Atomic Playboy

I found a bunch of very nice wallpapers. Purty purty. Solar is my current wallpaper. Screenshot of it in action can be found here.

Splorp has a very nifty layout. Simple and minimalistic, just the way I like it. I’ll probably make something similar once I get my thumb out of my posterior and finish the template code.

Well. Time to go do the dishes. The kitchen is a disaster area. Hard hats required at all times.

I’m busy working on integrating Smarty with MT now. Making progress, but it will be a while before I get the system done. Then I’ll make a brand new template to celebrate the occasion.

This will make it easier to write more powerful templates than MT allows you to do, with far less hassle.

Update: well, I’ve got some basic templating stuff working, but the code isn’t live yet.

Christmas is coming up. Buy me something from this list and I’ll be happy for at least six months.

• Apple iPod. This is easily the best MP3 player on the market. Sure, you can get portable players with more storage for less than the cost of an iPod, but they’re simply not as nice as an iPod. Or as small as an iPod. Or as cute.
• Apple iBook. I really want a good laptop, and I’m very curious about Mac OS X. I can kill two birds with one stone and get an iBook. My current laptop is an old Cyrix 100MHz that’s little more than a glorified SSH terminal that I mostly use to IRC from my bed. It runs Debian Linux in text-mode only.
• Digital camera. It would be great if I could take pictures whenever I felt like it and put them in the gallery.

Uh. Well, that was all that I could think of at the moment. Not exactly cheap toys. But I’ll probably buy the iPod within a few months. I also need to buy a Firewire card, since my motherboard doesn’t have Firewire ports…

Tomorrow I’ll fly home again (if I can get a standby ticket that is, otherwise I’ll be home on Tuesday).

I’m still thinking about templates for the site. I know exactly how to write the code for Smarty, and the code even has the side-effect of allowing different “skins” on the site by calling different templates. Since the content will be generated by MT, I don’t have to bother with that and can contain 100% of the layout in the templates. If I change something in the content templates within MT, I won’t have to poke around in the layout templates to update.

If I feel really creative, I’ll clean up the code and write a guide on how to use it, and post it for download.

Other than that, I’ll have Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility in mind when making the various templates. There’s really not much you have to add when making your site accessible. And I always design with readability in mind anyway, so I don’t have to change my style of writing HTML just to have good accessibility.

I’m home.

Lots of things have changed in the mere six months since I moved away from home. My parents are divorced now. My mother has moved (although not more than 300 meters). My father is dating a new woman I haven’t met yet. My sister has graduated and is engaged with her boyfriend.

The house has changed on a more physical plane as well. New furniture in the TV room. My dad now lives in my old room, and my parents’ old room is now completely empty — even the carpet is gone. Once there’s a new floor and new wallpapers, my sister will use it as her room.

I’ve really missed the dogs. It felt good to play with them again. Though Daffy is getting old and prefers to sit in someones lap and enjoy the view instead.

Me and Dad went and visited my grandparents too. They asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I answered something you never thought you’d say when you were a kid: I wanted soft packages. That’s what I need now that I’ve moved away from home. Socks. Bed sheets. Pillows. That kind of stuff. I also got 1000 SEK from my grandfather. Very nice, my economy is a bit strained at the moment. That covers the cost of the flight here, and back again.

Side note: I’ve upgraded MovableType to 2.51.