Life & Research Notes

I had a lot of fun meeting up with three high school friends for dinner tonight. At one point in the evening we all came to the conclusion that, for the most part, we are all doing pretty much what the others would have expected… a doctoral student finishing his PhD and starting a business, a lawyer doing non-profit and pro-bono work, an up and coming green tech journalist, and a designer/engineer nerd working in a startup. None of us were at all sure of our plans back then, and we’ve all gone through our various challenges and adaptations. But for the most part each of our actual trajectories line up relatively close to our previously projected ones. It’s funny to realize this, and surprisingly comforting.

Evidently some new secret stuff is in the works. Looks hot, yet also makes me wistful thinking about all the great stuff I could be learning with those guys if I was still there. For more, see Luis’s post, and screenshots (1, 2, 3) and videos (1, 2) on PLWire.

The 15 minute redesign, in emacs, on live css. Not good practices for production work, but for my own site it’s ok. So for posterity here’s the old one, which was cramped and dark and gross:

And here is the new one, which is not perfect, but is lighter, wider, more legible, and importantly, doesn’t have any more crappy green:

It’s amazing how you can just so badly want to make a change, but it seems so involved and like such a huge project, and it just never happens. Months ago I had a full on freaking rails project for my new blog and portfolio. It had pink and yellow, and was absolute overkill. Now I realize how nice it is just to keep making incremental changes. There’s enough epic stuff to deal with already, and web design doesn’t always need to be one of them.