I’m writing this on my PDA to be blogged later, because the title of this post is pretty much literally true: there’s heavy weather coming this way, just about here, judging by the amount of thunder I’m hearing, so I’ve unplugged just about everything as a precaution. Chances of a hit causing damage are actually quite small, but I figured that while I was home I might as well be cautious for a change.

Some 5 minutes later now and the sounds of rain and thunder are the only things I’m hearing. This is almost certainly no more than the leading edge of the storm, but I’ve already seen some flashes pretty nearby. I’ve also found that, even with rain, wind, and thunder around my room somehow feels unnaturally quiet without the computers or the fridge running. It’s not a bad thing, but it does feel weird.

I’ve been doing some reading, also on my PDA so it’s now probably half an hour since I started this post. The rain has slackened a little in the last ten minutes or so, but every time I start to think the whole thing might be over the thunder rolls again. In fact there was just a particularly bright flash, followed by a truly deafening roll of thunder instantly. There’s definitely been a hit nearby, but where exactly and what the consequences might be only time will tell.

One hour in, just about, and the lightning seems to have pretty much stopped. I’ll give it another 10 or 15 minutes, but we’re probably approaching the point where we can plug everything in again… And of course there was a lightning strike just as I finished that last sentence.

It’s now a little over two hours since the great unplugging started. The weather’s passed and everything is back up and running as usual. It was an interesting experiment especially as, while I didn’t actually unscrew any lightbulbs, I didn’t switch the lights on either. Aside from the PDA I was pretty much living without electricity while the storm lasted, and as a result I found myself dozing off at one point; I didn’t feel like reading or writing, and there just wasn’t anything else to do.

As I mentioned in my previous post¹ I did manage to do one thing: I did some editing. To be specific I picked up an edit that sort of fell by the way side back in 2006, though edit may be too weak a description, in parts it’s more of a rewrite. In short Gordian Knot is back on my short term todo list, with its own category on the blog as a statement of intent.

So what is Gordian Knot? In essence it’s a space opera, with evil Aliens, good Aliens, evil Human, and good Humans. To be more precise Gordian Knot is the current working title of that space opera. It’s also my attempt to prove that thinking up faster than light drive systems while cycling to university classes at 08:45 can yield worthwhile literature, but that’s not the main aim.

It’s also, if I do say so myself, a decent read even in its raw first version. Which is one of the reasons I picked it for this edit/rewrite way back in 2006. The idea was, and still is, to get it polished up to the point where I’ll feel comfortable using it to go looking for agents and/or publishers.²

I already know I’ll have to go over it at least once more after this pass, if only to make the stuff I wrote in 2006 fit what I’m writing now (which is better, I hope). I’ve also done a typical science fiction writer thing and printed a calender for 2317. I’m working out the details of my timeline as I write the new version, so having something handy to tell me July 20th will be a Friday in 2317 is useful from time to time.

Actually this was all prompted by a conversation I had with my father yesterday. We were talking about the future and I mentioned (as I usually do) that writing would be my dream job. I got to thinking about that later and decided that if I really mean that – and I do – I should start taking a more professional approach to writing again.

That means setting targets to meet, and doing the things I don’t like; I tend to get distracted from editing because I like writing new material better. So I’m hoping that posting this, and adding the new Gordian Knot Category to the blog, will help keep me honest. Expect to see more progress reports on this in the near future.
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¹ Moaning about being too inactive today here
² The preferred route is getting a good agent who will then take care of getting the actual publisher.

I hate warm weather. I know the socially acceptable position is that hot, sunny weather is fun, but I personally hate it. Although actually I don’t think I’d mind just hot and sunny much. Here in the Netherlands it’s always (or at least always seems to be) hot, sunny, and humid. To me, that’s not a good combination.

I could take it if it were just the discomfort of the heat. Mind you, I wouldn’t enjoy it. But what really bugs me is what it does to me. It somehow manages to drain all my energy. Leaving me without as much vigour and drive as a damp cloth. The only thing I did manage to get done today was to set up my portable airco, which at least kept things somewhat bearable.

Since the prediction is for the next few days to be as warm, or warmer, I’m not looking forward to them. But at least now that I have the airco set up I should be able to start it earlier and (with luck) keep things a bit cooler.

And it’s not like I really did nothing today, I did a respectable amount of reading and even some editing. It just felt like I did nothing, and I guess I had to get that off my chest.

I’ve been pondering the site redesign in recent days, and particularly the problems having a menu over two layers would cause. If I want to move the menu to the top of the site, which is what I’m currently thinking about doing, it simply can’t accommodate all the entries it has now.

One option would be to do drop-down submenues.¹ But it’s difficult to do those well and most of the times I’ve tried to do them I’ve ended up pulling them out again because they didn’t quite work. That consideration more or less left me stuck with a menu down the side of the page the way it is now.

Then I realised the answer’s been staring me in the face almost daily. To be precise every time I check the Arch Linux forums.² My homepage and blog, and the headers from the present menu could form the top layer of such a menu, with the other entries grouped on the lower layer, and displayed based on context.

The one dilemma that leaves me is whether I should go for a simple static implementation like Arch’s, or a more complicated one which changes the second layer on mouse over as well. I’ve done that before as well, but in that case I’ve never felt quite happy about the result, so I’m hesitant to try it again. On the other hand it would allow a greater amount of One Click navigation.

