The moment I’ve been waiting for for what feels like my whole life has finally arrived: my induc­tion into the Oberlin College Library system. Irving S. Gilmore, better step it up.

There is some­thing I love about moving. I have moved every year for the past five years; even if only across a court­yard, it was cause for excite­ment. This year we are two people moving across town. The apart­ment we spent the past year in was cozy and nice enough, but really only the living/working space had much person­al­ity. The new place is much bigger, so it feels almost spend­thrift even though it’s a fantas­tic deal; New Haven is completely spoiling my real estate sense of the real world.

What I find exciting is making all my stuff disap­pear into boxes and then emerge in a differ­ent envi­ron­ment, and then adjust­ing all of the little rituals that make up my life in order to adapt to those differ­ences. Taking out my contacts, boiling pasta, or putting on my shoes takes on new signif­i­cance by making me stop and think about each step of the action. In my current apart­ment, for instance, I adopted a completely new and revo­lu­tion­ary concept of face-washing in the morning— over the bathtub, because the sink is too small to contain all the drips and splashes. It looks ridicu­lous, but I can be as messy as I want. 

I also like the moment of the last look around an empty room, which I always find quite sad, but so loaded with antic­i­pa­tion— not a feeling I’ve expe­ri­enced in any other situation.

Next week is moving week, and it’s also WWDC! So ready for an iPhone nano. My dad is there and will be sending back live reports.

Every year I go through a cycle of redesign­ing my website, liking the design a lot, grad­u­ally liking it less and less, and then redesign­ing again. This has pretty much been happen­ing since 2001, so I might as well instate it as an annual tradi­tion. I haven’t kept very good records of the old designs, which is a pity, because some of them were really bad and hilar­i­ous. Here is what the home page looked like in 2001:

As you can see, I have gotten over the rounded rectan­gles thing, but I still like gray. 

The 2008 redesign is more of a collec­tion of refine­ments than a real overhaul. The fonts are differ­ent; I decided that Meta was looking too corpo­rate (not that Helvetica isn’t the epitome of corpo­rate, but it can also be a lot of other differ­ent things). The page headings are now in Gotham and Hoefler text (hooray H&FJ!). As soon as I started working with Gotham I began to notice it absolutely every­where, from Obama to Martha Stewart to Banana Republic, so I guess I’m still pretty much a corpo­rate poseur. But it is nonethe­less a great font.

Some more changes have taken place behind the scenes, as I’ve switched from GoLive to Dreamweaver. I don’t like either program; Dreamweaver is finicky (though perhaps in fewer respects than GoLive) but I still think GoLive has a better user inter­face. Dreamweaver feels like a Windows app, with features thrown together in a bunch of palettes (all of which operate in slightly differ­ent ways) without much regard to orga­ni­za­tion or visual hier­ar­chy. The WYSIWYG composit­ing tools are better and more reliable than Golive’s, though, which is really what counts for me since I don’t know how to program.

I will be making more incre­men­tal improve­ments over the summer. In the meantime, I leave you with this picture, which can be magni­fied courtesy of Cabel Sasser’s pretty sweet Fancy­Zoom: