I’m not sure how I neglected to mention this, since I have been ridiculously excited about it for months, but I’m telling you now: On July 20th and 21st (less than two weeks away!) I will be attending the Webvisions conference in Portland.

This means a couple of things:

1. I get to soak up boatloads of useful information about designing for the web (among other things). (Then again, that means I will also have the un-enviable task of choosing which of these great talks to listen to during any given hour.)
2. I will get to see some internet celebrities in person. (I am especially excited about Dan Cederholm and Derek Powazek. To be perfectly honest, I have not heard of many of the other speakers, although I feel like I should have. Dear internet celebrities: I’m sorry. Now I will know who you are. )
3. I may get to experience driving in downtown Portland for the first time. (In other words, if I never show up to the conference, you’ll know why.)
4. If you are going to Webvisions, you should leave a comment saying so and you should certainly say hello if you see me there! I will be the shortish redhead with the camera glued to her face, but I don’t really need to tell you that because my regrettable “lack of laptop” syndrome will probably cause me to stand out from the crowd. In any case, I would be delighted if anyone recognized me, thereby proving that real people do, in fact, read this blog. I’m not expecting it, mind you… I just think it would be really cool.
5. I’m driving up with Philip, who told me about the event in the first place and is the only one of my friends who is as serious about this whole web thing as I am (perhaps more so, in fact). He has also kindly agreed to beat up anybody who gives me any trouble (you know, like trying to mug me or making jokes about my unfortunate habits)—and furthermore to chew them up and spit them out and stomp upon their remains. Ooookay, so maybe I made that last part up, but the point is I feel perfectly comfortable travelling with Philip because I know he is excellent at being the “big brother” who will look out for me. Thanks in advance, Phil.

“But, Erin!” you’re thinking, “Isn’t this a conference for, like, real, bona fide web designers? You know, who actually have websites for their web design businesses? Websites that actually have ‘about’ pages and whose portfolios do not have ‘under construction’ signs on them?”

Ah. What an interesting point. You are probably right—which is the exact reason that I have been working on a bit of a pet project. I will be making some changes to Lylium.org in the coming weeks—not drastic ones, mind you, but things such as actually finishing my about page and tweaking the design a bit and adding a few other things that may or may not be cool. But I will spare you any explanation—you’ll see these changes for yourself soon enough.

To sum up: Webvisions will be many kinds of cool. I hope to see you there.

(Also, Philip said if I’m really nice he might let me use his laptop a little during the conference, so perhaps I will make some kind of exciting “Woohoo! I’m here this very moment watching Derek Powazek talk!” kind of post. Who knows.)

(Also, you can of course expect photos on Flickr after the fact. )

So, you may or may not have visited my HTML love-child, The Jade Sabre, but it has been lying dormant for more than three years. For those unaware, The Jade Sabre is about, as I so timelessly described it, “Mara Jade and all things Star Wars.” And it was the testing ground for my html skills for its first three years of existence. Now it’s pushing six, and doesn’t have much to show for it except dust… oh, and being the number two result on google for “Mara Jade.” (The first one is the official Star Wars site.)

But anyway, I still regularly get mail from the Jade Sabre; none of which I reply to, of course, because it is always from fans asking me crazy questions about Star Wars, the answers to which I might not have known even when I did remember all that stuff. But today I received a particularly helpless-sounding plea from a myserious soul named “Gweniveve.” She was succinct:

“Why haven’t you updated your site lately???”

Apparently she felt that her reprimand may have been too harsh, because two minutes later a revised message appeared in my inbox:

“Why haven’t you updated your site lately?? It is a great site though”

Thank you for the addend, Gweniveve. I appreciate it, and so does the Sabre. And, in answer to your question, I did update something on The Jade Sabre this very evening! I, ah… I updated the link on the homepage so it links correctly to my blog instead of to Lylium.com. Shameless, I know.

Tonight I had the opportunity to spend a good chunk of time working on a client’s upcoming site. It was really great to just spend the afternoon and evening designing and problem-solving; I haven’t had the chance to do that for a while. I’m really excited to show you this design when I’m finished with it, too.

As I opened up my web design folder to begin working tonight, I found myself hacking my way through woefully overgrown folders full of ancient psds and moldy html files and who knows what else. (Don’t worry Andrew, you won’t be charged for that time. ) After finally installing some sensible organization (A folder each for “Clients,” “Blog,” and “My old sites,” with clearly delineated sub-folders for individual sites), I poked around a bit in my old websites folder. Sadly, most of the designs hidden in this folder never even saw the light of day… well, not so sadly, in a few cases. But the fact is that a large portion of my portfolio never made it to the web, making me wonder if I should cite them as examples of my work.

