programming contest, web design

Yesterday was spent, from 9a-8:15p, in the campus library where the regional programming contest was being held. Jessica and I were helpers, Jess as “Operations Support” (i.e. she got to run print-outs from the printer to contestants) and myself as “Systems” (i.e. I got to deal with technical difficulties). It was a long day but thankfully nothing major went wrong. We didn’t have many little problems either; I mostly sat at a computer, surfing the ‘net.

Scott and I went out to dinner at Applebee’s afterward which was nice except he didn’t enjoy the chicken he got. I ended up working on the Orchid layout here, which is now the default, for the rest of the evening. I went to bed kind of early and got up at about 10:30 this morning feeling rested. I’ve been kind of sleepy this afternoon, though.

David and I took a walk and hung out in the park earlier this afternoon, people-watching and talking. I managed to find an apple underneath someone’s apple tree on the walk back, which tickled me because I never see fruit trees around here.

I’ve a few web projects lined up for me. One is for Dr. Jaromczyk and it involves redesigning the Undergraduate Education page. The other is one David brought up today: a simple admin tool for an apartment owner he knows. The last is to do a design for Todd’s personal site, once he gives me an idea of what he’s looking for.

The new layout should look okay in Firefox 1.0.4 (I need to update, I know) and IE 6.0, which are so far the only browsers I’ve checked it in. I’m assuming Safari, Mozilla, and Opera display it decently, too, because they’re usually fine. It was designed in Fireworks, hacked into separate images in the GIMP, and coded in vim. I didn’t take that photo of the orchid: it came from sxc.hu, a stock photography site.

So Ashlee, Jessica, and I went to a club the other day with the high hopes of dancing in a packed, noisy room while looking sexy, but that idea flopped majorly. Oh, we went to a club and we looked sexy (details in a bit), but we were the only ones there apart from three creepy guys, one of whom groped me (just grabbed my stomach) as we were leaving. It was a sucky night. The highlights were getting to dress up and dancing to the Black Eyed Peas in the car. Jessica was in a slinky red shirt with black pants and black heels; Ashlee was in a sparkly blue halter top with black gauchos and heels; I was in a green tank top that has gold bead-work at the top and on the straps, brown gauchos that have gold pinstriping, and gold wedges. We’re going to try going back to the club some other time, possibly a Thursday at midnight when it should be packed. Should be.