Patrick Haney's old reboot screenshots suddenly wound up in my feed reader (RSS is such a black art, it seems), which prompted me to check out the CSS Reboot site. it seems that they aren't hosting the event again this year, after last years had so many glitches. The good news, via StyleGala is that Standards Reboot is picking up the slack this year. I signed archGFX up, since i resolved to do it in my 101 in 1001 list. I know i also said i would do the may1reboot thing this year, but that was before i moved my entire portfolio into wordpress. i can't believe that an entirely non-CMS, flash based site is worth the effort.

Also while browsing stylegala, i happened on an old standard joke. The joke has been kicked around and plagiarized/unattributed for years now. (Matt's is stamped 2003, and is the only reference to even include a blockquote). It's a fairly valid analogy, except for the title "if architects had to work like web designers". Other than the mobile home bit, i've heard nearly every single one of those comments coming from clients. The joke is a great example of why designers need to have a thoroughly well rounded education, because they have to counter ridiculous requests with tangible answers every day. It's also an example of how design professions are similar, not different. You would think that designers who get paid 3 times what architects do could manage a little less complaining.

i've accomplished only a few things:

• i finished reading midnight's children
• i posted about architecture (roughly) once a week for a month. since november, not so much.
• i've supplanted my addiction to SG. my subscription ran out in december. i've since managed to peel stickers off of just about everything they were once affixed to. i still have the american apparel clothing, though, which somehow managed to convince someone that i needed their copy of the dvd
• all of my portfolio is currently presented on archGFX. i realized that the remaining project wasn't really portfolio worthy. i have some nicer renderings of a very similarly detailed project from my current office that i'll eventually post.

i am in progress on some of the major stuff, tho.

• **********************
• i'm reading a book on entrepeneurship that makes my brain hurt. the thought of running my own firm is more terrifying than ever. free-lancing does seem more manageable, though.
• i think i've actually done my 1170 units of IDP. i just need to put them all in spreadsheets, and get those pesky 10 units of volunteering done. it's not so difficult for me to volunteer, as for me to find a licensed mentor who's also volunteering.
• the top 50 independent films thing. movies like 'mad max' and 'blood feast' really make me question the authority of the list, though.
• There'll be a mini road trip next weekend.
• UT2K7 is now called UT3, and isn't coming out for PC.

i'm going to need to go through and write better goals for a bunch of items, some of them are straightforward failures, some of them are just life not going in the order i thought it would

Completed:

• have at least 1 photorealistically rendered project, for portfolio purposes
• make a wordpress template that integrates with the rest of archGFX
• finish X-men Legends part I
• find replacement tennants for my current apartment
• move into someplace without roommates (that are not my wife or my pet)
• spend an entire day cuddling
• learn to make pizza, from scratch, without help
• renew my driver’s license (i.e. don’t fail the test)
• move my voter registration to my current address
• make a nice looking ‘completed’ CSS class for this list
• see metropolis

since i'm not working at the same place anymore, i've changed "writing my 1 year review" to "get hired permanently" once that happens, i'll figure out what to change the second year review to. Being unemployed also led to my weight going the wrong direction, but i'm back up over 150. now that i'm eating 3 meals a day again, i can work on getting up to 170 in earnest. The job hunt also got me to re-render an old project from K2, since i didn't have time to model anything new.

In Progress

• make all of my portfolio presentable on my website (6/7)
• buy the following albums: (3 5/10)
• vote in 2006 elections
• make an informed decision about every single candidate on a ballot
• go five years without a speeding ticket/go five years without an accident (Sept. '07)
• change jobs, to one that makes me happier (not counting this complete until it's permanent)
• design a UT2K4 map before UT2K7 is released

because i'm exceptionally lazy, i didn't move my voting registration until 'the grace period', which means i have to vote absentee. which gives me time to look up all the obscure cook county judges (and other offices who don't advertise or get involved in scandals). At the moment, the most difficult thing in progress is the unreal map. It's just a lot of work, I've forgotten most of what i did learn, and i have no idea how soon UT2K7 is coming. but we'll see.

and maybe next time i can actually update on an even hundred and one days.

1. You may remember that I bought a car recently. Whereupon, I went and bought insurance. Geico kindly reminded me that I did, in fact, have both an accident and a speeding ticket in the last 5 years. They did not point out, however, that my license had expired in January. You'd think that would be important to them. Or to Harris Bank, who gave us our loan.

It turns out that fact is only important to airlines. As I found out on my way to San Francisco. An expired license automatically puts you in the "possible terrorist" category. Although on a thursday morning at midway, that happens to be the fast lane. not so much on the way home, what with the detour through customer service to get a different boarding pass, that explicitly says "this guy thinks he can fly with an expired driver's license"

Saturday I went to get my license renewed, which required a written test. It's amazing how many of those questions have no application to the way people actually drive. No wonder the wifest hates learning to drive here. We are all bad drivers. And the best part: when we got home from the test, there was a letter from geico, who finally noticed that my license was expired.

2. Saturday we also got a new lease signed on our current apartment, and a letter from our landlord signed, saying that our current lease will be terminated amicably at the end of the month. Which is good, because our less-than-amicable backup plan is being made harder and harder to document by the evil ventilation department secretary at city hall. Apparently she only takes messages when threatened by other city employees, residents are afforded no such pleasantries. And here I thought getting the place rented was the hard part. The stress never ends.

3. Of course, while the wifest and I were jumping up and down about financial freedom, our two roommates were more worried about having to repaint. I'm reasonably sure that the new tennants will regret not having an intense teal living room once they see it white, but it's their call, unfortunately. So sunday we layed down two coats of kilz, so we wouldn't have to repaint the living room at the end of the month, amid the craziness of moving. After a coat of the cheapest white paint ever, the room has been returned to boring normal

4. The Wifest finally convinced me to get a costco membership. Sure enough, it sucked the soul straight outta me (or maybe it was just the 6/6/06 thing):

seriously, where the hell are my eyes?

UPDATE: some of what I originally posted was rather passive aggressive. I'm sorry, it shouldn't have been posted. I forget that I'm not blogging in a vaccuum anymore.

I love album art. despite david byrne reminding me that it's largely an advertisement for, not a reflection of, the album. So when Windows Media Player 11 grabbed a 'me too!' function from amarok, i had to go check it out. (since i sometimes listen to music with something other than my xbox media center extender.). it's kind of an odd trade off compated to the MCE interface. scrolling is much faster in the media center interface, but the album art loads instantly (versus sequentially as MCE does) in WMP 11.

i managed to scare myself, though. after i installed the beta, i went to check and make sure that the extender still worked. when i got to "My Music", it informed me that my music catalog had gone missing. oh, joy. so i rolled back to the system restore point right before the install. rebooted, and tried again, and got the same error. i opened WMP to see if it had, indeed, been downgraded (which it hadn't), and looked back up at the tv to see that the xbox was now re-cataloging my entire collection. fortunately i was about to leave the house, so the few hours of  downtime didn't matter.

in other news, i took my first baby step on mission101, i borrowed from matt brett's hover tutorial, and made a completed class for my list:

100. 05.27.06
     make a nice looking ‘completed’ CSS class for this list