Today

Zen00 said:

Looks awesome so far, may I suggest in the logo at the top you capitalize the first word of each part of "Our Work, your ideas". Currently it gives the idea that the ideas are subservient to you.

Thanks :) I listened to your suggestion, and i must admit it look a bit better now. Thanks

Today I came up for air!

I've been travelling, first to a Moab, Utah picture-taking expedition and then to my niece's wedding in Madrid, and processing the resulting photos - I shoot in raw mode which I then need to process using some software (Adobe Lightroom in my case) to get the jpegs or do anything with them. Why, you may be asking yourself? For the same reason I used to have my own wet darkroom rather than send the film out to the drugstore or photolab . I want me to decide what my final images look like, not some labcoat or canned piece of firmware.

Then I went on Javascript hell mode rewritting my web site's framework and redoing the navigation UI, especially on the photo section (a.k.a. Beauty). When I originally created the site I used too many frames, which make content easy to control but can create a nightmarish navigational labyrinth. The Work section still needs simplification but that'll wait. I was mostly concerned with the image galleries. Overall I went down from three framesets and 12 frames to one frameset and four frames. And I was going to use the standard hover-drop menus but they tend to drive me crazy so I ended up using a popup menu design.

Improbably Structured Layers

The image gallery area used to have one page per gallery section, about 60+. Now there's only one page setup by Javascript. Wonder how slow it is on a frugal PC ...

My problem with focus is that when I get my teeth on a problem I have a hard time letting go. I've actually been at times getting to bed after sunup, which is bad. Getting both IE and Mozilla to look and behave the same for what I wanted to do has been a challenge with raw Javascript, but I've been learning much about the browser environments as well as Javascript and HTML. I still need to catch up on sleep but today I got the framework stable and to my liking.

I now need to redo a lot of the pictures in the Beauty galleries. Most of the ones there now have this Dimarc "invisible" watermark which unfortunately ended up making many if not most look crappy. So now I'm using a visible copyright on the lower left corner which leaves the rest of the image looking like it should. Also many of the jpeg versions were coming out oversaturated / contrasty too. It took me about three hours to regenerate one gallery, the Navajoland 2005 one, and Death Valley I added a couple of weeks ago, so now I have about thirteen to go to redo, plus two additional new galleries to add.

OK, that was probably way more information than you really wanted ...

I just activated my twice-rearmed workstation's RTM with the upgrade key I received in my Newegg pre-order, no mess no fuss, no need to point to any XP / Vista install anywhere or enter additional old keys or anything at all. What a non-event! The Amazon one for my notebook is set to ship the 26th. So now I'm officially a Genuine Microsoft Windows Experiencer ...

Anyway, I came up for air now I'm diving back and it will probably be a week more before I resurface :).

Y'all behave now!