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I got my alumni t-shirt from school today. :O I did find my name a little after I got it, and I found some classmates’ names (mainly other art majors and Capstone classmates). I also found some names from non-studio art classes (Spanish, Art and Mass Media…) and one from church (I don’t know if she still goes though). Aaaaand I also managed to find some names from my grade at my old middle school (including one of my friends). :O I already knew two of them were going to this university (thanks to Facebook :P), but I was able to find a couple three* others. :O These are people I haven’t heard anything about in ten years.

*[Edit: 9:45pm] I forgot one.

And what’s more is the t-shirt that I got when I graduated middle school? The guy whose name is next to mine on that shirt is also has his name next to mine on this new shirt. O_o Wow. I think one of the staff at church (who graduated from this same university) said we sit with our majors during Commencement, but if they didn’t have us do that, they’d probably alphabetize us and we’d be sitting next to each other again. o_O

So, I am on a mission. I am going to somehow reap every single name on here that I recognize, just so I could go “wow, I know all these people.” :3

Sorry. I’m done squeeeeing now. ^^

A few others things:

• One thing that bugs me is that some of the names have a period right in between the first and last names, like “John.Smith”.
• There are at least 7 students at this school with the same last name. I didn’t know it was a common last name (either that, or some of them are related).

Every second and fourth Sunday of the month, I do volunteer work (tech) for the Children’s Ministry at my church, which means I play the songs the kids sing in iTunes and display the lyrics on the screen (which are projected up in the front).

So a couple Sundays ago (yes, it took me this long to post it ._.), after the kids were dismissed to their respective classrooms, the Children’s Ministry leader gave me a sheet of paper and asked “Here, want to find 30 books of the Bible?”

I managed to find somewhere around 20 (I lost count) so far. So…can you find 30 books of the Bible? (And if you find any, don’t post the answers! :P)

There are thirty books of the Bible in this paragraph. Can you find them? This is a most remarkable puzzle. It was found by a gentleman in an airplane seat pocket, on a flight from Las Angeles to Honolulu, keeping him occupied for hours. One friend from Illinois worked on this while fishing from his john boat. Another friend studied it while playing his banjo. Elaine Taylor, a columnist friend, was so intrigued by it she mentioned it in her weekly newspaper column. Another friend judges the job of solving this puzzle so involving, she brews a cup of tea to help her nerves. There will be some names that are really easy to spot. That’s a fact. Some people, however, will soon find themselves in a jam, especially since the book names are not necessarily capitalized. Truthfully, from answers we get, we are forced to admit it usually takes a minister or scholar to see some of them at the worst. Research has shown that something in our genes is responsible for the difficulty we have in seeing the books in this paragraph. During a recent fund raising event, which featured this puzzle, the Alpha Delta Phi lemonade booth set a new sales record. The local paper, The Chronicle, surveyed over 200 patrons who reported that this puzzle was one of the most difficult they had ever seen. As Daniel Humana humbly puts it, “the books are all right here in plain view hidden from sight.” Those able to find all of them will hear great lamentations from those who have to be shown. One revelation that may help is that books like Timothy and Samuel may occur without their numbers. Also, keep in mind, that punctuation and spaces in the middle are normal. A chipper attitude will help you compete really well against those who claim to know the answers. Remember, there is no need for a mad exodus, there really are 30 books of the Bible lurking somewhere in this paragraph waiting to be found.

Haha, once again, I get to torture you with another dream of mine. :3 (Actually, this one’s not as exciting as the other ones. But four days in a row with dreams. Maybe there should be an Internet meme called “365 Dreams a Year” or “Dream-a-Day”. :P)

A Capstone classmate and I were lodging at a public swimming pool. In exchange for being able to stay the night, we were asked to clean the place up. We both sat at a long table by the pool, talking while working (I was using some face cleaning stuff to clean furniture, various objects and anything that’s wasn’t actual people faces).

