KODA

Sometimes, life gives you a decision between school, design, and sleep. Right now it feels like it’s a game of “pick two.” Tonight, I choose sleep.

Had another absolutely wonderful Aikido lesson today… and would love to go on and on about how great it was, but tonight I’ll just have to give it a rest.

Alright! The art section of chromakode.com is now officially open!
Took me a few days, but I finally wrangled ZenPhoto into something I feel has both form and function. ZenPhoto turned out very easy and fun to tweak, and I managed to get most of those things I was ranting about earlier into the site design. Oh, and this WordPress integration plugin is totally rad. Yay!

That’s about it. Ugh… I think I spent just about the entire weekend writing papers.

Sorry things have been pretty quiet here for the past day or so… I’ve been busy writing papers and other fun school-related stuff.

Well, I do have one announcement, and that is that I’ve finally found a PHP gallery app that fit my criteria, and that app is the excellent ZenPhoto. It’s just complex enough for my tastes, while being lightweight and having some neat ajaxy admin features. Not much to show yet, though it’s looking very good. I’m busy theming and tweaking things to fit the dark look of chromakode.com, though there are a few buggy things going on in the CSS that I haven’t figured out yet. Here’s a little preview, if you’d like to see what I’m talking about. There’s some old pictures up there for testing, though other than that it’s pretty bare. I’d love to hear any comments on the design, though (bugs aside).

Zzzzmm… very good concert. Sigur Rós were wonderful, Amina were excellent, and there were some really neat tracks in the setlist that I hadn’t heard for a long time. There were also some fun mixups and surprises that made the night special. I got to talk to the lights guy and meet the sound people before the show, which was really nice.

It seemed that Sigur brought back a few of their more gloomy, melancholic songs instead of the extreme happiness in the last concert – though they played those songs with an energy I hadn’t heard before. It was especially funny to hear the first encore, “Dauðalagið,” just after this morning reading john of management’s tour diary:

“when the band played daudalagid at a soundcheck in tokyo they gave up before the end, pondering later why their songs were so bloody long… go figure.”

… the studio version of that track is 13 minutes long. But hey, they made it through it tonight! And it was spectacular.

Tomorrow, to my great anticipation, I will get to see my all-time favorite band live in concert. Ever since listening to some of their music on their website, I’ve been a huge fan of Sigur Rós’s music.

Sigur Rós is (are) an Icelandic band who play original, long, simple and yet very sonically “full” music. They play a mixture of rock instruments, strings, used in a genre that’s pretty much all their own. There are no (to my ear) understandable lyrics, though singer Jonsi’s often high-pitched vocals in Icelandic and “Hopelandic” (a kind of phonetic scat singing unique to the band) have a very meaningful quality, even without the words. Jonsi also often plays his guitar with a bow, adding to the uniqueness of their sound.

Today was busy… filled with all sorts of amazing and tiring things. No time for any writing or philosophizing, so today will have to do with a little journal-style post.

Woke up late today, around 8:45 with a bit of a sore throat… did some more great (tiring) philosophy stuff and it was off to Aikido practice. Today’s practice was… very difficult for some reason. Sometimes I have days where I just “know” that things aren’t going to work smoothly – and as much as I try to stop self-fulfilling prophecy, I just don’t feel as centered as usual. Today was kind of that way.

Announce’d.

It’s looking like a busy week to come, so I may not be writing a lot over the days to come. My intention is to keep up daily postings, though if I get backlogged with homework, things may have to go on hold for a few days while I get back into the loop of things.

…for an attractive PHP gallery app has begun. Polishing up the theme and design for the blog here has gone so well that I think I’m going to call it mostly complete for now. I also took some time today to write up a custom 404 (and other) error handler for chromakode.com. I’m not sure if the devil truly is in the details… it sure is fun to dive into a little detail every now and then.

It’s time to start filling in the other sections of this site. I’ve been hoping to tackle an art gallery next, but it seems that every open source gallery system I check out turns out looking less than my hopes. I don’t know if I’ve becomed spoiled over at deviantART, but the demos and interfaces I’ve seen all seem to be based around the same clunky forum-ish page layout. Thumbnails are painfully small, the user interfaces are cluttered, distracting, and based on ugly web forms. And if you’re looking for a serious gallery layout, the standard white is about the worst color to choose for a background – dark gray and black can bring out so much more color in your images!

Just more updates, more design, more cold. I’ve been knocking it out, though.

Things are getting a little bit busy in this blog design here… though I don’t feel it’s yet busy to the point of being cluttered. More like busy to the point of being mature.

FreeSerif == Beautiful.

I’m pretty jazzed about these fancy half-cut date headings, though if they get too annoying, I’ll have to figure something else out. Next in line is that boring mess of a sidebar on the right… we’ll see how much of it remains tomorrow.