After a couple friends decided to redo their own websites, I took a nice long look at princessleia.com and decided to take another stab at redesigning it. I pretty much scraped my entire old design. Since the site started out as a php nuke site (late 2001 as princessleia2.com)) the design kept being a morphed version of that three column layout. As I added more content I just added another things to my increasingly massive “main menu.” There really was no way of shuffling that main menu to a usable state. The last time I tackled this redesign project I thought about creating an extra page for each subsection, but then got stuck on how to design that subsection. I eventually dropped that idea and redid the design, which looked pretty cool but I had once again fallen into the “too dark” trap! This time I think I did much better. Implemented the sub-page menus in a nice way. Dare I say I’m happy with this new design? Well I’ll say it fits my needs at the moment, and I like it much better than the old design! You can actually find stuff now %)
While I was finishing up some parts of my site before making it live this morning the phone rang. We’re on a no-call list, and our relatives don’t call much (certainly not during the day), so I assumed it was for “Linda” or “Frank” I was right, apparently they have an overdue video at Hollywood Video. As if Verizon didn’t give me enough to complain about, it seems we got someone’s old phone number.
I hate phones. But Michael did get our static problems fixed! The wiring for the phones in this house is pretty old, so with DSL using the phoneline, even with a filter, the static was sometimes so bad that you couldn’t talk on the phone. Once I even quit IRC so that I could call up the vet to make an appointment for Caligula without IRC traffic cluttering up my conversation. So Michael spent a bit of time going through some of the phone wiring in the house, removing extra bits that we didn’t need. Then on monday we recieved our new cordless phone that we ordered after seeing it on spoofee. This new phone sounds much nicer than the old cheap corded phone we picked up for a couple bucks at Target after our old one died. And this new one has an answering machine, which is nice since my family gets very annoyed by my lack of one since I’m “never around.”
Caligula went to the vet last night. It was a pre-surgical exam since he’ll be six months old on sunday and needs to be “fixed.” We went to the Limerick Animal Hospital and the vet was wonderful. She was pretty excited to see a Mau, since she is so used to dealing with regular tabbies all the time. She was very pleased with his health and said that we could make an appointment as soon as we’d like. So on friday morning Caligula goes to the vet for surgery. Poor guy, he gets extra treats and snuggles this week.
I was sitting in #Support on xelium the other day, and one of the people I know there asked me about linux (it’s actually just IRC support, but it was more of a friendly request). I started talking about the different distros and after a few minutes he said “Ok, now in english?” Ack! I was always quite good at switching from “advanced” to “medium” to “newbie” user knowledge in my brain when explaining linux stuff, but this time my brain got stuck on medium. That’s the second time it’s happened recently. I still don’t have much trouble switching to “newbie” if I stop for a moment and actually THINK about who I’m talking to. But the furth
er away I get from my Windows using past, the more difficult I’m finding to find parallels between things in linux and windows to help me explain things.
It’s hot out, I’m going to turn up the a/c and chill with Caligula for a bit. *wanders off*