text-transform:uppercase? I think not.

I just spent the last 2 hours playing with my template. I didn’t even mean to. I have my IRB paperwork all laid out, and I started to read it. I’m all set, Diet Pepsi on the table, random college football on TV, laptop charged. I’m well rested, thrilled about finally starting the human study I’ve planned for so long, yet the sitemeter called to me. So I was seeing who had been around, and decided to glance over a post one visitor read.

Then my margins bugged me – why all the white space on the edges? Yes, some sort of margin is nice, but I was only using half my screen, and let’s be honest. That’s just wasteful. The problem is that I don’t know html or CSS or any methodology of changing these things. But my simple template is very well documented (cheers to Douglas Bowman, who obviously does nice work), so I was able to figure out what I thought certain lines might do. The problem with not really knowing is that I’d alter a value, then preview. Oops – no margins at all. To read Jason Mulgrew yesterday, I had to copy and paste into a word document because the page was so wide. While I do have time to waste, I prefer not to spend it arrowing back and forth across a webpage. And I’ve donated money to him, so I think I’m all good to complain.

When I finally decided I was using the appropriate amount of screen, nothing was lining up. So I had to figure out where all those lines were, switch them around, change some of them back (Bowman knows what he’s talking about sometimes), then I finally got the layout to look somewhat normal. Then, I went through and took out all the uppercase lines – I don’t discriminate against lowercase letters. I think they have an appropriate place in the middle of words. I once got an email all in capital letters and I backed away from the computer, sure that I was being yelled at. So while I wrinkle my nose at emails in all lowercase letters, they are better than screaming at me online. But I dream of a world where upper and lowercase letters exist in harmony, and apart from my title (which just looked weird otherwise!), my blog is now that place.

So things are good – I’ve changed colors to be soothing and mellow, the margins are more appropriate, things appear to be centered. But now the posts bother me – justify them. Makes some of the old ones look all freaky, but that’s fine. The new ones will be OK. I think the headings on my sidebar should be underlined. But that underlines the date stamp at the top of each post, so that’s annoying. Change and preview. Change back and preview. Think. Leave it alone.

I was finished at least 3 times. Then I decided to alphabetize my links, because that would be lovely, right? But that lead to re-titling the sections a couple of times. Change and preview. Then I gasped as I rolled over the links and they turned orange! No, no, no. Turns out that’s the hover color, so I changed that a couple of times. On the fourth preview, I was content with it. Then I thought it would be better to put the description above the title. Nice. But then it should be bigger. Oh, and with different text. In a different font. With different padding.

So I’m done for now – I found it more aesthetically pleasing the last time I looked, and I promised myself I wouldn’t refresh it again until I had finished some real work. The reason I wrote all this out, apart from a small amount of pride that I had accomplished the margin change, which was my original goal, is that it’s a recurring theme for me. I’ve spent days in Photoshop making figures. Altering shades of black in the background, moving images around, playing with how they’re grouped, how much space between them, arrow color and placement… I can also do that with Matlab – write a functional script that contains too many for loops, then spend weeks reading manuals and checking examples for a way to be more efficient and elegant in my coding.

I’m very example-driven. So if you give me an m-file and some instructions, I’ll just mess with it, then try to run it. Fix errors, and try again. Not get the right results and fill scratch paper with matrix sizes, trying to figure out if something’s read in wrong or I used the wrong command to manipulate it, or if I changed something critical in the write-out section. So even at my most productive, I can get distracted and, like a raccoon with a shiny object, become completely entranced with something trivial. I think that’s why it’s important for me to get reminders – that what I’m trying to do shouldn’t just be a job, and that there should be some profound goal that we’re trying to reach.

So while distractions can be incredibly useful – I’ve done some of my best, most innovative work after letting my brain rest by doing Photoshop for a couple days, I try to be aware of what I’m doing. And in changing the margins of this site, I was engrossed without being conscious of it, realizing with absolute shock that so much time had passed when I looked at the clock. So rather than dwell on it anymore, I really should work. And I’m going to – as soon as I make sure this post looks right.