Grumble.

Got on the scale today after a long hiatus, and discovered that I’ve gained ten pounds (!!).  Clearly it’s time to start losing some weight.  I’m going to think carefully about how to manage this, as it’s typically been difficult for me to take weight off.  Training for the AIDS Ride will help some, but I find that intensive training increases my appetite to the point where losing weight is difficult.  Well, I’ll figure it out somehow.

The bronchitis is continuing to keep me off the bike, and probably will for another 1-2 weeks.  It’s slowly getting better but I continue to have coughing fits whenever I do even mild exertion.  At least I can sleep through the night without coughing now.

I have been studying web navigation for the last few days, reading through the O’Reilly book Designing Web Navigation and working on this new website I’m designing for the company I’m contracting for.  It’s fascinating and quite difficult to design simplicity.  I have acquired a great appreciation for websites that “just work” – top on the list being Amazon.com.  It takes a lot of thought to design websites that are “obvious”.  Kudos to them.

I am finding myself gravitating more and more to website design, professionally speaking.  It’s fascinating, it involves getting into people’s heads and thinking about how they perceive information,  it involves a bunch of new-to-me technologies, and let’s face it: it’s just damn cool.  Not the pretty-pictures part, but the underlying structure.  I love what I’ve seen of it.  (I’m also rapidly developing a bookshelf of Web design and technology books, a good sign that I find this stuff interesting.)

No progress on the projects database project; I’m still puzzling out MySQL and database design.  No progress on the weaving either, as I’ve been devouring web-design books at a rapid pace.  I’m interviewing for a bunch of web-design-y positions and want to pick up the basics at least.