The Red Sox start the playoffs tomorrow at Fenway against the Angels. I will be rooting for them (as always), but with added urgency since I have the chance to go to Game 2 of the ALCS, when they advance. 🙂
Getting tickets is rather unpleasant, but I managed them somehow.
Guess I’ll have to start planning a trip to Boston.
I moved most of the large items this weekend. I still have a few odds and ends (less than one car-full) left at the house. One more trip, and then one trip to wash the carpets, and I should be fully vacated from the old location, and fully “in” the new. Of course, everything remains in boxes, and finding anything is near impossible (and dangerous if you’ve got to walk over things), but I’m workin’ on it.
I’m mostly just interested in getting back into a regular routine.
On the upside (and on a side-note), the Red Sox beat the A’s tonight, the Yankees lost, and Manny played his first game in the last 24 days. Papi hit a home run… hopefully the Sox are using these last few to secure the division, go for best record in the A.L., and win some “meaningful games” before the playoffs start. Get ready…
My thought for the day is this:
Everyone should keep usability in mind while performing their job. While creating something (especially like a website), some aspects end up being unrelated-graphic design to programmers, implementation details to designers, etc-however usability should be an part of every aspect of the creation process. There are an unending number of uses to design for, the least we can do is succeed for one or two.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Red Sox game all night on my computer. When I saw David Ortiz up in the 9th with a man on, and down by 1 run, I went running into the living room and turned on the TV. He fouled off one pitch, and then, just in time for the arrival of fall, Papi hits a walk-off home run into the newly cooled air.
I’ve been working on the same project for about 4 weeks now. 4 weeks straight. It’s the re-design of certain parts of a big site using CSS. Sounds like nothing, but the constraints of the re-design are that it must function almost exactly like the old. Therein lies the difficulty.
It is surprisingly hard to make the new act like the old. I am pretty good with my CSS, but when you have different parts that can expand to huge sizes, both horizontally and vertically, it is quite the challenge. Also, when certain expections have been set by use of tables, it is hard to design around them. There is only one widely supported html tag which can resize a collection of block-level elements similarly, and that would be a table. And yes, I have had to revert to a few tables (with some crazy CSS trickery on top).
I have found myself longing for Microsoft to catch up to other browsers, specifically regarding support of display: table* attributes, but I’m not really sure why I even looked.
Aside from the technical difficulties, my main problem as of late has been focus. I have focused so long and intensely on this one project, it is beginning to blur together. Today I was making mistakes in my code that I would have never normally made. And I had to think…for a rather long time about a conceptual problem concerning whether a certain piece of code should be put in an include, or in the calling source.
I guess I don’t really know how “long” is “long” to be working on a project. Something I will have to figure out gradually, I assume. I am glad to be able to recognize the problem, as I can now see if I can work on de-bluring my vision of the project. Maybe it simply requires a different perspective. That being said, one approach that I will take before anything else is to get a good long night’s sleep tonight.
