Wow, it's been a while...

A.) I don't think anyone actually reads this, which makes me sad.

B.) As a direct result of A, I doubt anyone will notice that there's a new post here.

C.) As a direct result of A and B, I doubt anyone noticed that there haven't been new posts since early May.

D.) The actual substance:

BHG: Still Tactician, still kicking. That's something, I guess. Sairi's gonna get a new bee-eff, though.

Oberlin: So CIT asked that I return for work/training on the 21st. That would be cool, and I'd love to move in early, but man....I bought my plane ticket back a month ago. There ain't no way I'd be changing things without a wicked good reason. Luckily, they understood and let me off the hook.

I'm formally declaring myself as a Comp Sci major when I get back in the fall. I suppose that means I'll have to switch advisers to someone out of the Politics department. I was accepted into the CS151 class, which means I'll actually have to buy my books this year. Thanks for letting me mooch, Eliot :P

For the moment, I'm still planning on doing Japanese as a minor, but I've been giving serious thought all summer to exploring mathematics as either a double-major or a minor. Mathematical philosophy == pretty awesome. But, as with all of my grand sweeping decisions, we'll see.

Motif Designs: This is finally taking off. I have 2 solid web contracts running right now. One of them I have a pretty clear path forwards. It's pretty much rebuilding an existing page from the ground up, while clearing away the 85% crap in the code and design. Hopefully, once I'm through with it, it'll be mostly identical in looks, but 10x better in feel. Keep your eyes open for that once I get work done on it. (Ie, I'll post a URI for it...there's no sense in giving you information that will soon be invalid.)

The second contract is a bit muddier. I have an unclear idea of my personal path, an unclear idea of my client's path and and unclear idea of what I can and cannot do with it. I gave him a wireframe yesterday, but feel fairly dissatisfied with it the more I consider the next step. I think I'll be abandoning the layout I presented for a more useful one for the project. I'll be sacrificing prettiness for usability, though, so it's 100% worth it.

The really hard part about the second contract is that I have no information to fill the design with. Typesets are fine and all, but they don't give real context to how the page will flow. Images are the same way; I can use dummy images as placeholders, but they're not indicative of how images will fit/flow within the finished product. I...have some thoughts. We'll see if I implement them.

The frustrating thing for Motif Designs right now is that I am in the midst of learning several new languages for publishing web content. I've been playing with ActionScript, AJAX, XML, XSLT, Ruby on Rails, PHP and JavaScript lately, as well as "mastering" the use of DTDs within my XHTML files. This massive expansion of languages is good...but also leaves me neck deep in unknown languages when I'm trying to churn out pages. So that leaves me either: a.) fumbling and messing around with things I know very little of or b.) sticking with what I do know and making a page that I'll be dissatisfied with later. And that also keeps me stuck in my basic knowledge and does nothing to expand my languages in practical application. It's a tricky water to navigate.

Next time on Nothing Personal: Gun and Small team up to take on the biggest bad guys yet! Video game reviews and disappointment in GPhoria! And stay tuned for PhiloKit and my ramblings on web standards!

Until we meet again

-gun