Even if they were never actually published, however, I know for a fact that each and every one of those shoddy old designs for fanlistings and Star Wars sites contributed a little bit to my development as a designer. So I don’t really feel like I can let them go. They’re a part of my design legacy, if you will! (Even if a few of them did feature typewriter fonts and poorly rendered lightsabers.)

If for no other reason than to amuse myself, I plan to post a few of these designs here sometime in the near future. But that time is not now, because I need to go to bed and am too lazy to take screenshots of them. I will, however, leave you with a glimpse of one of my newest “old” designs. This one hails from a year and a half ago, back when I still had Lylium.com registered and was planning on using it as my portfolio site

Click on the image below to see the full screenshot. The text in the design is just a paragraph from some essay I wrote that I grabbed to use as filler. Also, my intention in highlighting “WEBSITES” in the nav bar was to demonstrate how all of the links would look when rolled over.

Sure, it’s not perfect. I would definitely tweak things, were I to work on it again now. But there are a lot of things I really like about this design: it’s simple, clean, and fun, and it delivers impact. I’m almost tempted to adapt it into a template for my blog. But then again… designing a whole new template sounds like more fun.

So there you go. Since my portfolio is apparently never going to be updated, there is a glimpse of some of my other design work. I hope to share more soon.

So, you’re probably thinking: Wow! Erin hasn’t written anything in almost a week. She must be building up to some extra special, kick-awesome, blow-your-socks-off amazing post!

Okay, so maybe nobody was thinking that. But if you were thinking that, you were wrong. Sorry, but the real reasons I haven’t written in almost a week are far more pedestrian details like: 1) School, 2) Procrastination, and 3) Life. Such are the hazards of being a blogger by hobby, I guess. I have to squeeze blogging into the nooks and crannies of my life. I’m not a professional. Yet. As a side note, this is the last time I’m going to apologize for not writing for x number of days. I’m sure you know that if I had my druthers I would be publishing multiple posts every day, but the fact is that life is life and no matter how hard I try I will never be able to completely eliminate pesky things like face-to-face interaction with real human beings. (That was a joke, Mom.)

But anyway, on to the actual reason for this post. Ever since I have been writing here at Lylium.org, ideas for things to write about have begun to pop, unbidden, into my head every day. I’ll be sitting in math class, and suddenly I’ll realize, “Hey! I should write about my old deceased pets! Or spinach! Or malaria!” And, as these ideas come streaming out of my head like spray cheese from a can, it’s the least I can do to capture them on paper and hope that I will someday get around to writing about them.

A lot of these post ideas, I’ve noticed, center on sharing stories about things that mean a lot to me. I know that sounds sappy (and maybe it is), but I would really like to share a snapshot of my life with you folks. Whether you’re my best friend or whether you’re a stranger who just found my website for the first time, I would like to offer you a glimpse into the ideas, objects, and people that surround me and are important to me. So, towards that end, I am introducing a new feature on Lylium.org: “Things that I love.” (with an implied “… and that you should too.”) This semi-regular attraction will showcase and tell the story of something important in my life; be it a person, an article of clothing, or a principle. I know this is not a new idea (I’m stealing it from Sound of Music, at the very least, but I’m sure other bloggers have done it too), but I’m hoping this new feature will provide the impetus for some really interesting future posts. Having said all that, here is an inaugaural mini-post to give you an idea of what I am talking about:

Things that I love: Green polka-dot flip flops

The pictured flip flops are, admittedly, a slightly ironic choice for the first “thing that I love.” The fact is, they are pretty uncomfortable. They are slightly too big for my midget-sized feet, the plastic toe thingy chafes on my foot, and they are rapidly becoming flat as a pancake after two or three times of wearing them. To top it all off, the polka-dot design is already wearing off the shoe.