The dream switched over to my church (where I do volunteer work). I was given the task of printing out a stack of black-and-white flyers on colored paper. But when I pressed the print button, a full-color, legal-sized poster on white paper came out. I figured that one of the ministry assistants had in the printing queue, and thought about printing the rest of out (but decided against it, when I remembered that she might want to look it over and make corrections before printing out the rest). I took a stack of colored paper and hunted for the tray to put it in…except I couldn’t find said tray. :O (Other than that, I was pretty amazed at how much luck I was having with the printer, as seeing as how it didn’t act like it was possessed. :P)

Now I was at home, in the living room. Except the living room no longer looked like our living room; it looked like a meeting room or a conference room. All around the perimeter of the room were sofas and tables. And there were a bunch of people I was unfamiliar with were also in that room (some kind of ceremony going on). Then I remember I lost a poster in this room a long time ago, so I decided to find it before someone else did.

That resulted in me crawling around on the floor, checking under the sofas and tables (even when people were in danger of stepping on me :O). I would check in areas I have not looked in for a long time, and I would crawl right across the room to get to the other side. ^_^;

The dream shifted back to the public pool. Our work (classmate’s and mine) was done, and we headed to our “room”, which looked like a locker room under construction…and it probably was, since there were lockers lined up against the walls. In between each set of lockers was a sleeping bag hanging on the wall. Classmate, myself and other people staying at the pool slept in these sleeping bags. In the middle of the room was a long, unfurnished dining table and somewhere in the corner were old kayaks and paddles.

(As for the entry title, there was a scene in Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice #10 where Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan have to go to a place called Soft Landings Inn…which was nothing like its name suggested. It was rundown and downright ugly-looking, so this dream reminded me of that.)

I’m reading some reviews on Yoursite.nu, and some of the sites being reviewed have fairly simple layouts. Or to be more honest, I felt like something else could’ve been done about it to make it look a little nicer. But that’s just me. Some reviewers were telling the webmasters things like “It’s simple, but too simple. Add some (xyz).” While something like that would make it less simple, I’m sure the webmaster wanted it to be simple with no extra frills (and adding (xyz) would take away that simplicity they were looking for). For simple layouts, I think it’s not about adding some extra stuff to save it from being too boring; it’s about paying attention to little extra details. I’m not talking about adding little shapes to your header image or sidebar, but things like text color, background color, margin/padding in the content area, alignment (and the entire CRAP principle), line-height, typeface, etc. Things people often overlook. So yes, you can stick to your original idea, without having to make it what it’s not.

The same goes for grayscale layouts. Most people seem to not like them, because they look so boring, gray and drab (reviewers often tell webmasters with these layouts that they should spice them up with some other colors, which wouldn’t make it grayscale anymore), but you can have a nice-looking grayscale layout. For me, I found that using lots of white and really light gray helps and using black and dark gray only for thin lines and text colors. In other words, keeping dark colors to a minimum. (But that’s just me. I might say “it would look better when it’s like xyz”, but I always end up seeing someone who manages to go against what I just said, while making their layout look good. So it’s always good to experiment and play around. ^_^)

In the end, the way you find all this is out is through practice and experience. You won’t become a fantabulous designer overnight (I’ve been doing this since ‘01, and I still have a long way to go before I become a great designer :P). And unless if your livelihood depends on you having a good web designs (i.e. if you’re a web designer or if you’re advertising your services or products through your website), having a good-looking layout probably isn’t the most important thing. Finding your style or what type of layouts appeal to you the most won’t come overnight either. And even that might change as you experiment further with different colors, textures or images (or lack of). So give it time and don’t rush.

If you’re looking for feedback, and you seem to be getting none from your visitors, you can try WPRs (like Yoursite.nu). They have people who are willing to review your website. Of course, because people’s personal preferences differ, webmasters shouldn’t have to take every negative feedback to heart if you like what they criticized (i.e you might like using only a limited color palette, but the reviewer thinks it’s too boring, or vice-versa). And reading up on design helps too (The Non-Designer’s Web Book is good if you’re just starting web design, and there’s also Writing for the Web: Geek’s Edition).

(And having a bad layout won’t keep me from coming back to your website. :))