Rat-A-Tat

Tonight will be rambling and aimless, channeled mostly through Full Sail’s Amber Ale. I typically find the beer at Full Sail to be a bit heavy on the hops, but their amber is absolutely killer. Everyone needs a favorite beer from every favorite place where they have lived. Ahh, yes. Full Sail Amber, Deschutes Black Butte Porter, and Fitger’s Hempen Ale. My heart goes out to all those who have not discovered their favorite hometown brews. For you I raise a fine can of PBR.

Today I finished my first week back at the windsurfing shop. It’s great to be back, as I love my co-workers almost as much as I love the merchandise. I’ve been working hard on bringing the website up to snuff, and today I launched a completely redesigned codebase, which I’ve hammered out over the last week. The design renders in XHTML, uses pure CSS for all design elements, and has a newly streamlined structure for included files.

What’s more, the XHTML has almost exactly the same structure as Brainside Out, which is almost the same structure as every other website I’ve built over the past six months. Our shop’s site is likely the only XHTML/CSS website that exists within the entire windsurfing and kiteboarding industry. That will change.

What’s most notable, however, is the rate at which I was able to completely gut and recode the site. What had originally taken me two months to build I have rebuilt in five days, now bigger, better and stronger than ever before. There’s a lot more work to be done, however. I need to rework our scripting code so it does neat and exciting things, which is great and fascinating and only complicated by the fact that I’ve only dabbled in scripting. In the wrong language for this project, in fact. I’m picking it up quickly, along with everything I need to know about database querying, updating, etc.

Oh yeah. Did I mention that I get to rearchitect our database? And revamp our management system? Those shall be fun. I mean that. The only way to keep on top of the web design industry is to realize that you know nothing, and to kick your own ass to learn stuff, so you can continue to know nothing. Socrates himself showed that you need to know lots of things so you can show that you don’t know anything at all.

Otherwise, the weather has been getting nicer. Yesterday it warmed up into the early 50s and the entire Gorge was fogged in. Humidity was at like 200 percent or something, and when you went outside it felt like you were breathing through a wet washcloth. The air made my lungs feel full so I skipped dinner to hang out at the coffee shop and read the latest issue of Adbusters.

Adbusters is where everyone has problems and no one has answers. The answers are so self-evident that they need not be mentioned, nor discussed, so most of the content of Adbusters is reserved for pondering why the masses won’t listen to us when we have all the answers? Idiots.

I’d really like a pair of these sneakers. I only wish that I could try on a pair before buying them, or find them a little bit cheaper, or get a better deal on shipping, or have them arrive earlier than two months from now, or at least go to a place where I can pick up one shoe and toss it back and forth from one hand to the other. If only there was some sort of system that could offer such services to the consumer, and still remain economically viable.

Until then.