But the reason I bought them, and the reason I love them in spite of their faults, is quite simple: their aesthetic appeal is fantastic. (Also they were really cheap. ) These shoes, believe it or not, serve as a perfect representation of three or four of my personal favorite design elements:

1. Green. This is huge. My “favorite color” was never green, growing up. I always answered pink or blue or purple or yellow or something innocuous and girly like that if anyone asked me. But one day I woke up and realized that not only had I painted my room a shade of green, but I had green pillows on my bed, my wardrobe included a healthy amount of green, and literally every website I currently had published on the web featured green in some way shape or form. (Don’t believe me? Take a look: 1 2 3 4 5 6) I have since wholeheartedly embraced the color (especially on the yellow side of the spectrum, in tones of lime, sage, and celedon.) and its myriad possibilities. Maybe I really am Irish.
2. Tone-on-tone, monochromatic color scheme. I love the subtle impact of an almost monochromatic color scheme. Whereas many different, contrasting colors used together can busy a screen and create excitement (and can be used very effectively), tone-on-tone design is more comforting and relaxing; at least to my eye, it appears more orderly and controlled. One of my favorite examples of a tone-on-tone site design is the website for Mint, a stats program developed by Shaun Inman. (Surprise, surprise, the site is green. ) On his site, the refreshing green surround not only creates a warm, inviting effect, it pops the orange “pay here!” button, making it an extremely effective call to action. (I realize that I may not be up on all the correct color lingo; so to be clear, by tone-on-tone I mean patterns or layers of color that are based on one hue (like green, blue, or red), and then include other lighter and darker shades of the same color, also possibly including black or white.)
3. Delicate, crisp patterns in general. Coming back to the shoes, I especially love a tone-on-tone color scheme when it is implemented in a crisp pattern like the one gracing my green flip-flops.
4. Polka-Dots in particular. There is not much to say about this. Polka-dots are just one of my favorite things.

So when all of these lovely things confronted me in one, adorable, flip-flop package, I caved. Now, I’m not sure I would have bought them if I knew how quickly the design was going to wear off of them… but at least I got pictures. Oh, and I got a blog entry out of them too. Definitely not a wasted purchase.

If you have any connection with the Mac world at all, you have probably heard about this tasty little development: Apple has just released a beta version of Boot Camp, an application that allows users to dual boot their Intel-powered Macs with both Mac OS X and Windows XP. In other words, as Apple says, “Macs do Windows, too.” Plenty of people all over the blogosphere have already combed this news up and down, frontwards and backwards, squeezing every iota of meaning that they can out of Apple’s announcement. I don’t have much new to offer to that table, except what this announcement means for me.

I do not have operating system attachments. I like Windows fine. I have tried Mac OS X, and although I am not proficient in it I like it quite a bit too. So I have a little bit of a hard time sympathizing with the people who are screaming bloody murder over the idea of their Macs being blemished by the unholy stain of Windows. But I know you are out there, so if any of you are reading this, consider this: As you may remember, I have been considering the purchase of a laptop sometime this year. I was already leaning towards a MacBook Pro (which would be my first Mac), but Boot Camp has made it many times more likely that I will actually buy one. From my perspective, Apple has sweetened the deal: not only can I get a kick-awesome laptop complete with Mac OS X and all its associated goodies, but I can run my Windows-only software on it as well! I could play Sims 2 on my MacBook Pro! If that’s not grounds for major excitement, I don’t know what is.

As with anything to do with computers, however, this scenario has its own problems. The first and foremost for me is: I don’t actually have Windows XP. That’s right, My computer is still in the dark ages of Windows 2000. (Which are not so dark, really; Mac users always talk about how much Windows crashes, but my operating system has not crashed once that I can remember in three years of owning it. Maybe XP crashes more, but I don’t think so.) I am O.K. with buying a copy of XP, because I would like to upgrade my desktop PC to XP anyway. But… XP’s notorious registration requirements would not allow me to legally install it on both my desktop and my laptop. I suppose I could just put it on my laptop and live with Win 2000 on my desktop, but is it really worth $140 to be able to play Sims 2? (Okay, that wouldn’t be the only purpose… )

I don’t know. But one thing’s for sure: Apple’s release of Boot Camp has only made it more likely that I will end up purchasing their products. Thanks for making it easy for us, Apple. Way to go.

In case you missed it, the photo of our Performa that I featured in this post the other day was chosen for the unofficial Apple weblog’s rig of the day! I discovered this when I got up this morning and had not only several new comments on the afore-mentioned post, but also dozens of new Flickr comments and literally HUNDREDS of new page views directed from tuaw!

All of this meant that by 2:00 pm, when it was time to go to the dentist for a routine cleaning, my ego was roughly the size of a swollen melon–and growing by the minute. As the smiley dental hygienist started ordering me around and poking me with menacing dental tools, I felt like telling her, “Hey, Lady, you don’t know who you’re dealing with! My photo was featured on TUAW today. I’ve had 300 new hits since breakfast. Can you compete with that?” But instead I just lay there all limp-like and let her shove things around in my mouth.

