Rapid Fire Thoughts

• I'm sitting in one of Purdue's undergrad computer labs to work on my teaching portfolio (the draft of which is below--I'm going to play around with that Dali-esque scheme). The reason I'm using a gen-pop lab: the new Adobe Creative Suite. Our pathetic College of Liberal Arts computers (the one's delegated to the English Department) don't have the new tricked out software package (nor do they have IE 7.0 yet--but that's a good thing for me, I want to beta test my sites with IE 6.0 and the ancient English department is fast becoming one of the few places around Purdue I can do so). To my chagrin, Fireworks is gone--so now I have to start using Photoshop. I new this day was coming, but I just didn't think it would be so soon...
• Speaking of soon, Meg's still pregnant. Very, very pregnant.
• The Red Sox will be fine, so long as Schilling can stay healthy. Starting pitching wins in the regular season, and the Sox have plenty of that. Great starting pitching wins in the post-season, and I'm not sure how Dice-K and Lester will fare. I'm also not sure how Big Big Papi will be in October, but he deserves respect for playing all season with a bum shoulder.
• I finished my upcoming 106 website, and am quite pleased with the results. I really like how the typography came out--expect this blog's typeface to change quite soon. In the end, I took a closer look at how Dave Shea sets up his fonts over at Mezzo-Blue, and sytled something similar:

  font-family:"Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Gill Sans", "Tw Cen MT", Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size:12px;

  I was trying to set the font-size through ems, but found that the different browsers (Safari vs. IE & FF) just interpreted them way to different. Pixels seems more precise to me. The headers are done in a different family, one that looks a lot better on Safari than on PC (I'm still working this out):

  font-family:"Abadi MT Condensed Light", "Gill Sans", Arial, sans-serif;

  I know that the Web2.0 aesthetic calls for rounded everything, but I am more and more liking the simplicity and contrast of straight lines. Course, from a coding perspective, straight lines are a lot easier to pull off! I'm going to try to make sure that my new site has rounded corners, but I'm not yet sure if I am going to use a background image (effective, but old-fashioned) or if I am going to get a bit more fancy. I really like this png technique over at Schillmania, but am not quite sure if it will work on a large scale. Experimentation forthcoming.