Rawrville

Well, I’ve been up to a few things, doing some of them in tandem, others notsomuch:

• Working at the Adler Planetarium
• Learning Javascript
• Working with jQuery
• Expanding knowledge of PHP/MySQL
• Going to classes
• Silly homework
• I turned 21!
• Got a Dell Mini 9
• Contemplating a redesign of my site

Working at the Adler has been great, it’s really helped me out with my growth as a professional. I’ve recently been working on a data collection system for IBEX audience information from various events (such as planetarium shows, classroom visits, talks at camps, et cetera), to help us understand how well we are doing as an Education and Public Outreach team and give us info to report back to NASA. I’ve been working with a lot of PHP/MySQL on that, as well as Javascript (for on-the-fly, client-side form validation, as well as some nice AJAXian stuff (via jQuery, to make less headaches for me and more compatibility for users) that just makes things work nicer). For once in my life, I’ve found myself actually liking Javascript, so it will be interesting to see what I do with it in the future.

Classes have mostly been going well, though I’m beginning to suffer from end-of-the-year laziness, which is seriously hindering some of my coursework and putting much of it off until the last minute. Part of it is me being lazy and part of it is the coursework not being stimulating enough for me (or something like that), but that should all be over in a few weeks, so hurray!

I turned 21 waaaaaay back (May 4th, for those who care/are interested), and it has been an interesting experience. Most of my escapades so far have either been for concerts (the Metromix Rock ‘n Vote concert was amazing, I Fight Dragons won with over half the vote, despite many an overheard grumble from some of the other people there (“Of COURSE the nerds would win it” – I don’t even think I need to make a comment on this, it is ridiculous enough as is), and so now they are big and famous and super rich (or something like that)), or for Musical Monday at Sidetrack. Musical Monday is amazing, period. Sidetrack is a bar up at Halsted & Roscoe, here in Chicago, and Musical Monday is their night where people drink and sing along with musicals, including (but not limited to):

• RENT
• Dr. Horrible
• Evita
• The Producers
• The Little Mermaid
• Wicked

And many more! It is awesome.

As a birthday gift from my parents (who I cannot thank enough), I got a Dell Mini 9. So far, it is wonderful (I don’t have to sit at my desk to talk with people online and read Slashdot and Smashing Magazine and Abduzeedo and Spoongraphics and Viget Inspire and Net.tutsplus and all of the other stuff I read? SWEET!), and I’ve been getting a lot of good use out of it. Well, if you consider doing Sudoku between classes and being on AIM while I’m gaming in my living room a good use, that is. Really, though, it is wonderful, and it is really helping me feel less restricted and constrained.

Last, but certainly not least, I’ve been (heavily) considering a redesign of my personal site. The current design is nice (and it fits with my resume style and my business cards and everything (that reminds me; I need to take photos of my business cards so I can put a picture of those here)), but I want to do something different with it. I’ll likely use the same color scheme and all (I enjoy these colors very much), but I’d like to more effectively utilize whitespace (well, you know what I mean), patterns (I’ve been really into damask lately, might do something damask-esque, even though it’s super-trendy right now), and other things (like experimenting with typography, playing with jQuery, possibly working on a unique layout or design, that kind of stuff).

The center of this redesign, though, would be a sort of paradigm shift. I want to make my personal website (this, the iaman.leafo.net site) a playground for myself. Sort of a sandbox, if you will, where I can play around with new ideas I have, test them out, get feedback, et cetera. This blog would begin to serve not only the purpose of chronicling things that go on in my life, but also for me to post about, explain, and get some good C&C on what I do. I’d love to be able to experiment with lots of different things (interesting menu options, different presentation methods, et cetera), but the problem with that is, in order to have the freedom I’d like, I’d have to more or less abandon all hope of using my personal site as a professional site. At the very least, I’d have to have a “professional” section of the site that stays the same and doesn’t get affected by the sometimes insane, often goofy changes I would be making to the rest of the site.

So, I ask all of you handful of people reading this, what do you think I should do? Should I separate the two into separate sites (have a personal and professional site, with different domains), or should I have a professional section of my site that I keep consistent and try to make the path to it as clear as possible on my homepage? Or should I do something else entirely? Whatever your suggestions are, I’d love to hear them!