Playing around w/MySQL. Changed the pw. Broke bBlog and didn’t realize it. Back now. Playing lots of Fable. Also found this great game - ←Uplink. Lots of fun. Very different, too. Supposedly there’s a couple other games out there along the same lines. Gonna look into those. (I seem to remember a BBS game called Nethack. Not your regular nethack, but a “hacking” game.)
I’m still very fond of the color photos I did a while back, using the old-style method of taking 3 separate photos each with a different color filter, then combining them. I used a b&w quickcam, and combined the images using the GIMP, but the principle is how many of the first color photographs were taken. I didn’t know this at the time, however, because I didn’t take history of photography until the next year. Not that I imagined the idea was original. Because of the “messiness” of my process, the photos have a blurry, bright quality that I especially like.
I hate design. I suppose, though, that I’m not giving design enough credit. I do occasionally enjoy reading about design. A look at this site, although my design is fairly amateurish, betrays at least some level of attention. I do actually have very strong opinions about usability, and UI design is something that interests me a fair bit. Graphic Design, on the other hand, I could care less about, as long as it serves the higher goal of usability. I don’t really want to think about these things - I have my preferences and aesthetic, as do others.
Design isn’t art. Both deal with aesthetics, but neither is about aesthetics. Elements of art can, and often do, inform design. Elements of design can also inform art, although I generally find it creepy when they do.
What this comes down to, though, is after I separate what I think of as bad design from design itself, I mostly hate design because I’m no good at it. I don’t have an innate ability for it, and I don’t like doing it enough to want to try to get better. I feel that focusing on design takes me away from other important things. I know that’s wrong, because the only design I ever spend time on is an interface of some sort (this site is an example, others are, well, not on this site but will hopefully find their way here when they’re ready), and, since they serve something that’s meant in some way to be used, UI design is important.
Ugh. This started out as a fairly coherent thought. I’ve lost track of what the point was, though, so that’s it for now.
Textile seems cool. I can do stuff like emphasize words, though my favorite /italics/ markup doesn’t seem to work. But, say, I want to talk about something that’s copyrighted(c). I can do that. Neat-o. Oh, and
h2. Headers.
Easy. Though doing the html for headers is pretty easy, too. Hmm, a lot of neat stuff to get used to, if I’m gonna go this way. But it seems pretty powerful, easy, and unobtrusive. Thumbs up.
editor’s note: since moved to Markdown Extra
yah. It’s up. Still simple, still same basic color scheme. Lots of cutting stuff out of the default template that came w/←bBlog. Unnecessary divs and all that. I think I like it, so far. Maybe a little massaging of headers & text-properties.
It still looks nice in ←lynx, though.