I haven’t even got a preliminary design for this yet, since this type of structure change would definitely mean redoing the entire site’s design. But the realisation that I have been looking at the perfect way to do this almost daily is certainly worth an entry here (as well as hitting myself gently in the head later on).
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¹ The Dragon Page offers a good example of these
² Located here

Or: How Monitors Can Ruin Your Designs

Yes, the long awaited monitor rant is here. Reinforced by the fact that I checked my two recent attempt while at work. And on my monitor there I could sort of see why someone might not like them. They looked… different from the way they look on my own monitor at home. I could probably change that monitor to match what I have at home, but that would merely solve my frustration not the basic problem.

And the basic problem is this: no matter how you tweak a design, you can’t make it look the same for everyone everywhere. Another good example: my Samsung SyncMaster 940BW can actually cycle through a number of pre-set configurations as well as my own custom setting. I can use this to test what a design might look like on different monitors (probably should do that more often) though none of them happen to match the way my designs looked at work.

When I go over to Starstuff’s Rule-TwentyNine.com and cycle through my screen settings at least one of them makes the blue borders and sidebar background fade into the white background for the rest of the page.¹ That of course can be headed off by using something with a bigger contrast, but even then it would look radically different on each setting, and there are people using most (probably all) off these out there.

Which more or less forces you back to Black on White or White on Black if you want to have any real influence over the appearance of your site. Black and White still do fall prey to these settings (especially some of the more ludicrous ones), but the two of them – and to a lesser extend shades of grey – are the closest thing to consistent rendering available. In fact, no matter how wacky the monitor configuration people are likely to know at least what Black and White look like on their own monitor.

Now I’m a control freak when it comes to this sort of thing anyway, but I suspect this would be enough to drive me into ranting territory even if I weren’t. Trying to get things to look the same across browsers is a nightmare already, but at least it can (to an extend) by managed by testing and then coding around the problems. Trying to get things to look the same on different monitors is an exercise in futility.

One would almost wish someone would come up with a standard configuration to be enforced across monitors. Unfortunately that would almost certainly be fucked up, so I guess I’ll have to learn to live with it. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
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¹ The same thing goes for some of Wikipedia’s background colours.

I had been planning on writing the monitor rant tonight, but just didn’t feel like it (I’m not in a ranting mood, so to speak). Instead I found myself playing around with the colours of the design again, using The GIMP to take the light version of the background image through pretty much the entire colour spectrum. I had great hopes for the reddish tints, but funnily enough I found myself drawn to the green version instead.

Like the previous yellow version I’m considering this one as a possible replacement for the current theme, though I’m pretty definitely considering redoing the whole site now. The way I see it now I’d like to have a menu along the top, locked in view like the currently location bar, though I can’t see how to do it without having to change the menu structure again as well. Of course I could work with main items and dropdown submenues, but I tend to dislike the way these work out. They’re elegant enough in theory, but somehow never quite work in the real world.

As always, comments are welcome.

After doing the dark design earlier in the day I decided to give into temptation and design a lighter alternative as well. Again this is by no means the full redesign I’m considering, but I might actually consider putting this one up as a temporary replacement for the current look.

The one thing I’m not too sure about in this design is the yellow for the page title and copyright notice sections, but that’s certainly easy enough to tweak. And while the blue for the sidebars is the darker in my current design than it is on the site now I may well end up taking that back to the present level. Right now I’m in the process of trying to find the right balance for contrast.

Of course, as with the previous design, all comments are most certainly welcome on this one. One of the main reasons I like it is that it seems to make the text in the central section come out clearer. I may end up switching to that background image even if decide to leave the rest of it be for now.

Okay so it’s more like 11 days later, but only one episode and, quite frankly, I didn’t really find time to watch the second episode before today. And the amazing thing is, I liked it. There were still some weak spots, but nowhere near as many as there were in the first episode.¹

I can’t put my finger very firmly on the differences, but somehow it was easier to suspend disbelieve for this episode, and get drawn into the story. There were a few nagging loose ends (two people suffer weird hallucinations that endanger their lives, but there’s no clue as to who’s behind them), but on the whole the story seemed to run better than last week’s.

There were also some more hints of a continuing storyline starting to emerge. It’s still too early to say whether I’ll like the series as a whole, but I’m definitely going to be sticking around for episode three.
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¹ See my review here

I’ve been playing with the site design a little this morning. The thumbnail to the left, and the larger version it links to, are the preliminary result.¹ I’m not really seriously contemplating using this on the site (though that might change, it’s Sunday after all so I’m allowed to be capricious). But it’s a quick first look at a potential new colour scheme.

If I really do go in for a full redesign I’ll probably switch things around more than this. For one thing I’m no longer entirely satisfied with the way I’m doing the site menu on the left. It works well enough, but it leaves an awful lot of empty side bar beneath it a lot of the time. By no means a major disaster, but never the less something to look into.

For that matter, if I do go for a full redesign, I may well end up moving pages around quite a bit, although I have to admit that on the whole I’m pretty satisfied with the way things are now in that respect.
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¹ In case anyone is interested, this is actually a screenshot made using a totally local version of the site on my own computer, not just a mockup. It shouldn’t take me more than 10 minutes to roll this out to the site if I wanted to do that, since it’s just CSS and one new image.

First of all on this posts title, it’s taken from Babylon 5. Where Garabaldi and Franklin speculate that the future should probably have been marked “Some assembly required”. Which is certainly true for those of use doing worldbuilding.

And that brings me to the purpose of this post, a little update on the worldbuilding I’m doing in preparation for November. Right now my assembly problem is the 22nd century. I’m pretty clear on most of the things I want to happen, but I’m having trouble deciding who exactly does what.

Obviously that’s not on a personal level, but on an international one. Right now I’m torn between doing things the easy way – basically going along with the international dividing lines we have now – and a certain reluctance to do things the expected way. I’m sure I’ll think of something eventually. If all else fails I could always resort to simply getting out a world map and drawing lines with my eyes closed.