Welcome

Yep, I’ve moved. You know how you start with a little idea and it spirals out of control? I was tired of the Blog*spot banner, tired of Blog*spot going down, tired of Blogger not working sometimes, et cetera et cetera et cetera. One thing led to another, and, well, here we are. So what’s new? In no particular order:

A visual redesign. Um, yeah, you may have noticed that. I knew that if I was going to get rid of the Blog*spot banner, I’d need something at the top of the page other than just big blue letters in Verdana. Well, I guess I didn’t really need it, but I wanted it. (“Mom, I need a cookie!” “No, you want a cookie. You need to shut your mouth.”)

So there’s a bit more color here than there used to be, and I’ve moved some things around. I also narrowed the main entry window, because studies show that it’s easier to read something when you decrease the distance across which your eyes have to travel. We’ll see how it works. I may continue to tinker with things. I don’t want the design to be too distracting or get in the way of the content. Maybe plainer was better? I don’t know. When the New York Times started printing color photos on its front page a few years ago, some people said it was going to detract from the quality of its journalism. Never happened, though. I don’t really know what I’m saying. Just enjoy the red heart and the upside-down funnel hat, OK?

CSS. Click on “View Source” and you will see that my HTML is now table-tag-free. I’ve been boning up on my CSS skills over the last couple of weeks, and in the process I’ve become sort of an anti-table snob! (Last week I removed table tags from the old page as well.) Table tags are actually supposed to be used for tables of data, not for page layout. Why should McGyver try to open a door with a quarter, a paper clip and a stick of gum when he’s got a key in his pocket? CSS is actually simple once you get the hang of it, as well as more elegant. And it makes your page load faster. If you’re curious, you might want to check out a couple of sites. Glish shows you CSS in action, demonstrating some simple but sleek layouts along with the accompanying code. If you prefer learning from the ground up, I found the Style Master to be clear and helpful.

Greymatter. No more Blogger for now. I was curious about Greymatter and how it worked, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It was a hassle to install it, set it up on the server, and modify all the templates, but maybe it will be worth it. It gives you lots more control over things than Blogger does, and since it sits on the server, I don’t have to worry about a Blogger outage. Actually, Blogger’s service seems to have improved lately — the site hasn’t gone down in a while, and so forth. But basically I switched to Greymatter out of pure curiosity. I’ll see how I like it.

Tinmanic.com. Oh yeah, that. Why did I move? Well, for one thing, you can’t run Greymatter on a Blog*spot page. For another, as I stated above, I wanted to get rid of the Blog*spot banner. (Of course, now it turns out that I could have done that for $9.95.) For another, I wanted a comments system that doesn’t go down all the time. For another… and so on and so forth.

Why Tinmanic.com? Because www.tinman.com, www.tinman.org, and www.tinman.net were all taken, and because I didn’t want a name with a hyphen, and because I wanted a dot-com. So what does the name mean? Take your pick:

1. It’s an adjective. “He’s like the Tin Man… in fact, he’s tinmanic.”

2. It’s a play on the word manic. “He’s not just manic… he’s tinmanic!”

3. Tin Man? I see. (tinman+i.c.)

There’s also a search box, but unfortunately you can’t search any of the entries from my Blogger days. As for the old Blogger entries, I’ll move them to the archives on this site soon enough.

I’ve also added some more of my older writings. These include some old UVA newspaper columns. Some of them seem to be precursors to my whole blog thing. Perhaps being a newspaper columnist is similar to writing these blog entries in some ways.

Oh, finally: there’s a new e-mail address on this page, but it just forwards everything to my Yahoo! e-mail account, so feel free to continue using the old address if you want.

I hope all the kinks are worked out. But if you find something that’s not right, let me know.

Don’t forget to change your links.

And, oh yeah, happy Mid-Year’s Day!

Woof!

I was tooling around on the Internet this morning, reading the New York Times and contemplating entering the chat rooms, when I got an instant message from someone unfamiliar. “Jeff?” the person wrote. “Yes?” I wrote back. It turned out it was my dad. I’d never had an online chat with one of my parents before, and I wasn’t sure how to express myself. It just seemed weird to have a conversation with my dad using “LOL” and “oh” and “oh ok” and smiley faces. But I got used to it.

My dad told me that my parents have settled on a new dog. When our old dog died last month after a long life, my mom said that she wasn’t interested in getting another one, but as the house’s emptiness turned to sullenness she changed her mind.

But how to acquire a new dog? The last dog was a mixed-breed animal from a shelter, but after considering the options, my parents decided to go to a breeder. I think I would have been torn. If you get a dog from a shelter, you know you’re doing a good deed, rescuing a dog from harsher fates, but you don’t really know what you’re getting. If you get a dog from a breeder, you know what you’re getting, but… I don’t know. Ever see the Simpsons episode where Santa’s Little Helper was replaced with Laddie? A perfect dog… too perfect.

Anyway, I’m sure I don’t know what I’m talking about. Like I know from dog breeders.

So they decided to go through a breeder. But what breed? My brother and I were pushing for a retriever of some sort — my brother really wanted my parents to get a golden, and I would’ve been happy with that or a black lab. But since I don’t live there anymore and my brother’s moving out soon, I guess it’s up to them. They considered basset hounds (my mom had one as a kid) and the aforementioned golden retrievers, but they finally settled on getting a German shorthaired pointer. They’ve picked a breeder and everything, and they should get a puppy in about a week and half. They don’t yet know which member of the litter they’re getting.

I’m happy that they’re getting a new dog, but I think the first time I see him or her I’m going to feel a fresh wave of lament over the loss of our old dog. On top of that, I had a really bad roommate experience last year for a few months, and the guy had a German shorthaired pointer, the only one I’ve ever known. She was a great dog, but I still associate that breed with the bad roommate. I assume that will change.

Sigh… I guess I won’t be able to call the new dog “my” dog, since I won’t be living with it. But maybe someday I’ll get a dog of my own. Or a boyfriend. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s someone to lick my face in the morning.

Blissful Inconsequence

I realize that I haven’t written about my personal life since the weekend. That’s because nothing of consequence has happened. Actually, I’ve been really obsessed with moving/tweaking my site over the past week. My schedule has been: go to work, come home from work, eat dinner, get online, and work on my site. At some point each night I grab a beer from the fridge and get back to the computer. It’s really been wonderful. All has seemed right with the world; I haven’t worried about anything, because I’ve been really interested in what I’ve been doing.

I did get an e-mail from Wales yesterday — he was invited to go to a bar and an 80s dance club tonight, and he invited me along. He’s probably going to skip the bar and just go to the club. Maybe I’ll do that too.

Meanwhile, yesterday I talked to my friend Nick for the first time in a little while. He amazes me — he seems to have dates with three or four guys a week. And whenever I ask how he met so-and-so, he says, “Through PlanetOut.” I really don’t understand it. He must just be really motivated. I’ll admit I’m kind of envious, but at the same time, for some reason, I just want to laugh at the whole thing. It’s becoming comical. “Tonight I have a date with so-and-so, and tomorrow night I have a date with such-and-such. Oh, and I had a date with this guy the other night… he was SOO adorable.” I get tired of hearing about it after a while.

Still, like I said, it’s been a good week. It’s been nice to be working hard on things that really interest me. Happiness is nothing happening at all.