Whoo hoo! My book is here!

And only a few more months until the sequel comes out.

Sir, we’ve got visuals. Some sand, some sky, some trees and a whole lotta moss and falling water.

Alright ladies and gentlemen, I believe you can now update your danesbored bookmarks to www.brainsideout.com without incident. It looks the same but it’s new and better and promises stay in existence.

The snow is now too deep for Converse All-Stars. Even Hightop Converse All-Stars. Unfortunately my choices for footwear are limited to All-Stars, Chacos, Birkenstocks or bowling shoes. My feet are ill-equipped for surviving my home state.

Happy Apple starts in four minutes, but this is so important I need to dash it off, right now.

Thanks to endless domain-mongering and great verbal diligance, www.brainsideout.com has just been nursed into being. In all due time, everything at the ‘Bored will be relocated to this new home. Don’t update your links yet. Not yet, but soon. Soon. And yet. Soon, yet. Yet.

I still have time, so I’ll tell a story. We went to the beach along the Oregon coast. There was a street sign in town that had an image of a giant wave and said TSUNAMI EVACUATION ROUTE. It pointed away from the ocean. It’s counterintuitive, but apparently you’re supposed to run AWAY from the mile high wave of death. Who knew.

I ran out of printer paper, so I filled my inkjet with looseleaf notebook paper. It works really well, though sometimes the printer gets excited while printing stuff out real fast in draft mode and crumples up all its finished sheets in one big messy pile.

So far I’ve found five of ten required scholarly sources for my research paper. I’ve tapped the holy grail of Inter-Library Loan, but they’ve mostly given me redundant PDF files and referred me to periodicals that are supposed to exist somewhere in the UMD library. What’s more, when they finally sent me a useful article in PDF form, they sent me the citation information for the journal that UMD doesn’t stock, rather than the article itself. Thanks, guys.

I noticed my pen wasn’t writing well, so I naturally brought the tip to my tongue to help it elucidate my thoughts. After a short moment I felt the distinct stinging taste of scorpions fill my mouth and I knew I was in for something interesting. As it turns out, riding around in my pocket through Portland and airports and school had loosened up the ink in my pen a bit, and it decided to find escape in my mouth.

I garbled a few obscenities and ran to the bathroom to survey the damage. My roommate peeked in and recoiled in terror. I rinsed repeatedly, but ink stains flesh for some reason. My teeth, mouth and lips are black. I look like I’ve been eating tar.

New design. It’s still got a few kinks, but it’s what I’ve been able to muster during the last three hours of not studying and not writing and not doing homework.

The design layout is still corralled by tables, as I can’t figure out the CSS commands for arranging space independent of the HTML code. Ideally I want to do a design similar to that at Zeldman.com. All his style and layout is determined by the cascading style sheet, which leaves the HTML code responsible only for content. This separation of design and content allows quick, site-wide changes to design, as instead of changing colors, borders and backgrounds across hundreds of HTML files, I can just change the stylesheet that all those files have been told to reference.

You can see this in the green glob that now adorns the bottom of all the pages on my site. I changed the “bottom” style on the stylesheet to make it consistent in the blog template, but since all pages reference the “bottom” object, it changes them all against my wishes. I could quickly fix this by telling the blog index to reference a new stylesheet object, like “blog-bottom”, but since I plan on eventually changing all the pages to this new style anyway, it really isn’t worth the trouble, now. That, and I really, really should be doing homework.

This, my friends, is forward compatibility, and it saves me a bundle of time.