In addition to a cleaning, I was scheduled for a panoramic X-ray today to look for my wisdom teeth. I’m at that age where we need to start worrying about the little buggers erupting out. Now, I don’t know if you have ever had a panoramic X-ray of your head before, but let me tell you: the dental technicians (or whatever they are) were bored the day they came up with this process. Their thinking must have been along the lines of “Let’s devise a method of X-raying a person’s head that makes them look as completely ridiculous as possible!”, because I don’t think they could have succeeded so spectacularly otherwise. Smiley dental hygienist lady: “Now just walk around behind that machine. That’s right. Now stick your chin on this plate. And bite down on this stick. And put these prongs on the side of your head. And do the monkey dance. There you go! Just one moment.”

So, long story short, I have wisdom teeth. Four of ‘em. And they’re looking ripe. They said it’s not urgent that I get them removed immediately (groan), but sometime this year I need to. So probably we’ll do that this summer–and I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to the days of numb-mouthed puffy-faced drooly eating. Oh joy.

(BTW: Lylium.org seems to have developed a really annoying problem. Everything is fine in Firefox, of course, but in Internet Explorer my right sidebar is being pushed all the way down the page beneath the content. Any ideas as to why this could be? It didn’t used to be this way, but I can’t think of anything I’ve changed. Also, does it look this way in Safari, Mac users? Thanks in advance.) Thanks Phil!

You know how sometimes families will develop a reputation with other families in their community? Not even necessarily in a bad way, just in a “that family’s really outdoorsy” or “Oh, that’s just the family that practices cannibalism,” kind of way.

Well, for better or worse, my family and I have been branded as computer nerds. (I suspect that when we’re not around we’re also known as the ‘boring’ family, but that’s a whole different story.) Whether this is deserved or not I will leave for you to determine, but the fact is that our friends and acquaintances regularly come to us looking for technical advice/salvation, because it is an accepted fact that we Julians are “computer people.” This is partially because for much of my life we have had at least one computer per person in our household; but also because at any given moment the odds of finding us all sitting at our computers are… high.

It seems that my family’s affinity for computers began before either my brother or I were even conceived, because as my parents like to tell us, they spent long nights when they were newly married playing those new-fangled TEXT-BASED ADVENTURE GAMES! (Emphasis added to demonstrate their excitement.) I believe they were also some of the first people they knew to actually get a computer (An Apple, of course), but I wasn’t around so I may not have the details completely straight.

One thing I know for sure is that computers have been a gigantic part of my life for as long as I can remember. My earliest memory of computer-excitement is from that fateful night when my parents came home from shopping at Costco. Dad walked in the door with a big cardboard box in his arms, set it down on the table, carefully opened it up, and pulled out… a brand new computer! It was a Macintosh Performa 578, but in my six-year-old excitement, all I noticed was that it was COLOR! Our first color computer! I loved this computer, because it had Kid Pix (which rocked my world like you would not believe) and Mario Teaches Typing and Wacky Jacks.

This little computer served us faithfully for years, but pretty soon my family started switching to bigger, faster, (at that time) better PCs, and they gave me the Performa to keep in my room. So it became the first computer I was responsible for, as well as the machine I used for school reports and on which I designed my first website (The story of my introduction to the internet is worthy of its own post. Let’s just say my tagline is right: I grew up with the internet. ).

Finally, one of my family members upgraded their PC and gave me their old one. So my days as a Mac user were over, and I happily accepted my newer, faster (although still hopelessly outdated) PC. Since then I have upgraded to new PCs several times, but this post is growing unwieldy so I will spare you the details.

Except to mention that three years ago I bought a computer for the first time, which is the PC I still have, and let me tell you: I love it to death. It’s slightly outdated now, but has aged surprisingly well, and with my new monitor it is a thing of beauty. (I told you I’d post pictures of it someday!) So take that, Mac users, PC people can get attached to their computers too.

But anyway, back to how my family is made up of computer geeks… these are the computers that currently make up our household:

• Mine (see above)
• Mom’s (newest computer we have)
• Dad’s (newer than mine, older than Mom’s)
• An old Dell laptop that is rapidly growing decrepit
• The afore-mentioned Performa (Yes, we still have it! It probably hasn’t been turned on in a year, though.)
• An older-than-dirt “laptop” (affectionately known as the “luggable”) that probably doesn’t work anymore.

This is not including my brother’s TWO computers (soon to be three, including his Fiance’s laptop) since he doesn’t live here anymore; but he’s definitely still part of the family, and demonstrates the family computer geekiness.

