Aquarionics

Simplicity

So yeah, new year, newish design. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a start. And the new new design is trapped in PSP until I get a new 30 day trial :-D

Simplicity

I like simplicity. It appeals to my sense of design, and the light grey with some of the most delicate shading I could make visible is nothing if not simple. The boxes and curves design is lifted from previous designs, but where there they were gradiented and filled here they are lightly hinted at rather than rigidly defined. The construction marks on the logo I like too :-)

Complexity

It’s a long way from the new design, which is slightly more heavy on the photographic backgrounds than I usually do, and is therefore something of a departure. Changes are good.

Smart

Today I spent a long time in a car, and a slightly shorter time in an actual meeting with actual clients. For this I am wearing a suit, and am reminded – as I am always reminded – that I need a new suit at some point. I don’t wear suits very often, and part of the reason for that is my enjoyment of the reaction of people who haven’t seen it before. I hate with a passion, however, the shiny clompy shoes, because the shiny clompy shoes are clompy – and I don’t like being clompy – and the shiny clompy shoes go clomp-clomp-clomp all the way home until they wear though my socks and make the backs of my ankles bleed. Which, you know, hurts.

Tech

I suspect that, with all the lack-of-updatingness and the cheese-sandwichingness (though currently it’s a bacon sandwich. Mmm, bacon) I’ve lost most of the geeky percentage of my audience. Though the geeky percentage probably didn’t notice the not-updatingness because they all use RSS readers, and the rest all use friends lists. Why do I bother with the designing of actual web pages again?

Anyway.

Current things that I have been mucking around with include “DOM Scripting” (as well I might), which I will get around to mentioning in a bit, Scripting in computer games (Both Civilization 4 and Vampire The Masquerade use Python as their primary game scripting language, which I find interesting, and have on my list of Things To Write An Article About) and Visual Studio Express.

Open Sorcery types, you can switch off now, because I don’t need your next reaction.

So, I have downloaded Visual Studio Express which is what happens when Microsoft miss the point. Amateur coders are mostly nowadays developing in things like Python, Perl, PHP and if they have had their brains fiddled with, GCC and Java. Lots on Linux. This is, indeed, partly because Visual Studio costs TEN MILLION DOLLARS per license.

Actually, it doesn’t, but as a non-professional developer it might as well do, as the high licensing puts something of a boot-strapping problem in front of learning to dev for Win32, or even Win64. So, Visual Studio Express you can download for Free (as in Beer). Well, you can download a demo for free (as in beer), but you do have to register for free (as in, be spammed for eternity) and have a Passport account (as in “submit to the almighty Gates empire”. Much like you have to do for OpenSolaris) (Except different empire, obviously) (Yeash, you guys are pedantic). So yeah, I’m downloading VC++ (Because I want to design a Half life 2 mod about killing lawnchairs) (Incidentally, Valve’s Developer docs are all in a Wiki, isn’t that interesting?) (Yes, too many brackets, Sosumi) and it’s taking an eternity, though not as long as XCode did. I mean, what do you have to put into an IDE to make it 800mb?

Oh, right. OS X. Chrome, naturally.

So yeah, updates as and when. Also about the Mysterious Project Breakfast, assuming I get around to that too.

Sushi

Bedford has a sushi restaurant. I swear the things follow me around. I am, of course, doomed, but I am doomed with expensive raw fish, and that somehow makes it all worth while.

Dead Ken(nedy)

Charles Kennedy, leader of the UK Liberal Democrats Governmental party, has, shortly after some people accused him of not being a good leader, admitted to having a drinking problem. His chances are not looking terribly rosy.

(From The Friday Thing Dead Kennedy Pool):
When Charles finally goes, the nearest prediction will win its predictor a bottle of Talisker 18 Year Old Single Malt Whisky. And the country will win a second opposition party with an actual leader. Everyone’s a winner.

(Thats three times I’ve attempted to spell “Kennedy” as “Khennedy”, which is your fault, Jason)

Tuesday, Ten AM.

Shortly afterwards all the people who said they wouldn’t run against him in a leadership election will, in fact, run against him in a leadership election “In the interests of the party”.

Wednesday, Thirteen Fifteen, Sir Malcolm Rifkind will announce that he’s actually really been a spy for the Liberal Democrats all along, will enter – and win – the leadership election, and then all three major parties will be basically Tory. This will set off a chain of Heath Robinson events which will naturally lead to the collapse of the entire political system across the world, leading to the rise and rule of a little known previously almost silent group called the “Bloggers” who will alternate between demanding that everyone be nice to everyone else and being so emo their hair cuts itself, their first action will demand that every person in the entire universe gets a weblog or other online journal and the resulting influx of new accounts at LiveJournal will mean that Six Apart become the single source of money in the entire world, except for Sun, who they buy servers from. Sun will open source world government, leading to rule by whoever argues most consistently on the mailing list, which will eventually lead to the population of the world being run by the commentators on Slashdot, leading to great leaps forward in technological research, the population of Space, a new version of Doom, and a world famine as no money is spent on any food that doesn’t go into either kool aid or cookies. We all die, and it’s all Charlie’s fault for telling us about his drinking problem.

Selfish bastard.