I would have posted yes­ter­day, but for the fact that I’d been screw­ing with DNS stuff (fool­ishly on my www record) yes­ter­day, and it was most unfor­giv­ing come time to change it back. Whilst I’d nor­mally see changes fairly quickly, this time around my ISP’s DNS servers (and pre­sum­ably what­ever ISP I’m using as my sec­ondary) were excru­ci­at­ingly slow to update. So, I haven’t been able to login to my admin panel, hence the lack of posting!

Hmm. Aside from that, of course, other things have been hap­pen­ing. Yes­ter­day was my brother’s 8th birth­day — I would say happy birth­day, but he doesn’t read this, so there we go. :P We went out to Juanita’s, a great Mex­i­can restaru­ant in Kens­ing­ton, and… umm… ate food. As you do.

The rest yes­ter­day was spent on a vari­ety of things, from fran­ti­cally edit­ing CSS and the occa­sional graphic (all visual design work, thank­fully — I’ve decided that I shouldn’t make a habit of pro­gram­ming, as it’s some­thing I reg­u­larly fall flat on my face try­ing!) for an upcom­ing web­site, to read­ing Hen­rik Ibsen’s 1877 play, A Doll’s House.

I’m strug­gling to decide which was more enjoy­able, too… this web­site fea­tures some rather well imple­mented gim­micky ele­ments of design, and it’s immensely sat­is­fy­ing to watch come together, from paper mockup to dig­i­tal real­ity (haha, I’d never noticed the irony in that before — funny how us web peo­ple turn even the con­cept of “real­ity” itself on its head, hey?). At the same time, A Doll’s House was an excel­lent play. I think a com­par­i­son of which is more “enjoy­able” is tru­is­tic, because the play is cer­tainly not enjoy­able, even if it was incred­i­bly worth­while reading.

The web­site is cur­rently chock-full of pro­pri­etry –moz CSS exten­sions, which is part of a new strat­egy I’m try­ing to cut devel­op­ment time. Basi­cally, the thought behind it goes “Josh sucks when work­ing with the GIMP”, so the idea is I use Mozilla con­trols to achieve visu­ally what I want in an elec­tronic form, such that what I wish to achieve is evi­dent on screen already, and then sim­ply go about con­vert­ing that to a sta­tic graph­i­cal form. Of par­tic­u­lar use, at least for what I’d envis­aged for this design, is the Opac­ity prop­erty… it’s not a per­fect rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what I’ll end up with, as it effects the con­tents of the ele­ment it’s applied to (i.e. not JUST the back­ground of an ele­ment), but it’s close enough for all intents and purposes.

Fur­ther into this web­site, I’ll post esti­mates as to just how much time this has saved… it’s some­thing of an intan­gi­ble, but hey, you get that.

Today’s the last day of my hol­i­days! Ahh­hhh! This has hon­estly been one of the shorter hol­i­day peri­ods of my life… ah well. I think I’m going to go and buy some more film and RAM for this com­puter today… I’m sick of see­ing it 30% into swap, and phys­i­cal usage sit­ting at 98%!

P.S. Mandy Moore’s song “Only Hope” is supris­ingly good — I’d writ­ten her off as another pop queen, but I’d cite that song as proof she can sing!

Tags: A Doll's House, DNS, food, Henrik Ibsen, ISP, Mandy Moore, queen, RAM