Spreading the love

I found this great article on how to find new clients. Check it out!
It's been busy, busy around here, but not busy enough in some ways, so I'm hoping to make good use of some of this stuff soon!
Jenn Mears Web Design is going to be completely redesigned for the new year. I've been getting ideas together for a while and now feel good enough about most of them to buckle down and start (re)designing. Tutorials, Jenn's Web Glossary and lot 'o CSS fun!
As my friend Mary would say: "Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

Spreading the love

And Now, For Something Completely Different-

Luther Price, Ladies and Gentlemen. A fellow Mass Art survivor who never fails to make me laugh out loud in the face of tragedy.

And Now, For Something Completely Different-

A Snapshot of the War: Day 1,719

I know I've posted this before, but it bears repeating.
I went to school in the late 80's/early 90's with a girl from Czechoslovakia. She would tell us stories about their news media and how everyone in their neighborhood would strategically take their evening stroll at the same time the State-run news broadcast was on. It was their only way of expressing their frustration with the misinformation that they were being fed. I loved the beautiful simplicity of a gesture like that. It was also illustrated to great effect in that episode of the "Simpsons" when Homer stole the giant donut from Lard Lad and all the advertising icons ran amok and Lisa realized that they would die if everyone ignored them but I digress...
Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone else out there is tired of the Talking Heads running the show about the war telling us that everything is going great and we're making Real Progress Over There. Case in point:
Go check out CNN's story about Robert McNamara( whoops! I mean Gates)visiting Iraq. It's about 4 headlines down in the World section on Cnn.com under the title "Gates Makes Surprise Visit to Iraq". And look! It's accompanied by a photo of a smiling Gates in a helicopter looking all sexy with his headphones on, like he's ready to open up a can of Whup Ass on some insurgents.
OK, so now you've seen the Liberal American Media's version of the story, now go check out the BBC's:
Go ahead, I'll wait...
Love the catchy headline, front and center on the BBC's homepage as of this morning.
"Eight Killed as Gates Visits Iraq". And this is from a country that went into this whole mess right along side us.
It's scary what you notice when you tear yourself away from watching Britney Spears do a year-long legal pratfall isn't it?
Sorry if I wrecked your day, but I'm getting tired from all this walking around the block.

A Snapshot of the War: Day 1,719

Pretty Spam

Yep, it's actually fun to look at; especially after a week of deleting "Jenn, your new penis is here!!!" messages.

Pretty Spam

FUBAR on the BBC

From the home page of the BBC online 3rd link down. If you can find a similar link on CNN's website less than 3 clicks away from the home page, send it to me and I will send you a FUBAR t-shirt from the Salem Army Navy store.

FUBAR on the BBC

Why I do what I do where I do it.

Apparently, American commuters spend about a week out of their year waiting in traffic. I used to be one of them and I'm sitting here thinking "only a week?"
It was my own damn fault. I moved out to Salem so I could avoid paying over 2 grand a month for the privilege of living in a closet. New Englanders love to complain and, being a "regional immigrant", naturally I wanted to blend in. It was becoming a favourite topic of conversation at my husband's family get togethers. "It takes me an hour and a half one way and yesterday there was a fender bender so Route 1 was shut down on both sides..." I started to get sick of always bitching about the same old thing. Also, I would finally reach my desk after another epic journey only to hear my former boss tearing me a new one via voicemail about some task that I hadn't been able to get to after completing the 60 other things he had asked for.
Things finally came to a head on a Wednesday morning when I had gotten up, tried to get a very sleepy and cranky toddler into the car by 7:30, sat in inexplicable traffic for 50 minutes, gotten to my mother in law's, and dropped off Chloe in the midst of a tantrum. As my mother in law said for what felt like the 300th time: "Oh it's too bad you have to work in Boston, I don't know how you deal with the rat race!" I realized that she was right. I knew that I still had a drive to a garage and then the trip on the Orange Line to go before I showed up to a desk that was one giant inbox and an office full of disgruntled, bitter co-workers. When I finally got to my desk about an hour later, I hit Craig's List and started looking.
I kept looking until I saw a job as an Office Manager in Salem. I went to the interview hoping that they would see that I made up with charm what I lacked in actual office and manager experience. My career has been such a non-linear, chaotic crapshoot that I totally ignore trying to show any kind of trajectory and just hope that I can keep the interviewer amused with film set stories.
Unbelievably, my approached worked and seeing that email with a job offer was a great moment. I had decided to check my online account one more time before I rushed out the door and as I read the words "we are pleased to offer you..." while listening to my boss scream at both a vendor and his Outlook inbox at the same time, I could feel perma-grin coming on.
It's been 3 and a half months now and my commute is a 20 minute stroll from my front door. As an added bonus, the Office Manager title was a little bit of a misnomer since they were actually looking for a graphics and web person! I could descend into a bunch of cliches right here but if you have read this far, you deserve better than that. In a nutshell, long commutes suck. They suck for the environment, since it forces millions of people to sit in idling cars for hundreds of hours. They suck for the people in the cars because humans are (for the most part) a fairly mobile and dynamic species and don't like just sitting there unless there's possible nudity or some variety of athletic activity involved. They suck for companies because there are thousands of hours wasted each year over phone calls like "We're on our way for the meeting, but a student tried driving a box truck under Storrow Drive again and it's shut down." So my advice is, don't put up with it because everyone else does. Find something closer to home. Figure out a way to work from home. If those aren't options, take public transportation. The only reason it sucks now is because anyone with sufficient self-esteem to still complain to the MBTA, has either already given up and gone back to their car, or they have opted for the first two solutions.

Why I do what I do where I do it.

Next time, try email.

