Nothing beats a night off from underwear

December 2015 · 4 minute read

God, it feels good. After a full on week at work, a release on a new project (really only a small accomplishment but hey, a win is a win. And I like to win), a geeky meetup thing where you meet other people with similar interests, a solid gym session, 3 dinners, and a mindless few hours of catching up on Empire. Good series, can’t get enough of it. Love the music, music is my creative outlet or maybe it just causes me to day dream?

I’ve been meaning all week to have an early night and get some good sleep, but there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to get everything done. One more project off the list, though. You what that means? A new project. Something trickier, something even more rewarding! (After another long depressing period trying to work it out and nearly giving up all together, of course). At this rate of progress – both weight training and developing, I’ll definitely be back in the ring early next year.

Now now, let’s not get too excited. Nothing really happens til it actually happens. For example I had every intention of going home tonight to do more work and research, I even prepared a list of #todo’s. But by the time I got there, the couch just looked so good… It’s big and loungey with a massive ottoman that joins on and makes it pretty much the same size as my bed. But in a different room. Where my computer is not located. And I guess everyone needs to reward themselves occasionally. Haha, what a reward?!

But, I mean I just nailed custom responsive CSS. On my own! I also learned a bit more about domain routing and a pretty solid and draining lesson about what happens when you redirect your domain name servers… That was painful. Nearly wanted to just give up, but omg I don’t know why I can’t. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. No. There’s definitely something wrong with me. I’m pretty sure that other people don’t get this crazy obsessed about stuff. Either way, I learned a few things and hopefully will be doing it all a little bit faster on the next round.

Here’s what I’m talking about. This is the site that I had, hosted on wordpress’s platform as a blog with two pages using a design that someone else had built with strict and limitations on what you can do.

This is the new site, which I guess isn’t that much different at first glance. But with custom styling I was able to signifcantly alter page layouts compared to what I could do before, this was a great way to practice the CSS and layout skills I have recently acquired. It is also now on a server in Sydney, run through Amazon Web Services and encrypted with ssh making the data more secure.

Because I like to write about a broad range of topics, not all of which are of interest to everyone I decided I wanted to separate out all of my opinion posts from my technical articles and examples, which I would also like to easily reference in the future. You can check it out for yourself at www.selenasmall.com

Obviously, there’s a bit more work to do with colour schemes and stuff but realistically I’m not interested in picking pretty colours, I’m interested in making things work correctly. So, overall it’s really the fact that it’s working and fully responsive that I’m happy about. Well, happy is a bit of an overstatement. I’m pretty sure I can do better than that. I’m mildly pleased that I maybe did a thing that could be useful later.

For now, though, enough gloating. It’s time to get some hard earned sleep, before a solid morning session at the gym, where I’ll hopefully learn some new exercises​ and a weekend working out what I’m going to attempt to tackle next. Possibly, a little more insight into infosec might be beneficial…