The End

It's been real, everyone. Bye.

No, but seriously. "It's All in the Timing", awesome name notwithstanding, has run its course.

I originally started the blog as a commentary on life, but my intention was to not make it personal.

Through my junior year of high school, the blog in fact got very personal, and I used it as a spout for my relationship troubles, social dilemmas, and activity updates. It helped me develop my "one-to-many" blogging writing style, and became a way for me to let off steam, or at least shoot my thoughts out into the world, even though posts would frequently consist of song lyrics or cryptic plays or poems.

In the last year and a half, my freshman and sophomore years of college, I've tried to make it lighter and more relevant to people other than me. Funny? I tried to do that too - maybe it worked, maybe it didn't. When Facebook started importing blog posts into Notes, I did that too, and for a couple of months kept up a weekly posting routine with whimsical, sometimes Seinfeld-esque entries.

So why should it end? I don't really know myself, but when I think about this blog, my feelings for it run very strongly in the past tense. It mostly represents my high school years, I suppose - the feeling of being a kid living with your family at home, being taken care of and fed, doing your homework and chores because your parents tell you to, and the general flavor of teenagerness that embodies high school and, to a lesser extent, my freshman year of college.

I turn twenty in a couple months (January 15, *cough cough*), and that flavor that permeated this blog is all but gone, with this last post sweeping up the lingering scraps of my need to project personal emotion online.

So, as a certain post was titled, what now?

Well, as I immerse myself deeper and deeper into the internet, and learn more and more about website and interaction design, and human-computer interaction, I've discovered a niche for a blog that talks about the principles of these disciplines in a way that a beginner, or close to beginner can understand. And, having teaching running so strongly in my family, I know that the best way to learn is by teaching to someone else.

And so "subject/oriented" was born. I hope to post fairly regularly on this new blog, and my articles will almost always be accessible to a novice audience, and hopefully should be interesting to all. I intend to write about what I'm currently learning in the field of interaction design, explore case studies of good (and bad) web design, and link to and offer commentary on other articles in the (and I hate to use this word) "blogosphere". There, it's done. Never using that word again.

I'm also making the switch from my good friend Blogger to a WordPress installation on my own server space. Blogger is amazing, and so, so simple to use, but fiddling around with WordPress is a really good learning experience for me, and I hope to use it in my web design much more in the future, so having subject/oriented on that platform will be a good step.

Well, that's about it. I'm going to try and have Facebook import my posts on the new blog as well, but the content probably won't be as colorful as these posts have been. Oh well - hopefully it'll be more useful to someone out there.

Fin.

(s/o)

Halo 3 Opens Big

Halo 3 officially is the biggest thing ever, breaking launch records to become the single biggest U.S. entertainment launch ever with estimates of sales up to $170 million. That means it beat out Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (the book) and Spider-man 3 (the movie).

Recipe: Some Kind of Mutated Bruschetta

Here's something I came up with last night while watching Arrested Development: some sort of mutated bruschetta thing.

1. Dice a half tomato and about a fourth of a bell pepper.
2. Mix both together with a little bit of salsa, red pepper, salt, pepper, garlic, and oregano.
3. Serve with sliced, slightly toasted, bread. Garnish with lettuce.

An Ear to the Ground

As if we needed further proof that Google is awesome (mostly), the response today on their blog to the backlash against their discontinuation of their download-to-own/rent program shows us all that the company whose informal slogan is "Don't Be Evil" is, indeed, not evil. The basic impression on the online community was that Google shortchanged the people who had bought videos from them, giving them only Google Checkout credit, which, to some people, was much worse than actual money - and not much of it at that.
Google's response? Listen to the complaints, assume the customer is right, and give them more. Might I add that it seems that Google expended quite a bit of its own effort in this technically unnecessary but, I assume, very welcome move. The blog post is here.

And in other news, the design (made by Dan Cederholm) for the social community site centered around wine, Cork'd, got completely ripped off by some other site presuming to sell templates. Now that's just annoying.

The Paramecia Flies Again!

Just a quick plug for Brynn Shepherd's redesign of her website, Flying Paramecia, which was featured on no less than five CSS and design galleries:

1. CssLeak
2. CSS Mania
3. Most Inspired
4. CSS Clip
5. CSS Impress

It's cool and, dare I say it, nifty. Go check it out.