yjblog

Hooray!

Gah! I really need to stop leaving my car key in the laundry.

Update, a day later: So far so good — the key seems to be working fine for now, but then it worked fine for a couple of weeks the last time too. After that, it decided to devour batteries at a rate of one per week before I got it replaced…

Almost two and a half months ago, my little programming group took on the project of redesigning the website for my workplace, as well as designing some kind of content management system that would allow easy updating by staff and corporate communications. (The photo above will be used in the new header.)

The current system requires teachers to design their pages from the ground up using a proprietary web CMS, and since most teachers aren’t designers (nor are the corp comms people), we’ve ended up with an embarrassing mess of fonts, colours and invalid markup. I’ll spare you the link to the school website, but it’s easily googleable.

It’s been a long and frustrating process, and we’ve had to deal with some pretty ridiculous client requests (”could you make the front page search box search the entire Internet instead of just the school website?”), but the end is in sight, and at least I learned something tremendously valuable (apart from the rather cool mootools library) about not being both client and designer*.

I also learned that I actually enjoyed this long and frustrating process infinitely more than my actual work… so we’ll see about what happens when this year’s over and they try to transfer me to an imaginably even more boring line of work.

Speaking of web standards, I just noticed today that the new MOE website is actually XHTML-Strict compliant and actually looks very clean. I hope it sets a good example for the rest of our government’s online web-of-crap (even IDA uses table layouts).

*I nearly said server.

The boarding apartment I’m staying in has a curious design at the front door — a 5 x 4 grid of rack space, apparently for people with a shitload of shoes. I decided to put up a little shrine to my favourite company there.

From left: Windows Vista (oops), iPod nano, Mac OS X Leopard, iBottle, iPod dock, iPod power connector, iPod touch, iPhone, Nike+ iPod kit, iPod classic. Some boxes stolen.

Missing: PowerBook and MacBook Pro boxes (too large, rather silly to bring them over from home), Mac OS X Tiger (also at home).

RI students bring new hues to a charity centre

I’m glad the employer / alma mater managed to pull this off, but damn, that shirt is ugly. Also, it’s a ripoff of the Sandman costume.

A photo, to loosen the rigidity of all these text posts.

Saw this while in Korea — a TV channel seemingly* entirely dedicated to displaying the output of an oscilloscope. Scintillating.

* My sampling frequency was once every 8 hours over a 12-hour time frame, so fine, I might be mistaken.

See you in five years and two months (or so).

Kirk’s scanned photo of the draw group in our Wacky Walk costumes, which he just sent to us today. Nearly two years late, but what a great photo (also because I’m not in it).