Andy Laub they call me "The Solution"

All I can say is that someone with extremely questionable taste must have borrowed my computer, I swear:

1. Spin – Lifehouse
2. 100 Years – Five for Fighting
3. Mandy – Barry Manilow
4. Toxic – Britney Spears
5. Trouble – Pink
6. Na-NaNa-Na – Nelly
7. La La – Ashlee Simpson
8. Little Girls – Oingo Boingo
9. Livin La Vida Loca – Antonio Banderas & Eddie Murphy (Shrek 2)
10. Invisible – Clay Aiken

Terrible music aside, I Twittered recently that it would cost me $135 to upgrade my purchased iTunes music to iTunes Plus. In news that’s both depressing and reassuring, that number has since climbed to $153. Imagine my relief when I read today that iTunes is now offering a la carte upgrades, so I can upgrade the stuff I’m actually glad I bought the first time without having to deal with the guilt that would stem from paying yet again for the shitty songs.

As a bonus, I’ve been able to recover a few songs here or there that managed to lose themselves in my computorial transition last year. The ol’ Powerbook was easily confused and ended up occasionally trying to put music on its internal drive instead of the external where it belonged, and that music was lost when I formatted the machine. I was able to recover a good portion of it either from CDs or off of my iPod (SHHH IT WILL BE OUR SECRET) (also this is why I demand an iPod that will hold my entire library), but upgrading filled in a couple of the gaps that still remained.

I launched version 14 of this site, officially, on May 1, 2007. That seems like a really long time ago, especially by my standards. I’m not sure how long I expected it to last back then, but I knew that I was pretty happy with it, especially considering how quickly it all went together.

Comparing the launch version to version 13 before it, it’s not hard to see what I felt was working and what wasn’t. A good portion of the content styles and graphic elements made it to the new site unscathed, while dropping the heavy-handed and overly divided feel of the previous design.

The Grid

Version 14’s major defining element was the grid based entirely on the Flickr photos at the top. Initial versions had nine 75px columns separated by 5px alleys, and in November 2008 I added a tenth. While it’s not a new thing for me to have grids defined by the size of my images (as evident in all of my site designs back when this was purely a photoblog), this was the first time I gave myself more than four columns to play with, and I really enjoyed that flexibility. I think the layout worked even better on pages where the Flickr photos weren’t visible; there was still a strong sense of grid and organization, but without the obvious indication of where it was all coming from.

Content Separation

The other major stylistic decision was the way status/blip/link posts were presented when compared to the regular journal entries. After experimenting with different options I ended up with the meta for the posts in the center column, while short posts would live on the right and full posts on the left. It worked best when it was populated evenly, but there were many times where compulsive Twittering would leave the home page entirely empty on the left column.

Then & Now

So how does this newest version compare to the outgoing iteration? You can see that while I haven’t done much with it yet, the grid concept remains intact.

In terms of visual carryover, though, that’s about it. The overall look of the new site was influenced heavily by those wallpapers I just did and my portfolio. I continue to use Helvetica for the headers, but I’ve moved back to Lucida for the body copy, which harkens all the way back to Version 8.x, as ever since then I’d pretty much used Helvetica for everything.

The dotted lines, which I have dearly loved for a very long time, are hanging on by a thread. Because I’m not using a white on white on white layout this time around, everything is divided by blocks of color and shading, which means borders as a whole just aren’t necessary.

Finally, the Status/Twitter posts have become the foremost bit of information on the new site, with Flickr taking the slot below that and the Journal even further down. This just seemed like the only way it could work, organizationally. I didn’t feel that the Flickr content was deserving of the most prominent spot on the page, and the Journal couldn’t be at the top simply because of length. As-is, most visitors should see all three sections when they visit and be inclined to scroll down. Or everybody reads this in RSS, in which case it doesn’t matter anyway.

All that said, I’m quite happy with this latest version, and I’m most interested to see what it evolves into as time progresses.

I get headaches. Migraines. It’s kind of hard to pin down a frequency; it seems there are blocks of time that are months long where they’re a weekly occurrence, and then some shift in life or climate or Daylight Savings Time will happen and they will leave me alone for awhile.

If I had to guess I’d say that boredom, stress, and stale/gross air are all factors. Every so often, the perfect storm of these elements comes together my eyes start to hurt. Then the nausea sets in, I plod through the rest of the workday and head to bed when I get home, hoping to wake up headache-free the next morning.

I was resigned to this routine for years. None of the pain relievers I tried made much of a difference, to the point where I no longer even bothered with them.

But I haven’t had a debilitating migraine since September, and I blame it on exercise. Maybe that’s not entirely the case; after all, it was also around that time that I started using Target’s version of Excedrin. Taking one pill any time a headache seemed imminent has actually been effective, but I’m not willing to give medicine all the credit.

For me, headaches have always been caused as much by mental factors as physical. As soon as I feel a headache I begin to obsess about it, which only makes it worse because it’s all I can focus on. Even when taking some kind of relief, I’m more than halfway convinced it won’t do any good – and I am often proven right.

But factor exercise into the equation and that’s where the magic happens. Take today for example – I was feeling the beginnings of a pretty wicked headache by the time I got home from work. I popped a couple of Fakecedrin and ran for half an hour, and just like that, it was gone. Yes, I’m sure the pills did their job, but they were enabled by my complete preoccupation with something else (which is why sleeping it off usually worked).

It’s because of this that exercise for me has now become something even more than just fitness – it’s pain relief. People have asked me if I feel different after losing weight; the answer is yes and no. I don’t feel particularly light on my feet or anything like that, but it’s little things like this that have made life so much easier.