cubicle17

I think the best way to describe Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is to liken it to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which is to say that by itself, the movie is simply mediocre. It’s a 2.5hr movie, where the first 2 hours are focused largely on Harry’s internal struggle. By the last half-hour, though, the movie picks up with some of the best action in any of the Harry Potter films so far. All in all, a C+ movie made a B+ by the last 30 minutes. Worth the money if you have the time, but certainly one that could wait until video as well.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with where this website falls on the blog continuum: it’s more of a blog than a tumblelog, but more of a tumblelog than a blog. My first instinct was to separate the tumbling bits from the blog bits, but there doesn’t seem to be enough blog to justify that yet.

So in its current state of mostly tumble with a smattering of blog, I’m just going to call it a tumbleblog. Does that work for everyone?  Excellent.

5 Things I’ll Never Understand:

1. What’s so great about Java EE
2. Why people think Dane Cook is funny
3. How Google is worth $500+ a share
   
4. String Theory
   
5. Girls

If you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been through no less than 5 custom designs since I opened my Tumblr account a few months ago. For this latest iteration, I’ve taken cues from sites like Daring Fireball and kottke.org, and tried to create something simple and minimal that puts the content front-and-center. I’ve also tried to decrease visual clutter by only using permalinks on original content, noting each day instead of each post, and favoring a more subtle color scheme as well. Hopefully I’ve succeeded in accomplishing this.

On a related note, the frequency with which I’ve updated my design is a testament to how simple working with the Tumblr template engine is. Although the service lacks documentation (at least documentation I could find) for creating a custom template, gleaning what you need from the provided templates is straightforward. The simplicity of the engine allows me to keep a basic sample page, make minor alterations to the HTML to get the structure I want and write CSS to make it look how I want. I mirror the structure tweaks on the “template version,” copy/paste the CSS and viola! New designs can literally take less than 30 minutes—and hence my fleeting designs.

So if you’re a person who doesn’t view this site via RSS, I hope the seemingly endless redesigning hasn’t been bothersome, but I’m happy with this one, and plan to stick with it.