Fan Mail, Workity Work, Strobist

I got a nice letter from someone who enjoyed my Escape Pod stories last night right before going to bed, which really perked me up. I've been doing a mostly good job about not obsessing over the message board comments. I agree with many of them, and other, I don't even understand. A couple have taught me things. Mostly, I'm just excited that there are people with opinions about my work out there, negative or positive.

I put in another evening's worth of work on the client design project prior to that. I'm at the HTML/CSS coding phase, which means my "Mother-$#(*#(*!! Microsoft" count was approaching 20+ an hour. I keep IE 6 on my working machine because 30% of the browser market still has the damned thing installed. Lots of perfectly good CSS gets mangled by this. I was trying to do some mouse-over sprites, but IE insisted on mangling them. Then I had to fight z-index bugs. When the market share of IE 6 falls below 15 percent, I'm going to hold a party and we're all going to get stinking DRUNK and go piss on the big Microsoft sign in Redmond.

But I bested the beast eventually. I am close to having the front page layout done. The other four designs are all very similar so they will go equally fast, I suspect, and I can reuse some of the CSS. Then there's the blog, which presents an all new set of challenges that I look forward to sinking my teeth into.

But not tonight! Some time today, my new strobist gear should arrive, so you can bet I will be in the back yard with my camera and light stands and umbrellas and flashes trying to take good pictures and sort out how the gear works. I need to read up on sync speed, because that's the one thing in the strobist tutorials that I don't quite understand, but with the equipment in hand, I should be able to figure it out.

I can't wait to start playing. I hope the weather holds until this weekend, when my beautiful model becomes available.