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Life is a redesign

While I was in here typing and uploading and reloading, the sun came up. Outside, it’s overcast, and chilly for the first time this year. Everything looks a little worn and sad, but the cold is refeshing.

A little more than five years ago, I was walking with a friend down a road in outside of Weil-im-Schönbuch. It was a little hot, the way southern Germany gets in summer.

I’d just graduated high school a little less than a month before, and was mostly enjoying the freedom of being away from home for the first time and with nothing to do. I’d been accepted to UH a couple of months before, and was looking forward to college, which I figured would be a fun four years. I’d had plans for a long time to move on from there to teaching literature at some small, unpreposessing liberal arts college.

I was tired, the way you get when you’re in another country for the first time and you put off sleep until you get home. I may very well have been hungover.

It was about half an hour before sunset when we passed a farm down in the valley below us. It was a scene that could, except for a lone electrical pole, have been from just about any century; fields and a small farmhouse. I took a picture, figuring it wouldn’t really capture too well the scene.

I was wrong; it did capture it, very well. That’s not the only thing I was wrong about. College has been fun, but it’s been a lot more besides. And I have no idea any longer what I want to do with my life. I certainly hadn’t planned on getting as involved with the internet as I have, or with weblogs. I hadn’t planned on getting bored with academia. I certainly hadn’t planned on taking an extra year to graduate.

But the picture’s followed me through these five years, and I’m glad I have it, since my memory’s so shabby I probably wouldn’t remember that day without it, just like I wouldn’t remember a lot of days without this weblog. It seemed natural, then, for me to put them together in the culmination of a redesign that’s been in the works since early August.

It’s the only redesign I’ve done that I haven’t been unhappy with in some way before I finished it. I’ve learned a lot about webdesign since I started this weblog, though, most of it having less to do with the actual process than with the philosophy behind it. Things like attention to detail, and the marriage of form and function. More of this design works than is normal for me, and (time constraints allowing) all of it will work in a few days.

You may not like it; that’s ok. Because, really, it’s not for you, is it? As usual, though, I’d appreciate your input, and am ready to fix all the errors you’ll find.

Filed by shaun at October 6th, 2001 under fidelite