This Week in Review

You know, bloggin only once a week, although freeing in some ways, is frustrating in others. Throughout the week I’ll come up with a bunch of things I’ll want to blog, then come Friday, I can’t remember many of them. I’m gonna have to start writing these things down.

Jenn wrote about my visit, and Amber did as well. I would tell you my perspective, but they have done such a good job, there is little for me to tell. I do have several photo’s I want to post when I get home, so later on this evening look for those here.

You may have noticed a couple changes of late, and also some outages on certain pages. My apologies to all if you did. I’m changing the way I do my photo section. You now see a ‘Daily Photo’ on the side bar. I will be adding a new photo everyday from now on, excepting perhaps Sunday. The main photo page will turn into a photoblog of sorts, and eventually I will be posting more information on each photo like where it was taken, f/stop, shutter speed, film speed, iso rating, and so on. Hopefully sometime in July I will be launching a commercial photo site where you can buy selected photo’s from walljm.com.

I finally launched the redesign of A Blog Apart. With a new articles section, a cleaner simpler layout, and five new authors, I hope ABA will be more enjoyable. I’m still working on small usability fixes and such so forgive the rather rough appearance.

Its Spring. It is of some fascination to me how the seasons affect my attitudes. During the Autumn months my spirit becomes very soft and reflective. I’m prone to fanciful flights of poetic meanderings, deep gray moods and bouts of cathartic melancholy. I so love the Autumn. Winter is restive, a time I don’t particularly enjoy. Its almost always too long. Spring though… Spring is a time for doing. During the Autumn I feel like reflection, a pastime I very much enjoy, but in the Spring I feel the need to produce and accomplish. Poetry doesn’t come easy in the Spring. Mostly because my attitude is more critical in the Spring and much of what I write is either too sappy or to mechanical.

Work has been a lot of fun lately. My real purpose there is to do ‘Data Mining’, which is terribly boring. I’ve spent the last couple months researching and experimenting with web analytic solutions. But it seems as though I came at just the right time to catch a wave of change. With just a few well placed comments and suggestions, a revolution of Web Standards and modern web authoring techniques is sweeping over the landscape where I work. And for some reason, they all think I’m an expert or something. *chuckle* I haven’t had the heart to tell them different. So in the middle of the boring web analytic research, I get to talk about CSS2 and XHTML, the importance of keeping your data separate from your presentation, and the importance of centralizing the maintenance of common content areas. w00t!

In light of how much I’ve wanted to blog these past couple weeks, I may start posting something on Tuesday’s as well. We shall see. One benefit from the decreased posting is that huge comment thread going on just below this post. Sheesh. You would think a little poem would cause so much chatter. *chuckle* Oh well… See you next Tuesday.