mekosh.org

I completely missed the Spring CSS Reboot and I wasn’t really interested in redesigning this site as the design was only three months old at the time. However, I do think that the design could use a realignment for the summer. Mostly, I just tweaked the banner and brightened up the page with some new colors, but I have a few more things that I’ll be adjusting over the next two weeks.

In addition to new colors, I’d also like to reorganize the archives page, make the media directory page somewhat useful, update the about section, and bring the movie lists into the site template. A bit too ambitious, perhaps, but definitely feasible. Comment and let me know if there are any other features/changes you’d like to see here. Thanks!

I haven’t written anything here in more than a month, but I’m still alive. I’ve been making subtle updates to the site and I have dozens of things that I want to write—or started writing—but I have little time to complete those thoughts. More on that later.

On Tuesday, Annie and I went to see the Cleveland Indians play the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards in a night game. Our seats were excellent, the weather was fantastic, and the tickets and parking didn’t cost us a cent (Annie’s boss provided the tickets). It’s always exciting for me when I emerge from the tunnel under the stands and the whole ballpark is visible; I’m not sure if it’s the bright sheen of the grass or the sheer expanse of the stadium’s interior or something purely psychological from my childhood, but the feeling is always the same.

The game was special for Annie too, as it was her first time at a professional baseball stadium. And despite the terrifying re-appearance of the Orioles Bird, she enjoyed the game more than she had anticipated. Neither of us had any emotional stake on the outcome of the game, but it would have been a little nicer if the Indians hadn’t crushed the Orioles 15-1. In any case, I uploaded some photos of the game that turned out nicely.

On Sunday, Annie and I went to the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. Since we both had the day off and the weather was absolutely amazing, we had to do something outdoors. The zoo wasn’t too crowded—unlike when Annie and Veronica went for Dollar Days—so I was able to take photos relatively unobstructed. In the spirit of the Maryland Zoo’s 130th anniversary, I retouched a photo I took to accompany this post. Just because.

My landlord is selling my apartment building, so I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be living at my current location. However, I found out the other day that the new owner plans to continue renting the apartment to Kevin and I for the same amount of rent! In celebration, I finally uploaded some pictures of the apartment—exterior only, the inside needs spring cleaning—that I took in early November.

I also have a few design jobs going in addition to a full-time job that I’m working to pay the rent and other bills. So I’ve been busy; made obvious by my lack of posts. But I’m finally getting some good design work and decent income so I’m relatively happy. I could use a better full-time job, but I also could do a lot worse.

FYI: I briefly considered titling this post “!Homeless” but perished the thought.

Why is it that so many companies make it so difficult to pay them? I think part of the problem is the rigitity of major corporations’ financial departments, who only seem to know what to do when a payment comes in on time, paid in full. But life doesn’t work that way all the time. If a company bends over backwards to accomodate a wide range of payment methods so its customers don’t have to, companies would probably have less need for debt collectors. Current guilty parties: BG&E and Geisinger.

Last Friday, Annie and I watched Casablanca because it was available for free from Comcast OnDemand (as is Citizen Kane, which we’ll be watching soon). It’s one of those movies that everyone has seen or wants to see—you know, a Classic—so I always feel a sense of anticipation that what I’m about to see has been overrated. I’m cynical like that.

Casablanca pleasantly surprised me. Yes, there’s some archaic dialog that doesn’t sound “normal” to the 21st Century, American ear, but the actors’ tension and apprehension is palpable in an unspoken way. In particular, Humphrey Bogart plays Rick Blaine as an icy cool “cynic,” unnerved through the tensest situations, but there’s something subtle in his performance that belies his cold exterior.

While some declare Casablanca to be the most romantic film of all time—and I can see clearly why they would—I didn’t see the movie as especially romantic. There are grand romantic gestures, but the characters also are very cruel to each other when necessary. Regardless of whether you’ll think it’s romantic, it’s definitely a film worth playing again (Sam).

For the past month, Fox has been airing commercials for the fifth season of 24 promising that everything will change in the first ten minutes. They were definitely telling the truth as I couldn’t believe that they were willing to sacrifice a few major characters.

The first four hours of the new day have been amazingly good. Jack has always been a bit of a rogue agent, but this season he’s outside CTU (at least for the moment). It’s always fun to see Bauer do his own thing, barely holding a few fraying threads to keep the world turning. And while the show has always had a rabid fan base of those in the know, it’s nice to see that the show is finally getting some much-deserved recognition for its weekly brilliance.

Oh. If Fox ever tries to let a football game run past the start time of 24 without warning me immediately that they won’t just start 24 ten minutes late to make up time, someone will pay. They will pay dearly. End rant.

Related Entries:

• Jack Bauer Evacuates Chi-Chi’s on 24
• 24 Season Three will Rock
• Another Season of 24

The new version of Mekosh.org is now officially live! I’ve taken to calling this site design the Dune Grass edition in deference to the Dune Grass tool I used in Photoshop to make the banner image. Dune Grass has been in the works for about two months, but as with all things on this site, it’s still a work in progress.

I think this new design is representative of my evolving sense of design goals. More often, I’m finding myself carefully measuring and planning my designs on paper and in Photoshop rather than just building them immediately in XHTML and CSS. I’m much more willing to design for aesthetics when I’m not worrying constantly about how to make it work in CSS; the worry that something won’t translate to XHTML never disappears, but it’s much less pronounced when I’m in Photoshop.

Enough with the theoretical. Dune Grass is the second major (custom) design for Mekosh.org. My first design was designed for WordPress 1.2 during the winter of 2005 and featured a snow theme that I liked, but never finished. Once I upgraded to WordPress 1.5, I was running—more or less—a default installation for the better part of a year. That’s all changing.

I think I’m finally starting to embrace this site as something permanent. For a while (or forever) I was changing domain names and hosts on a semiannual basis. Mekosh.org feels different. It’s a nice and short domain name that seems like an extension of my real life and the center of my life on the web.

Let me know what you think about the design, good or bad. Judge it on the home page, as the other pages are still works in progress.

I watched Crash again last night. I’d been meaning to see it since it came out and Annie and I rented it last Saturday. The film—as the title suggests—is about crashes: in one sense of the word, it is a movie about car crashes. In the opening scene, Don Cheadle’s character remarks that in Los Angeles (a city that boomed after the invention of the automobile) people lack the close physical proximity that citizens in the world’s other large cities take for granted. That in order to feel something beyond a world of steel and glass, people crash into each other.

More importantly, Crash is about human collisions: the internal crashes of anger and fear and love inside each of us, and the external conflicts of races and cultures. The film expertly weaves several different subplots that continually draw in characters from other story arcs. I loved the way the movie surprised me when individuals from different worlds within one city were confronted with the unexpected. My favorite parts of the movie focused on the Hispanic locksmith and the Iranian (I believe) shopkeeper. When those two worlds meet, it’s just gut-wrenching.

The treatment of racial tension in Crash has merited a lot of discussion; some seem to think the movie’s characters were unrealistically racist while others see the racism in the film as an unblinking look at the cruel way people treat those they fear, justified or not. What do I think? Sadly, I think the movie gets the ugly, racist undertones in America right. However, in the film, the characters are often more vocally racist than most people act in real life.

As a final note, Crash does a great job of providing reasons for actions and events in the movie. By the time the final credits roll, all the T’s are crossed in the plot, even if life doesn’t always work out neatly.