Random Thoughts

Don't have anything to write about, hence: random thoughts.

• People are always asking me, "what are you doing?" This is what I am doing these days. Go ahead and click, its an improvisation of a blogger template. It is Work-In-Progress and there's more where this came from. So whenever you need a different looking blog, catch me on Yahoo! IM.


• Joblo gave it 9/10 and Arrow would butcher his family to see this again. And they saw it at the Cannes. It's my most awaited movie this year. Much awaited than Superman Returns. And I know it won't be released in India/Hyderabad. It's mucho-gloomy and uber-creepy. It's Guillermo del Toro's "El Laberinto del Fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth). Download the creepy trailer, already.


• Next in line is Richard Linklater's live-action, rotoscopic-animated sci-fi, A Scanner Darkly. Three Words: PHILIP K. DICK (shame on you, ignoramus). It stars some of my favorite actors, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., and Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson. I believe I don't have to repeat the trailer line from above.


• Year's biggest disappointment, Southland Tales, courtesy, Richard Kelly. I had hopes. Damn you, Richard. Please give me a Darko, again.
  


• I am back on to music real hard, courtesy: iPod Nano. It's:
  
  
  
  • The Who's Baba O'Riley
  
  
  • Elton John's Tiny Dancer and My Father's Gun
  
  
  • Helen Stellar's Io (This time around)
  
  
  • Fleetwood Mac's Big Love (Acoustic)
  
  
  • Pearl Jam doing the Who's Baba O'Riley (live)
  
  
  • Wheat's Don't I Hold You
  
  
  • Lindsey Buckingham's Shut Us Down
  
  
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird
  
  
  • D-Mode's remix of Starsailor's Four to the Floor
  
  
  • Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker
  
  
  • Beck's Guero
  
  
  and more movie soundtracks and scores. I DIG MUSIC. (whoever got it, comment. hint: tiny dancer)


• Got nothing to read. Going for book-shopping tomorrow. Looking for Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird, David Vise and Mark Malseed's Google Story and anything minimal (spanbauer, hempel, palahniuk, coupland, camus, lee). Meanwhile, enjoying The Lord of the Rings for the don't-remember^th time.


• I am also going back to my web devlopment basics. Learning CSS again. Learning Modularization in XHTML 1.1. Trying to learn JavaScript for the n^th time. I even have a CSS Reference on my iPod. Thanks, Westciv.

That's all folks! Will return with more thoughts in the near future.

Worn Out Moll

Beautiful. Awesome. Inspiring. Cameron Moll has redesigned his portfolio in all its worn out glory. I can't say anything. I can't think of anything. I have been staring at the design for hours. Checking and re-checking every now and then. Why the f*** can't I do this?

The color works out so beautifully and perfectly accentuates small details. The sidebar is awesome-ly done. The signature worn is excellent. The best part is that the design is not a bit hard on the eyes, even with so much dark color. Great work.

P.S: Those Self-Promo Business Cards are so worth having. Shame on you Cameron, you disgusting self promoter.

Of Theme-ing and Scheme-ing

Busy theming out Wordpress. The idea, is to get this blog from Blogger to Wordpress and from blogspot servers to my own server. For all Blogger-fans. This flip has nothing to do with Blogger. Blogger is a damn great service and my other blog will stay on Blogger ever. The flip comes in with the need for a content management system for the whole website. Although I can do manage content on blogger but I have come to understand Wordpress a lot. And Wordpress seems a lot more better choice for a CMS. The reasons are apparent enough.

1. Great Interface.
2. Theme-ing, Piece of Cake.
   
3. New webpage creation, damn easy. (Click-Write-Publish)
4. Editing is fantastic, with timestamp editing I can write today for day before yesterday.
5. And a lot more reasons that I've not yet come to pass...

As i write this entry I have completed the theme and am tweaking the code for IE/Windows. I am trying to use every design technique I know/like on this theme.

I got a wooden background for this one. Writing up the theme was so nice, I have decided to skim up a few more themes for the Wordpress Codex. Back to design, I got the same old (read: trusty) centered, two-column, fixed-width layout. Dark Brown + White. With Automatic Lab's Image Rotator spewing out random header images you will get ... random header images. Also trying for the first time, sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), Mike Davidson's open source Text-Flash Replacement technique based on Shaun Inman's IFR. Until now, it's all in good times. Although the sIFR is giving some trouble, I'll make do without it for few days.

The code, hopefully, will be valid and accessible and will try not to eat up bandwidth. And I lack a .com and am living on excellent free hosting services provided by AddYour. Cos being here in India, domains and web hosting are quite an investment for a budding freelancer like me. With domains starting at 495 of our Indian currency and hosting hitting hard at 1500 rupees, dollars seems so low for the first time. Dollars happen to work great with domains because I can get 2 years of domain registered for the amount of one. With iPower giving out domains at $2.95 an annum, i.e. approx. 130 Indian Rupees, I can get meself a domain too.

But the problem is my Credit Card which doesn't work internationally. But through the power of the web I got myself a Paypal account. So all you good people shell out something for this guy, and who knows you might get a website redesign all free of cost. Or, maybe, at a low cost. So click the little donation button down under as fast as you can spell I.