Jaz's journal

It's Christmas time and I'm back at my parent's place and took my PC with me. Now that I can leech with DSL again I'm downloading the whole world into my computer. So if something sucks over the holidays, don't worry, that's just me.

On the motorway today I saw a car named Starcraft, but it was just a car. Then, back home Slashdot had a news headline "Starcraft", and it turned out to be a stupid book about UFOs.

Needless to say, these omen are just symptoms of a deeper laying ill.

Hell, everyone and their cat wants Starcraft 2. Why can't Blizzard deliver what the whole freaking world is craving for at last. Instead they give us some stupid shooter game. I've commanded armies in epic battle for the destiny of the universe. What makes them think I'd put up with a stupid shooter?

Man.

This post was edited by Jaz on Dec 20, 2002.

Uhm... I mean, of course, access to it.

Some weeks ago I participated in a competition from Audimax, a magazine handed out for free at German universities. They had a list of things you could win, and you had to answer a question related to your desired object.

Turned out I actually won a free DSL flatrate for six months! Wow, this must be the first time I ever won something of that magnitude in my life.

Only drawback is I will leave this place in two months and will already have Internet access in my new apartment. Hopefully I can strike a deal with the people here so I can at least get a little bit of money out of the remaining four months!

This is so cool. Almost gets me over my bad test results from earlier today.

The upgrade for Netalive went more smoothly than I had expected and I'm glad it's finally done. All in all it took me more time than writing the site in the first place, most of which was used up by the table-less redesign with CSS.

It totally went overboard. At first I just played around with the CSS design, unsure whether it could actually be done. 99% of all CSS designs I've seen on the web were for simple, weblog-style sites: easy to do in CSS because all they are is headline, text, headline, text, etc.

Sites like this are easy to do in CSS because they are document-orientated. But Netalive.org is more of a web application than a set of text documents. Every screen on every page is different.

Back to redesign, at some point I figured I already invested so much work that I should go ahead and redo the whole site with it. I hadn't known how many months it would take then, but with every line I wrote the option of going back moved even farther away.

I don't think many people will recognize the fact that the design they see on the site is completely new and that getting it too resemble the old layout was probably the hardest thing to do.

All in all I'm glad that it's done, and that I did it. It's that warm fuzzy feeling of having done something right, and Netalive.org is now one of few sites that are done right ™.

And that's good.

Pray that it works.