Funny to hear the correspondent on our local NPR affiliate’s technology show pronounce the word “stymied” as “stemmied” during a segment on older workers being afraid of newer technology. Perhaps we younger workers shouldn’t be afraid of dictionaries.

Inspiration. I’m in the middle of a creative funk. My plan was to have a new weblog (for the record, let me tell you that I hate that word) up and running on a new domain by the middle of the month. It’s turning out to be harder than I thought it would. Part of the problem is that I’m trying to design a new look for the site, and I want to build something beautiful, but I’m having a lot of problems making anything work. I was going to use a variation on one of the canned templates at first, but then I decided to make something new and clean. Most of my previous work has been very flat and one-dimensional, so I started playing with depth, which quickly looked gimmicky and trendy.

Then I played with a radical design, dropping a photo in the middle of the grid and running the columns around it. It was nice, but I want to get this thing live this year, and I know that wrestling the CSS/PHP to make it work the way I want would take too long—in between two freelance projects, this would be the bastard stepchild. So I went back to some of the photos I was taking last year to find a good unused subject to start from. I got depressed, because most of the photos I took last year were documentary (celebrations or home renovation) and not artistic like the ones I took in 2002-03, when I got my first camera and shot everything I saw. Yesterday I got an idea looking at the control panel on the elevator here at work to use it as navigation, but after an hour of Photoshop wrangling I decided to scrap it—I didn’t want white type on a black background anyway.

The other issue I have is what to keep and what to toss, and how to organize what stays in. Do I keep the month-based calendar for the archives, or toss it in favor of four year-based links? Do I make the music section a sideblog? (Yes.) Do I add a sideblog for links? (Probably.) Do I keep links to all the photos? (Not likely-it’ll be a separate page from now on.) Do I add a rotating photo somewhere? (possibly.)

Fortunately, some of the photos I was looking at that I took in 2003 started my brain working. As a sidenote, I have to underline what other people have said-it’s not the camera that takes good/bad pictures, it’s the photographer. Many of the shots I took with a crappy, second gen point-and-shoot are as good, if not better than the ones I shot with the G3.

Geek, Take Two. There’s a blue 400mhz iMac sitting in our basement without RAM, a hard drive, or a battery, because the screen is dead. A year ago I was in the middle of setting it up with OSX, and accidentally kicked out the power cord. After that, it ceased to work properly. I looked and looked for any kind of fixit advice online, and found nothing. Having stumbled across some new information this morning, I’m going to mount a rescue mission in the next couple of days to see if I can’t further my score in raising the dead.