Working on moving the venerable old CivilGrrl site over to new hosting today. I decided as an experiment that I'd move as much of the site as possible to off-site services. Seemed odd that I'd be putting stuff on my own server (blogs, picture browsers, etc) when all that stuff is available elsewhere. So I moved the thousand-odd pictures of Maggie over to flickr. And I moved Shelly's recipes to Google Base. I put our single grainy old rocket launch video on Google Video (I would've put it on youtube, but their RM importer was completely broken as opposed to Google video's, which was just mostly broken).

And it's taken the footprint of the site down considerably. Down to about a half-meg total (half of which is the CivilGrrl dress-up page.

And that makes it pretty absurdly easy to admin the site.



And am I the only one who thinks that the new Apple OS's GUI is kinda ugly? I don't wanna be a hater and I don't wanna claim that Vista's any better (because it ain't), but the impression I get when I see the screenshots of the new OSX is that it looks like a big hodgepodge. The little bulgy icon dock at the bottom is supposed to now look like a long skinny desk, but the forced perspective is way too short unless you live in a Salvador Dali painting. The angle of the icons in the dock is different from the drives which is itself different from the icons in whatever OSX calls Explorer. The shadows are all over the place, some from directly above, some from one side, and some from another. Some things have little reflections like they're sitting on shiny white tables, and some things do not.

Bottom line is that at no point am I convinced that I'm looking at something with actual depth or texture. The impression I get from looking from looking at OSX is pretty-much the same impression as I get looking at Vista, which is that there's so much holdover from earlier efforts at overhauling the interface that the thing now looks like the UI equivalent of the Las Vegas strip -- a thousand different ideas of how to do finest architecture, with none actually the best and few the same.

And the Vista folks at least have the excuse that they're not putting themselves forward as the arbiters of finest design. Apples are supposed to have the interface that makes Windows look like something carried over from the Soviet era, but it ends up being just a slightly better hodgepodge coupled with a user community that insists that it's actually a million billion times better hodgepodge.

Maybe they ought to bring back Tog.