9 March 05
Busy Down Time
As the title suggests, I’ve been busy. The down time refers to the lack of posts I’ve been making here lately because of it. I wish I could tell you it’s because I’ve been working at some fantastic job or spending a lot of time roaming France, but neither is true; not exactly. I have been working a lot with respect to my Web design activities, but it’s mainly been a lot of administration issues, which is severely cutting into my design time.
One of the biggest hassles I have ever experienced is with trying to setup a low-grade business banking account with my current financial institution over the internet. The process itself is not the problem, that part is relatively straight forward. The real problem is with the communication I receive from the bank when they ask me for information they think they need, or with their response when I correctly give them what they ask for. This issue is worthy of it’s own post, and perhaps I will write about it later at Wion Design, but suffice it to say that it’s been a rediculous situation that has still gone nowhere, and which is now beginning to jeopardize relationships I have with existing clients, from which I need to collect fees.
On top of that, and in parallel with design efforts for existing and potential clients, I am redesigning Wion Design and this one, The Colloquial Tongue (TCT). TCT is especially in severe need of a makeover. [Redesigned since this entry was first made. -dw] What you see now was only meant as a temporary change from the actual default theme of the Weblog engine that runs it; it was only meant to be in place for a month or two. Well it’s now about 12 months, and I still don’t have time to do much about it. (Of course if you’ve been reading any of my last several posts, you’ll know my last 12 months have been rather hectic.)
Nevertheless, a lot is happening with respect to the backend of my Web site, so hopefully I’ll get to this sooner than later. For one thing, I am changing my Web host provider, from Lunarpages to TextDrive. Projects I am currently working on, including my own, involve using a small content management system called Textpattern, and I’ve been spending a bit of time in the support forum for Textpattern to get up to speed with using it. As such, I happened to be in the right place when TextDrive recently announced an incredible, limited-time-only, lifetime Web hosting package. I jumped on it, not blindly of course, but with good consideration to the pros and cons. The pros won over, and hopefully I will never pay for Web hosting again. This also turned out to be pretty timely because my current account with Lunarpages expires this month, and now I won’t have to renew it. However, what this does mean is that I must scrample to get my current Web activities and sites moved to the new host, and I decided to move ahead with giving my own sites a makeover in the process. Needless to say, I have a lot to do.
On a different note, it looks like our Wedding celebration is still on. There was a lot of uncertainty about that for the last couple of months, but we decided to go for it, especially since so many of Hanane’s family members are expecting it to happen. It seems very odd to be having a wedding celebration months after the actual wedding, but as the French say…c’est la vie! It looks like the target for the celebration is next month. I will provide more details later, but it seems as many as 150 people are anticipated to show up, none of which is a single friend or family member of my own (i.e., nobody from the states is coming). Although I perfectly understand the various reasons for this, it’s strange in a way.
Well, this post is already growing past what I intended to say; I mainly just wanted to give people a heads up. Cool things are in the works.
