Spent the day working at home, getting into some web design for work. As somebody who claims “web designer” on his resume, it’s been an embarrassingly long time since I actually did any web design. I’ll be easing back into it over the next couple of weeks with a small project, which will in turn prepare me for the upcoming total overhaul of our company web site.
That will be one of those bittersweet kind of things, because the current site has won (and continues to win) a lot of praise from our customers, but it really is showing its age. Plus it’s expanded far beyond what it was ever intended to support organizationally, so usability has begun to suffer. A new design is definitely needed, but it’s one of those balancing acts where you have to make sure you don’t screw up what people like about the current site in your haste to replace it with something ostensibly better. That seems to be difficult to do in this industry, as evidenced by all the failures. (“Put it back! I liked it better the way it was before! Rawr, fffft!”)
I found another musical gem on the Internet today. I’m a bit of a soundtrack buff — have been since childhood, without fully realizing it. As a kid in the ’80s, I remember adoring the theme music from Short Circuit. Today I found the “unofficial” Short Circuit soundtrack online and free for download. It’s one of those crazy stories: No official soundtrack was ever released, but the webmaster of that site once met a collector who in turn had met a studio engineer who worked on the film. The engineer apparently had access to a set of backup tapes of the soundtrack, and a few winks and nods later, it became available to the world at large. Now I guess there’s another entry I can check off of the childhood geek wish list.
This Saturday morning my wife and I are starting our “Bradley method” childbirth classes. They’re holding them every weekend at the same place where we’re planning to have our baby. Looks like it’ll be a fairly small class — maybe 7 or 8 couples. I have almost no clue what to expect, honestly, but I’m sure it’ll be good.
Labor Day weekend! I keep forgetting about it. Three days off is a definite good thing. The other thing that’s good is that it’s supposed to rain and the temperatures are finally supposed to dip below 100. It sounds weird to be hoping for a rainy Labor Day, but after the summer we’ve had here in Texas, any kind of rain is like the gift horse you don’t want to look in the mouth. And my grill is under a roof, anyway.
