On The Tides
Looking for where I’ll be headed next feels like casting a net out there and … you don’t know what you are going to catch.
It’s good actually: a mental gathering of the places you’ve loved; considering returning to them. And I think of Philadelphia, Nashville, Pittsburgh…I think of walks in the snow this time of year and long drives through fall leaves.
Also I think of places I’ve visited briefly or heard good things about; Miami, Austin, Southern C.A., Israel, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai… and with those ideas the world unfolds…
Now let’s see what comes next. Will it feel like retracing old favorites steps? Or forging new trails?
Best Minimal Power Points
I’m searching for a few good ideas for creating a minimal Power Point theme. Minimal is tough I think in this case: you need consistency and you need t0 stay the hell out of the way of your content. I’m focusing on looking at layout/ color scheme/ and block elements that flatter the content and leave room for titles and graphs.
A couple good looking themes from Biz It. They like their stacked texts.
Pros: simple look and I dig the fonts and texture (added in back by using a photograph of natural papers).
Cons: The “prev” and “next” buttons at the bottom feel like an assumption that this ppt. is to be viewed without a presenter. Guess it’s easy enough to scrape off after buying? There’s no dynamic use of a logo or image here, nothing becomes a water mark or makes it into the theme in any big way: that’s up to the buyer to build in.
Below, Our Services theme with teal high fiber paper background, and The Future theme with black tar paper background. And last but not least, the Corporate theme: light gray, logo goes here, content goes here, title thrown at far right.
Free code for Adding Comments to Website/ Forums to Website
After cruising through several sites looking for easy to use code that looks good I came up with these two resources:
Free code for adding comments to website:
This links explains how Echo works and looks.
Free code for adding forums to website:
This site explains Tal.ki I like it because it lets users create comments without going to the hassle of creating a profile.
Aging in America
Don’t be fooled: there are no great cures to the whole dilemma of aging here- just an account of another holiday spent in a small Tennessee town with lots of time on your hands and lots of corn fields to look out over.
I guess there’s no way I can write about something like aging in a very personal way. I don’t want to name names or describe persons on whom that wrinkly process has occurred so instead I have a series of experiences which bring things into perspective…
…my grandmother getting older. Realizing that I have always thought of her as an old woman, but that she stayed that way all my life and has now passed into a point where I think of her as not an old woman, but an “older woman” . It’s such a subtle distinction but right now it means everything.
…playing with my niece and playing all the games I used to play: yelling in the coat closet and shining flashlights down the bedroom a/c vents to try and see the center of the earth. Whoa, I used to be the one getting coached on how to do this!
…talking with my brother and his wife and making up things his daughter should learn to say. One of those things being “I want some cousins!” Yikes, I say.
… My mom asking me if she is “too old” to wear this or that. While my grandmother has always felt like an old woman to me my mom has always felt like a young woman. I could never imagine her being to old for anything.
…walking around the neighborhood wearing my moms coat and going out to look at a field. Aware that I must look like my mom out for a walk in this coat. Looking out at a pond with frogs in it and listening to those frogs. Being happy where they are and okay with them being out of sight, rather than wanting to catch one and see it in a jar. Well, maybe I do kinda still want to do that…
…wishing I had a house here. Yes, a house in Tennessee .
Back on Board…
After a pause in blogging I’ve decided to fire up the Linguistic Underpinnings again. To those of you who said you missed the site- thanks for you interest. I will try to produce a collection of writings that continue to be worth the read!
cheers,
Ally Reeves
Job Hunt India
I’m in the midst of searching for my dream job in India and needless to say it’s been interesting.
The best of what I’ve discovered so far? That Indian business is booming with companies that are holding their own in terms of design, advertising, and interaction.
Very cool stuff!
Check out the companies below who are doing their part to stir the masses:
Dangerous Hiking Trail: Huashan
It’s a little out of character for this site, but a friend recently forwarded an article to me about the dangerous Huashan trail in China, and the description and nature of the trail were so nuts I wanted to post something about it. As someone who loves hiking in new landscapes and who’s trekked through many a trail in National parks of the US and a few in India too, I was amazed to hear about the risky nature of this trail. As a note, The SSQQ website , which this story springs from, is an odd one to be sure. The site actually seems to be a hobby websites for a couple who organize Caribbean Dance Cruises ??! but it has a bit of everything on it. Among the many random things in it’s archives are several stories of dangerous places and it seems to be a hobby of the site’s host to seek out some of the best stories of leisurely travel turned TV action movie.
A few pictures from the Huashan Trail taken from the SSQQ travel site are below. I recommend checking out the website and reading an account by a couple who hiked up the trail and had to come down during a winter storm. There are more treacherous pictures of the trail featured on the site, my favorite of which are a set of stairs which the traveling couple noted “go vertical.”
