep adding more and more styles to the frontpage, too… it’s kind of sad that it’s stayed basically unchanged for at least two years, if not longer.

Razza-frazza @#$% Macworld Keynote

Stupid “new iMacs”:http://www.apple.com with stupid Intel processors and stupid “all sales final” employee purchase plan…

…actually, I kid… I am kind of disappointed that they did in fact update the iMacs after all. I was banking on them updating the Mac Mini and probably one of the laptop lines, but I really thought that since the iMac was updated in November that it wouldn’t be updated so soon. Oh well.

My computer is still absolutely awesome and incredibly powerful, and will continue to have the same life that it would always have had. I knew they were going to start introducing Macs with Intel processors sometime this year, and I knew that and went ahead and bought a new computer anyways because I wanted a _new computer_.

I’ve heard it said that buying the first revision of anything is oftentimes a bad idea anyways…

Ah well. Let’s be realistic here. For what I’m going to do with my computer (surf the web, write, listen to music, watch movies, design web pages, maybe edit some video, play with Garageband, etc) I’ve got more than enough iMac to go around. Hell, my old iMac only recently stopped being able to do some of those things.

I’m singin bout the wreck of the Old 97

so i think it’s official that i watch every TV show generally considered “only watched by teenage girls”, including the aformentioned Buffy and a good bit of The OC this week (only three more eps of season one to go!) hell, even someone i know who loves Buffy to death was just like “The OC? You’re watching _The OC_? I thought only teenage girls watched that!”

don’t worry, Doug, et al… i defended your honor. i am, after all, the last one of pretty much everyone i know from back home to get into the show. even though i originally rated it 4 out of 5 on netflix, as the season went on i was forced to give it the full 5 stars. it’s _just that good_.

the second season comes out on dvd next week… i kind of want to buy it, but if i’m going to do that, i’ll have to wait until i’m all paid up on bills and have room to breathe again. on top of that, nip/tuck season two comes out a week later. quandary!

in other news, one of my friends at work used her employee discount to buy me a “mighty mouse”:http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/ and a new keyboard (after Jackson spilled glasses cleaner on my old one *twice*, it didn’t quite work so well anymore…) the mouse takes a little bit of getting used to, but i like it so far, and the keyboard is a definite improvement, now that i can use the right arrow and all.

i probably should have/could have waited on this purchase, however, because it turns out that the utilities deposit that i was expecting to pay sometime next month is actually due this month. moving into my new place has been so ridiculously expensive – i’ll have spent at least $1000 above and beyond rent just to pay off deposits and get myself moved and set up here. after this next month, though, things should settle down and i’ll have cashflow again.

it also helps that i’ve got some freelance web design work i’ll be doing. one job for a friend at work, one for an actual company trying to start a website. the one for my friend at work should be quick and simple. the one for the business will take much more work because they’re asking for something kind of complicated. either way, though, the money i’ll get will help.

i’m _planning_ to cancel netflix after this month, since i spent so much on cable and all… we’ll see how that goes. if i could either convince myself to only rent from netflix or cancel it and rent from vulcan video on wednesday nights (rent one get free every week), i’d have a solution. occasionally doing both, however, is ridiculous.

in other news… i’m not sure who actually reads this site anymore (i know my parents do, and i’m reasonably sure doug still does), but i apparently also get the occasional visitor who stumbles upon the site. i’ve actually removed some of my recent entries because i was starting to get contacted by people who knew the person in question (i’m making a point to not write her name, but i’m referring to the friend of mine that died last month.)

not that i was getting negative responses, mind you, but i didn’t really like having those particular personal reflections coming up so readily in google. i’m generally good about not writing anything particularly personal in here, but every once in a while i need to vent or talk about what is going on, and last month was definitely one of those times.

i’m sort of toying with starting over fresh with a new journal, but we’ll see how that goes. for the moment, though, i’m going to putter around for a while and then go to bed.

can you say “finally”?

after much fiddling about and a general program of procrastination, i have put the final touches on “my portfolio”:http://portfolio.unsquare.com. also, if you notice, i’ve added a link to it on the upper right-hand side of this page, right below that picture of me. now that it’s “live”, it can be spidered all to hell by google so that the random web visitor has a chance of finding it.

i have a few other possible web design projects in the works:

(1) a redesign of the “iota chapter website”:http://www.iotachapter.org. sure, it’s nice enough, but i designed it when i was first getting the hang of css, and i think i can do it better now. i also want to make it so that the actives might actually be able to update it, since i haven’t been given any information to put on there unless i prod them into giving it to me.

(2) i’m a fan of those programs that keep track of your book collection. the best one i’ve found (and it’s free!) is just called “books”:http://books.aetherial.net/. i’m also a fan of “all consuming”:http://allconsuming.net, but it has a bad habit of being slow, or inaccurate, or down, or just plain difficult. i think i’d like to begin working on a php application that replicates the basic function of all consuming, plus some features from books (the reading list currently on my site is only functional at best). this would be the same idea as movable type versus blogger. part of the reason i switched to mt was because i was tired of relying on a site that might go down without warning.

alright, i’m going to go finish watching “farscape season one”:http://www.tvtome.com/Farscape/season1.html. wish me luck.

No Updates

Well, work has been keeping me busy lately, and so I haven’t been able to make a new design for unsquare.com like I would like to. This will have to do for now. Eventually I’ll get the time. Things have been going well, but I haven’t really had too much to talk about. My job is occasionally frustrating, but not too bad. I’ve been enjoying spending time with my girlfriend as much as possible… and, finally, I haven’t been watching my NetFlix movies like I should. So I’m going to do that now.

Oh and by the way, Mark – I started reading Neuromancer today. I’ll let you know how it goes.