June 2, 1997


Well, Sunday WAS a very lazy day.

Today is just as gray and miserable out as yesterday. And I was unpleasantly awoken by the maintenance guy coming into the apartment to fix some things that Sabs had put in a trouble ticket about.

I was still asleep when the guy came into the apartment, I didn't hear him knocking because I was so tired out from this weekend. I spent a few embarrassing minutes getting dressed so I wouldn't be overseeing repairs in my pj's.

The good side to it all is that now our second shower actually works, the A/C unit isn't rattling anymore, and the seal in the toilet has been replaced so that the water doesn't run constantly. In general the apartment isn't making as much noise as usual:)

I got another happy email from the same friend who wrote me good news recently, which is making me VERY happy for her. I'm so excited about her being in the USA , I can't stop thinking about it!:)

As usual, I'm having thought-provoking moments while reading Maggy's mindspace. Some very interesting things have been said, lately.

I'm making a monk's habit right now, for a friend of mine. He wants it to wear at renaissance festivals and I'm hoping he'll like the result. I really enjoy costuming, looking at styles of clothing, a person and then making the two go together. I've also been commissioned for some other garb recently, and I hope that my inspiration will be up to the task!

I've also had some thoughts running around in my head that came from reading Julia's rants. I knew Julia at Smith during my first two years. I lost track of a lot of people when I left for my Junior Year Abroad. Finding mail in my box from Julia was a happy surprise. Finding her web page was interesting, her somewhat biting humor hadn't changed a bit and I found a lot that I agreed with on her pages. I'm still forming my views on web-design. A lot of what she says on her page has to do with the state of the internet today in some shape or form. My own feelings tend to range from disgust at the presence of so many banner ads on homepages and commercial sites, to a continuing sense of "wow" at the wealth of information that is just sitting there for anyone who has the knowhow and the patience to pick up.

I'm of two minds on the subject of web design. When I redesigned my pages, I was stuck between making the pages readable to all, and making them pretty. I tried to compromise by using tables and using a fairly simple margin gif that takes realtively little time to load. I'm going to cut that gif down a bit too to make it even smaller. It doesn't REALLY need to be 10 pixels high it's just easier to look at that way in PaintShopPro. I looked at my site with Lynx the other day, and found to my surprise, that it's not actually painful to look at. The tabled materials are lined up top to bottom, but this merely yields a menu above and text below, and the text menu bars that I started putting in help to make it more navigable. So I was fairly pleased with the result.

I think I should actually bite the bullet and load up Netscape 1.1 on my laptop to see what it does with the front page. The irony is that folks with Lynx won't have any large problems with these pages, and folks with Netscape 2.0 and up and other similar browsers won't either, but I have a feeling that it'll be messy in 1.1. *sigh*. If worst comes to worst, I'll just ditch the tables and go back to just using menu bars. I'm just a sucker for lay out. I like lining things up and coloring them in and giving everything a scheme of some sort.

Anyway, I agree with Julia about not jumping on bandwagons to grab the latest newest flashiest gimmick. A page that is readable and has something in it is much more interesting than yet another collection of cool links that can be found with equal ease on Yahoo or WebCrawler or Lycos or Alta Vista.

Which is why I'm writing this in the first place. Hopefully, one of these days, I'll actually put something really useful up here. I just had an idea for something like that, but I need to go poke around a bit to see if anyone else has done it. If I don't find anything, watch this space for forthcoming tutorials on garb-making.