Now, in a surprising development, this history of family computing may be about to come full circle! For the past six months or so, I have been researching Apple computers. It started because I wanted to upgrade my beloved PC, and the more I looked around the more attractive Macs were looking. I’ve gone back and forth so many times, talked with countless people through countless arguments about why one platform or the other is better. And, slowly but surely, my desire to own a Macintosh has been increasing. I have surreptitiously been reading The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and keeping up on Apple’s latest releases.

It is entirely possible that I will purchase a MacBook Pro later this year. This would be new territory for me in many ways: My first OSX Mac, my first laptop (…my first computer that costs almost as much as my car did =-o…). I want to wait till later this year to purchase one for a number of reasons: First and foremost, I need to save some more money. Secondly, I want to wait until some of the issues that I’ve read about have been worked out. (Computer whine, screen issues, etc.) I’m also kind of hoping that Apple will do a similar deal this year as the one they did last year, where they gave away an iPod with Powerbook purchases. But most of all… I’m just not sure yet. Is it really worth the expense and the hassle of incompatable software? Of not having Photoshop?? I don’t know. But it’s darn attractive. And it would seem particularly fitting, in view of my family’s reputation, to be a bi-platform computer user.

My parents probably never guessed, back when they were staunch Macintosh users, that they would one day be trying to convince their daughter that switching from Windows to a Mac would be too much of a pain. What silly problems and decisions computers have created in our lives… things that we never thought we’d have to think about. But here we are. And, for better or worse…. I am a computer geek. And proud.

Update: My brother tells me that the Performa was actually our third color computer. Oops. I guess that just goes to emphasize the technological-forwardness of my family; but as far as I’m concerned, it was our first one because it’s the first one I remember.

Today I bit the bullet and bought a pro Flickr account. This was partially inspired by the awesome time I had taking photographs at a get-together for Brian and Melanie on Sunday. You can see those photos at my photostream. And if you happen to be one of the people of whom I put a picture up, let me know if you’d rather I take it down. Except for Kelly, because the picture of Kelly is way too awesome.

This is one of my all-time favorite shots. These flowers were sitting on a table, and Brian happened to notice that the sunlight had thrown an awesome spotlight on them. So I seized the opportunity.

As you may have noticed, I’ve done some further work towards customizing my layout. See esp: new navigation on right sidebar. How do you think it looks? Does the script work correctly in your browser? (I’d be especially interested in Safari or Mac IE, as I have access to neither.) It’s supposed to be a list of expanding menus that drop down when you click on them.

Also! I finally got the site to validate for CSS and XHTML. Yay! That was a bit of a headache, chasing down those little problems and their nit-picky solutions, but all in all it feels good to have a ‘validated’ site.

I don’t have much else to say, mainly due to the fact that I enjoyed approximately THREE hours of sleep last night. =-o I did, however, turn in a satisfactory first draft. But I do not have the energy for a longer, more interesting post tonight. Sorry.

Oh, Lost is new tomorrow! Boo ya!

Tada! Well, here it is. I gots myself my own place. Blogger was great while it lasted, but I felt that I needed a blogging platform with a little bit more power behind it, a little bit more customization. And let me tell you, Wordpress roxxors my soxxors. Here’s why:

• It imported all my old posts from Blogger before you could say “Import all my old posts from Blogger.”
• It is compatible with web standards.
• It has a well-designed, intuitive interface
• It was simple to set up but you can get just about as in-depth as you want with customizing it.
• And last, but not least… Cheap as free. What else can I say?

So anyway, this little adventure called Lylium.org that we are setting off on should be fun. I hope at least a few new people are reading this… and that many more will continue to come. That being said, I apologize for the unfinished-ness of much the content of this site. (A.K.A. ‘about me’ and all that other stuff up there ^^) I hate to move into a place while the paint is still wet, as it were, but I’m really too busy (and behind) with my other responsibilites to finish every detail before I move in. If I waited to continue blogging until I had finished all the pages, I wouldn’t be writing this ’til sometime in March. (If then.)

Why Lylium, some of you may be wondering? Well, that is a question for the FAQ or the About me page, perhaps, but I’ll give you the short answer. It was a name that I made up and associated with myself when I would play make believe as a kid. And, actually, until last summer I had lylium.com registered for my personal site… which I never actually put up. When it came time to renew the name last fall, I decided to let it slide to save a little money. Well, needless to say, pernicious spam bots ate it up, and this time around I had to register Lylium.org. But that’s really okay… the name’s growing on me already. I hope you like it too.

That’s all for now! See ‘ya around.

Erin