This autumn is going to be way too short. I won’t have time for half the things I want to do, and in addition I suspect I will be putting in extra hours at work, because if I don’t I can’t see how we are possibly going to get everything done.
The servers at work were all down for most of the afternoon, so I was trying to think of something I needed to do that doesn’t involve servers. Unfortunately, the only thing I could think of for a long time was playing around with the layout for this site, which is probably not something my boss would consider constructive use of time. As we don’t really work with web-based projects, I can’t even call it training. I feel a makeover is due, though. I kinda like the “open book” look, but it’s not flexible enough. (Pseudo-technical babble to follow, please skip as appropriate:) The main problem with changing it is the nifty div-boxes on the author pages… I’ve got the code from Dhtml Central, and I’ve got a feeling it’s going to take rather more work than I would like to (or have time to) put in to modify it satisfactorily. On the other hand, the “boxes” are fixed size at the moment, which is not really very good, bacause it means I have to compromise between what will take advantage of a big screen with a high resolution and what will still be readable on a tiny one with 640xwhatnot resolution. Maybe I should just copy not.so.soft and add the disclaimer “For optimum viewing, come over to my house and look at these pages on my monitor.”
And colour scheme… Well, I like the blue. But… Mauve? Green? Orangy? I don’t know. Not.so.soft looks nice with the orange, even though that was not a colour I’d expect to like in a layout dominated by text. And the blue I have at the moment is ripped off from teig.org anyway, so maybe I should find “my own colour” (help! I’m beginning to sound like the marketing department of one of my ex-employers when they changed the logo to an undescribable colour. The benefit, they touted, was that since this was a colour no one else was using, the company could “own” the colour. The drawback, as most of us wanted to point out, was that it was not a particularly nice colour, and that maybe there was a reason no one else was using it…)
So. Need to study some colour charts. If I could have a look at web-monkey, it would help. But, as I think I mentioned, all the servers were down. Now, however, I’m at home. Unfortunately, it is now late, as I have been a good girl and done my translation for Plan Norge. Every few months I get some annual reports and some letters from foster children to foster parents and some letters from forster parents to foster children, and I translate the two first from English to Norwegian and the latter from Norwegian to English. It’s useful, I suppose. The latter is by far the most hilarious and also the most difficult. Apparently the majority of those Norwegians who can’t write a simple letter in English, really can’t write one in Norwegian either. So I have to figure out how to translate it into sensible Norwegian before I can ttranslate it into English. Good for a few laughs, I assure you, but I guess it would be rather a breach of confidence, and, more importantly, really, of good etiquette, to quote any of it here – so you’ll have to take my word for it. Alternatively, you can find your lokal branch of Plan and volunteer as a translator and see for yourself.
Anyway, I need to go to bed.
Voice in my head: How am I supposed to live without you (Michael Bolton – now where did he come from all of a sudden?)