Fixpert

Hi dudes, it’s been a while. I usually don’t discuss anything related to the news or politics here on this site, but I just had a thought. The war in Iraq is very Web 2.0. All this news is floating around about Al-Zarqawi’s death and the idea that it won’t stop the war, but it will make a difference. The opposition in this war is a distributed network. There’s no head honcho, no “Hitler” in this situation because it’s distributed and in some ways it’s a bottom up approach. I know it’s weird to talk about this stuff, kind of random, but I hadn’t posted in a while, I need to get the ball rolling again.

…not like you needed further confirmation. I had kind of a late night last night working on my Rubik’s Cube. Also, I have my calendar marked with Sunday’s Nintendo DS Lite release.

I guess it’s natural for creative people to look at something the moment they’ve finished it and immediately, they’ll feel it’s outdated. That’s what happened with this site. But I’ve been a pretty busy lady this past year, so finding time to redesign was tough. I had this old design sitting around from this past Winter that I never implemented, but every so often I would look at it and think “hmm, I still like this.” So last night around 10pm, I started plugging the bit of code I had for that design into WordPress, and that’s what you’re looking at right now.

I hadn’t fully coded the whole site, so it’s still a work in progress, but I like it when sites show their redesigns as they happen, glitches and all. It’s in the spirit of this new era of Fixpert being more fun and less focused on looking good for potential employers — since I’m no longer job hunting.

Status report on the redesign:

• Need to fix padding and margin settings on basic elements
• The tabs are clickable, but only the home tab appears active
• Masthead isn’t clickable
• Comments are looking pretty funky
• Need to get rid of pale yellow bg for strong tags, I don’t want to ride 37Signals jock that hard
• Some really old posts have formatting issues
• I won’t be checking it on IE or other crap browsers until the look is nailed down

I’m sure there’s other stuff, but like I said it’s only been a few hours of working at it, so I’m feeling ok about where it is at the moment. There are many new features that I’d like to add to the site too, and I think this new design will easily support them. I’m going to start incorporating a lot more of my personal artwork, like doodles and drawings. I really want this to be a site that is my own, where I can talk about anything, share any materials, and just have fun. Honestly, I think it will make the site more fun and interesting for the readers too.

Yesterday morning, on my way to work a guy driving a minivan turned his car unexpectedly in front of me and caused me to crash my bike into his car. He signaled, but it was like as he started to turn. It’s kind of hard to describe, so I scanned in the little doodle I did of it in my sketchbook:

I was planning on turning right as well, but up ahead it looked like he was just going straight. Then at the last minute he decided to turn. At that point it would have probably been ok and I would have just taken the turn really tight on the inside right next to him, but then he suddenly turned again into the Starbucks right there.

My bike is fine, completely unharmed. I’m 98% fine. I’m just sore and stiff all along my left side, from my shoulder to my ankle. I pretty much crashed my whole left side into his car. I had tried to jam on my brakes, but it was as I was taking the turn and my back end just locked and I sort of fish-tailed and went in sideways. He heard a big crash so he stopped, I was in a pile on the street, still tangled up with my feet in the toe cages. Part of my bike and I were a bit under his car, and then he started to pull forward, so I had to knock on the side of his van so he wouldn’t run over me slowly.

He was really shaken up, nice and apologetic. I was fine and my bike was fine, so I just said it was ok and I rode to work. Five minutes later I was sitting at my desk working on the computer just thinking “geez, I just got hit by a car like 5 minutes ago.”

Hopefully my Dad is not reading this post. He tends to worry so I sometimes don’t tell him this type of stuff, but I don’t think he subscribes to my feed or anything, so I’m probably good.

Sometimes when I imagine someone being really upset, I get an image of tears flying through the cracks between their fingers as they try to hide their face.