Caturday!

.

Pandora with Rollerblades

Having been banished from the bed, Pandora’s new lounging spot of choice is under my TV table, chin resting on the rollerblades that sit there, unused since the previous summer.

The vet got back to me last week, and told me that her urinalysis and culture came back negative for any infection. She had no swelling, no redness, no irritation, or any other indication of a urinary tract infection or other disease — which means Pandora’s recent evacuation displacement issues have been behavioral. Amy and I have realized of late that the beginning of her incontinence episodes coincide, to the day, with my purchase of an Air Wick device for the bathroom — where the litter box is located. It’s entirely possible that the strong odors of the Air Wick scented oil may have thrown off the cat’s normal odor-centric excretory rhythms.

I have discarded the Air Wick. We shall see what happens.

Rohady.jpg

.

Rohady.jpg

Scratched Metro pillar signage from when Rockville was the last stop on the Red Line, with Shady Grove stuck on over it later. Reflected in the pillar, a departing train and the walls of the station.

(Rohady.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

Gife.jpg

.

Gife.jpg

Typo on a window sign at Sawatdee Thai Restaurant, Courthouse Plaza, Arlington, VA.

Choose Gife!

(Gife.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

Archive Index Redo

.

archiveindex.gif I’ve changed the main archive index template from raw, unformatted month and category lists to something cleaner and slightly 2.0-ier. The monthly links are now arranged into neat rows of months grouped by year (all Kottke-style), and the category list is now a weighted “tag cloud” of links (although strictly speaking, I’m not using MT’s “tags” function). Larger words represent a higher number of entries under that category. This was all done with Movable Type templating tags and a bit of PHP — no plugins involved.

Here’s how I did the code for the year-and-month archives, basically building an associative array of URLs and default-format archive titles, exploding each title into a year and month, then looping through and printing the whole array by month, printing a line break and a bold year each time the years roll over:

<?php

$month_array = array();

<MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled type=”Monthly”>

  <MTArchiveList archive_type=”Monthly”>

    $month_array[‘<$MTArchiveTitle$>’] = ‘<$MTArchiveLink$>’;

  </MTArchiveList>

</MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled>

$month_array = array_reverse($month_array);

?>

<div class=”monthlies”>

<MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled type=”Monthly”>

<p>

  <?php

    $counter = 0;

    foreach ($month_array as $title => $link) {

      list($month, $year) = explode(” “, $title);

      if (!$counter) printf(“<b>%s:</b>n”, $year);

      printf(“t<a href=’%s’>%s</a>n”, $link, substr($month, 0, 3));

      if ($month != “December”) {

        $counter++;

      } else {

        $counter = 0;

        print “<br />”;

      }

    }

  ?>

</p>

</MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled>

</div><!– end .monthlies –>

And here’s my code for the weighted category cloud, building an array of categories, each category a nested associative array of info: category label, URL, entry count, and description. (I haven’t entered any category descriptions yet, so that variable doesn’t really come into play, but best to be thorough.) The entry count is then divided by whatever divisor gives you a decent font size when added to the base font size:

<?php

$category_array = array();

<MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled type=”Category”>

<MTTopLevelCategories>

  $category_array[] = array(

    ‘link’ => ‘<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>’,

    ‘description’ => ‘<$MTCategoryDescription encode_php=”q”$>’,

    ‘label’ => ‘<MTCategoryLabel>’,

    ‘count’ => <MTCategoryCount>,

    );

</MTTopLevelCategories>

</MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled>

?>

<div class=”categories”>

<MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled type=”Category”>

  <p>

  <? foreach ($category_array as $cat) {

    extract($cat);

    $fontsize = floor(11 + ($count/15));

    printf(“<a href=’%s’ style=’font-size: %spx’ title=’%s’>%s</a>n”,

      $link, $fontsize, $description, $label);

  } ?>

  </p>

</MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled>

</div><!– end .categories –>

So that’s how I did it. MT and PHP gurus out there, let me know if I’ve gotten anything wrong; I’m pretty sure I’ve done something wrong, unnecessary, or needlessly complicated, and I’m open to simpler code solutions.

Goddess.jpg

.

Goddess.jpg

When i first saw this ‘Goddess’ salad dressing at Trader Joe’s I thought it said ‘Godless.’ I blame Ann Coulter. (It’s great salad dressing, by the way. Tahini!)

(Goddess.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

Career Angst

.

I’ve been a freelancer for over a year now, and at my current in-house job for almost five years, but change is in the air, my resumé is out in the world, and with the change comes the professional angst I face whenever the prospect of progress looms over my career options.

I’ve worn many hats over the last decade of my working life: writer, editor, graphic designer, video editor, web designer, web developer, web executive, video archivist, blogger, freelancer. The diversity of experience opens the field up a bit for me, but forks in the road mean career confusion. “Web designer and developer” is my current niche, with a focus on usability, standards, and designing for content management systems, but web designers of middling skill are a dime a dozen, so competition can be stiff, especially with precocious web-savvy kids pricing well below your margins, as it’s been ever since the web was invented.

It’s caused me to wonder whether I should go back into the much more specialized field of video post-production — but then I remember the long, late nights and weekends, and the tedious playbacks to directors and agency creatives and clients. It was great keeping hours like that as a single 22 year old, but I’m not so sure if that would be best in my upcoming married early 30s. Plus, my experience with digital video editing at Omnipost is almost a decade old at this point, and mostly Media 100-based (not counting the passing acquaintance I had with Final Cut Pro at MICA).

As for my entrepreneurial venture, it certainly hasn’t been a disaster, but it hasn’t been a roaring success, either. Financially, 2006 was the Year of Treading Water, in which I learned and applied the basics of running a business in the District: doing my own taxes, keeping track of income and expenses, negotiating contracts with clients, managing overseas talent — and making just barely enough to break even after taxes. I know it takes time, money, perseverance, and luck to build a successful business, but savings are low and I’m getting married in three months, and what I need now is stability, structure, and a regular in-house paycheck. Still, I can’t help but feel a twinge of regret — and a nagging feeling of failure — at my inability to make my first trillion dollars in freelance web design, and I wonder if I couldn’t have tried to do a few things better.

What field to work in, then? As of now, my career strategy is still what it’s always been when I go job hunting — go with whoever hires me soonest, and as the song goes, “bloom where you’re planted.”

mo_921_.jpg

.

mo_922_.jpg mo_921_.jpg

Future atrium of the Old Patent Office Building, aka The Reynolds Center, with the new canopy mostly in place. Amy and I are wandering around the National Portrait Gallery.

(mo_921_.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)