It's been eerily quiet here for a while now, and while I'm not one to appreciate "it's been quiet here" notices, even my own girlfriend asked me if I had stopped blogging today.

I haven't, I'm just swamped. I'm working on a web project at work which, and this is actually a first time for me, I'm skeptical of wether it's going to work in practice. I can't say much about it, and I wouldn't even if I could, but suffice to say it's an ad driven service aimed at local consumers. The concept could work, I'm just not sure it will.

Design wise, I've taken a very simplistic approach, the entire purpose and concept of the site is to let the content shine. Although my boss has given me total freedom to come up with the design, he has very specific requests regarding the splash image.

Well, to begin with, he insists that there should be a splash image. If I had my way, there wouldn't be one, because splash images are the work of the devil. Secondly, my boss doesn't really know what a splash image is, he keeps referring to it as "the design", which of course drives me to the cusp of madness every time. Once, he even went so far as to say the words "what's most important to me is the design", referring, again, to the splash image. For what seemed like an eternity, but in reality probably only lasted a few seconds, I stared blankly and fought to remain conscious.

For years, I've had quite a bit of free time; I haven't been involved in more projects than I could manage. But now, all of a sudden, I'm knee deep in them, both professionally and on the side. People are contacting me from all over the place, asking me if I can do a bit of work for them, or a lot of work.

Just now I finished making a small but rather neat web application to manage conference reservations, and enable visitors to check the availability online. If only I would have had the luxury of developing it in PHP, or Rails, it'd been an experience I could have fondly looked back on, alas I had to do it in ASP. ASP! I haven't had to touch that for years. I think the last time was in January of 2002, and even back then I only did it because my then employer refused to venture outside of the warm and comfortable status quo.

I've got a redesign of this site in the works, which is quite ironic because since I started on that redesign, more people than ever have been spontaneously telling me how much they like the current design. I've been working on it for probably three months now, but I'll probably only get around to finishing it once the rest of the stuff I'm involved in have started to calm down.

In summary: not dead. Just swamped.

Permanent link