On Being Tired

I’m rather tired. Just a deep bone-tired. I get why bears hibernate.

I have dreams, but they stay vague. I try to tease them out. I had this art professor who used to say that your most frustrating days in the studio, where you don’t get anything, turns into the ideas that flourish.

It’s interesting when I go on vacation. When I come and everything’s still there. I still need to call Comcast about my bill. I still need to go to work for my paycheck everyday. I still have a fridge full of vegetables from my grandfather’s garden to turn into food.

But then everything just kind of means shit.

Maybe it’s just the rain talking.

Lessons in Design: Redneck Wedding

My mom’s getting remarried in two weeks. I like her fiance Rob, so that’s all good. The only not good part has been that I’m not a fan of weddings and all the heteronormative activities surrounding them, and I’m my mom’s maiden of honor.

Of course, I’m a good daughter, and my mom may have pulled the “I gave birth to you and supported you through your expensive private liberal arts education where you majored in creative writing and then you stayed so far away in Seattle, don’t you love your mother?” But I don’t remember as this was back in January.

Instead of buying them something for their wedding, I agree to build them a wedding website. Now while, they never managed to provide me with a lot of content for it (and the Big Day is fast approaching), I did manage to bring together what I consider a pretty solid design. And I pulled off some Photoshopping that might have gone a little too far since I removed some of Rob’s childhood scars. Who knew?

The Daiker/McGillivray Wedding Web Site

As with any new web site, I made some inquiries to friends to view the site on their computers and their browsers. (There’s only so many times I can open it in Firefox, IE, and Safari on my Windows XP PC at work and at home.) And everyone’s comments were: OMG, the colors! They burns us!

Belatedly, I realized I should’ve put the disclaimer that those are the wedding colors. Those are what my clients wanted. While, they wouldn’t be the colors I would’ve chosen, they were the requirement. I tried to put as much white space as I could to rest one’s eyes.

Compared to other wedding websites, it’s definitely brighter and less somber/classy. But this is my mom’s second wedding (and she’s had three children), so we’re dropping all the virgin-white subtext, and Rob wants to basically have a big party. Heck, the best man and my brothers, who are giving away my mom, are wearing Wranglers. Yeah, did I mention there’s a cowboy-theme underlying all this and how the reception is going to be in my mom’s new barn?

Design isn’t always what the designer thinks is best, even though we push our ideas, outlines, and platforms. Oh, don’t worry, there are always some client ideas we stop before they get out of control. Sometimes, it’s all about the client, the context, and the product. Especially if I’m building a wedding website for my mom as a gift. I’m just going to bite my tongue and ask her if she likes it. Which she does.

Now if I can get out of e-mailing her back over if she should get hot pink and black cowboy boots or hot pink camouflage-print cowboy boots to wear under her wedding dress.

Delicious: New Look, Same Excellent Functions

Social bookmarking tool Delicious got a makeover. It’s a little louder than I expected, considering Delicious had a very stripped down original interface. But they are owned by Yahoo now.

I love the little gray arrows around the tags. This is my favorite feature. I think it looks great

Is that Arial and Helvetica? I’m a little surprised at that choice. They’re classic, but more print oriented generally.

I’m not sure how I feel about the tag sorting, especially if someone has hundreds of tags.

Bundling tags seems a little easier. However, when you add a tag to a bundle, it jumps back up to the top of the page. Probably one of those designer didn’t catch what the programmer did kinks.

I’m not sure I care a bunch about how it’s sorted for dates. However, it might be helpful for my wishlist account that I used last birthday/Christmas. (Now if I could only figure out how to get the relatives to buy me things off said list instead of giant cat books. I’m not five anymore, Cameron. You weren’t even alive then.) Yep, very helpful now that I’ve gone back and deleted all the clothing stores no longer have.

Besides, the basic function of storing my bookmarks on the web so I can access them from any computer and never fear of losing them and how much I love tags to sort, I do think Delicious provides a great search engine based on user popularity. I always find interesting blog posts or tutorials or nifty little shops when I venture out on the Delicious network. Yahoo may find themselves back as a true competitor in the search business with Delicious.

Other interesting articles on Delicious as a soically relavent search engine: The Search Engine That’s Already Better Than Google at SEOmoz.org and more thoughts on that at Academic Commons.

One of Those Days

I’m having one of those where I feel light-years behind in web development and like I’m not going anywhere. So I wrote a haiku about Donna Noble, who’s by far my favorite companion on Dr. Who. We have similar self-worth issues.

Donna Noble rules/Most efficient companion/Finally someone saw

And I made Tofu and Broccoli Chinese Stir-Fry and have pie. Perhaps I need some sleep too.

I Love You, ToDoist

Organization is one of the most important things for me to keep on top of my job, especially that since June 2007, I am the web team. (Now I have half-a-manager, hopefully a full-time manager soonish.) I’ve tried lots of things to keep on track, from handwritten lists to whiteboards to Excel spreed sheets to Outlook tasks to BaseCamp. But so far, the best I’ve come across is ToDoist.

ToDoist is simple to use and so far the few kinks I’ve run into have been fixed or added. You can even add it to your Gmail or check it on tiny screens of phones. (I don’t use either feature so you’ll have to tell me how it does.) After the initial set-up of mass to-do-ing, I find it easy to update automatically when I get an e-mail or find a new task.

Every day, I open it up and there are the things I need to accomplish. In my Work tasks, I currently have 198 tasks, which is down from 238 in May. I tend not to forget anything on my plate. Even those things someone mentioned months ago and for various reasons, couldn’t be completed until today. It has a neat feature for reoccurring events that allows you to see how many times you’ve gone. It’s easy to move tasks around if I don’t have enough time to finish something I’d planned on working on. And it’s even easier to click the “done” button.

ToDoist is a wonderful tool for keeping track of the never-ending tasks list. As a work application, I find it essential. Though sometimes I wish I could say the same thing about it when it comes to my Personal tasks because I tend to leave it alone once I’m away from work. Maybe I need two accounts…