Selfish Crab

As I foretold earlier, Columbia redesigned their website. My take? It doesn’t suck. Which is very good. I thought the old one sucked and looked like my friend’s 13 year old kid sister designed it while chatting on IM and listening to Hanson. If you crave the old website, you can use the WayBack Machine and see the CU homepage circa one year ago (note: a bit slow loading).

The new webpage is much cleaner and professional looking; much more on par with an internationally-known university than with afore-mentioned kid sister design portfolio. Some people have said that it looks half-finished and that the website lacks “pizzazz”. To that I say, bleh.

I only have two complaints. I like the rotating portfolio of front page pictures, but for some reason they did not use all full framed pictures. That is, some pictures are two smaller pictures stuck together, that often don’t go together (examples one and two and three.) My second grub is that they were smart enough to use text links for navigation (as opposed to image buttons), but they opt’ed not to put mouse overs on the links. Lastly, our school colors are now apparently mutant maroon-blue.

For further reading, You can check out this About the Redesign article buried in the website.

# 2003 Dec 28    {Columbia, nerd, rompin' years}    #

NY Times cobbled together every piece of coverage on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy into one place. It includes all three film reviews, how Peter Jackson has been slaving on LoTR for the past seven years, analysis on the boom of New Zollywood (I coined it, you heard it here first) and, my favorite, the original fucking 1954 book review of “Fellowship of the Ring” by W.H. Auden.

# 2003 Dec 26    {Links, nerd, rompin' years}    #

Merry Christmas, Santa Claus does not exist.

Why do people bother with the myth of Santa Claus? What’s wrong with knowing one’s parents are the ones giving gifts? If I were to have children, I do not know if I would fabricate a story about old, rotund elves. Maybe it makes children spoiled to know these gifts come from real people. Oh, well. Back to the relaxing…

# 2003 Dec 25    {rompin' years}    #

I remember an old Chinese parable my grandfather used to tell me. A group of ducklings are traveling and they reach the edge of a wide road. The young ducks know they must cross this dangerous road before they can reach their final destination: the Pond. There, they can take deep sips of the sweet water they so badly need. But first, they must brave the road.

Carefully, they begin to cross the road: the big awkward-looking duckling, first; then several others, soon after. After they reached the other side, they look back and notice one little duckling has not made it fully across yet. This stupid little duckilng is taking goddamn forever because of god-knows-what reasons, probably because it is a retarded little duckling, that liked to do little arts and crafts projects and also somehow always got attention from all their chick friends (y’know, baby chickens) which was frustrating and—-

::cough::: And so the other ducklings waited patiently for the littlest duckling to reach the other side. The littlest duckling finally crossed the road and they began the final leg of their journey to the Pond. The end.

The moral of the story is to hang out with ducklings your size. Because the little ones take freakin’ forever to cross that road. And they’re ugly, too.

# 2003 Dec 14    {rompin' years}    #

From Columbia to Launch Redesigned Homepage :

On Monday, Dec. 15, Columbia will launch a newly designed homepage where improved information architecture and design make it easier to navigate the site and obtain information more efficiently and effectively.

Please please please be good. I missed a “preview and feedback session” held a month ago, and have been sad that I was unable to add my wisdom into the re-design process. I don’t think any people went either except for the usual council people. I’m terried that the re-design is going to be terrible and that it’s going to take another 5 years before our main website is done right.

# 2003 Dec 13    {Columbia, nerd, rompin' years}    #