Front page, top of the fold, of bostonherald.com this morning. Full "Lotto" coverage aside, the Herald knows how to work it sometimes. I miss their old ad campaign: "If you want something sugar coated, buy a doughnut"

Next time, try email.

The Perfect Desktop for Someone I Know

The article is kind of interesting too. If you already know what this is about (and chances are, if you are reading it on Boston.com, you already do), I would recommend going straight to the image gallery if your browser can take it.

The Perfect Desktop for Someone I Know

What I did on my summer vacation

I'm wiping my jaw off from where it touched the floor when it dropped as I noticed the date of my last post. Time flies when you're having fun, but I wasn't having THAT much fun. I had a working vacation and you can view the results here.
I also got a "real" job! I get to actually leave my house and sit at a different computer for a few hours a day. One that doesn't have a keyboard with applesauce on it! How glamorous. I have a fancy title (Communications Manager) and as part of my duties, I got to paint the company's name on the door so it looks like the set of a Sam Spade movie.
Also, I've been learning some geeky stuff that should come in handy soon. After a couple of years of trying to learn out of books, I think I've come up with a good technique:
1) Read the book all the way through quickly to get a general overview of what you're getting into.
2) Try a couple of the projects out.
3) If the chapters have little quizzes, write down the questions on one side of a sheet of notebook paper and the answers on the other side so you can carry a super-condensed version of the book around to look at when you get stuck on a train or something.
4) As you go through, try to come up with your own real-life project and use that as your guide when you go through the book again so you will have something to motivate you.
5) College is over, your loans are (hopefully!) paid off so don't sweat the technique too much. Go out and catch a damn movie once in a while!
(warning, Flash 8 required and there's some loud theme music)

What I did on my summer vacation

Why the IT Guy is always the grumpiest person in the office.

questions Google can’t answer part 1:
why is the IT guy(99.9 times out of 10!) always the crankiest person in the office?

1) You’d be cranky too if you were summoned to someone’s desk at least 5 times a month to help them find a web address in “The Google”
, only to find that they are trying to type the URL into Google’s search bar.

2) People who are paid twice as much as you call you at home to ask you how to use their Blackberry. ("Yeah, it's making this weird chirping sound and the screen keeps lighting up...")

3) Temps that try to download stuff off the web and crash their hard drive.

4) Every office has that one person who’s Significant Other/ BFF sends them every chain e-mail, “cute kitty” video, Flash-based animated card and 20mb photo of someone’s baby possible and clogs up the main drive.

5) There is no such thing as “IT Guy Day” at work so you never get cards or flowers telling you what a “meaningful” contribution you make to the work environment, in fact no one seems to notice what you do unless something doesn’t work.

6) People who bring their 12 year old into the office and let them “play” on the computer. The only thing a 12 year old is interested in is downloading games; big storage-greedy, graphic-heavy games. Whatever happened to checkers?

7) People who try to answer every spam e-mail with a polite “No Thank You” reply message. They don’t understand that e-mail spammers’ feelings won’t be hurt by being ignored because they HAVE no feelings. They eat their young.

8) You have a Master’s Certification for 3 different computer languages and you spend 8 hours a day with people who can’t copy a file onto a disk without Lots Of Help.

9) At least 3 times a week your boss summons you to their office to ask you how to do something and no matter how simple it is, they look at you like you are speaking in tongues over terms like “Control-C”.

10) In fact, most people look at you like you practice some obscure form of witchcraft when you talk about your job. Sometimes you wonder if they secretly want to try dunking you to see if you'll float.

Why the IT Guy is always the grumpiest person in the office.

Awesome! I wish I had @#%$ shot this!

Awesome! I wish I had @#%$ shot this!

Design Time Vs. Reality Time

Design Time is like the reverse of Narnian Time. I’ve come to realize this after trying to complete a site for launch. I’ve sworn off television (Watch “The Office”? No thanks, I’d MUCH rather be re-configuring this CGI script right now.)

Of course, ridding yourself of one addiction usually just means that you’ve substituted something else. In this case it’s been the Harry Potter series. To further add to the fun, my web email has been inaccessible and I hate to work on things in a vacuum. Lately it feels like 5 minutes my time = 2 hours reality time.

Design Time Vs. Reality Time

Follow-up

So this weekend I tried an experiment. Friday night, I stepped away from the 2 sites I'm working on for clients and the big intimidating book on Javascript purchased 2 months ago and picked up the sketchbook, ordered takeout and ignored the piles of laundry while I just relaxed and worked on drawings until it was time to get some sleep. Saturday morning, I got up with Chloe, got breakfast, and found 2 skirts and a cardigan for $37 at Modern Millie's. When I sat back down at the computer later on it felt like I had been on vacation for a couple of weeks and I swear I got more done after taking a break than if I had chained myself to the hard drive.

Follow-up

Finding a Method for the Madness

Working mother+freelance job= lots of stress. I think over the past month I've had an epiphany though. My theory is that stress is actually guilt over not getting some supposedly "urgent" task done. (if you are a client reading this, don't worry, I'm just taking a break from working on your site) So for now it's bye bye "to do" list with color coded bullet points, bye bye in-box piled with ALA and Digital Web Articles waiting to be highlighted and sorted and filed. The new Joseph Cornell exhibit opens tomorrow at the Peabody Essex Museum, Russell Orchards in Ipswich opens for the season, and if there's one thing I've learned over the past few weeks, it's that sitting in front of a blank screen forcing inspiration to strike doesn't work half as well as getting out into the "real" world for a few hours.
I'll see you in the park. Have great weekend!

Finding a Method for the Madness

Synchronicity Strikes Again

So I was watching a recorded episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher" tonight, trying to take my mind off quite a few things. Maher was grilling Bill Moyers about journalistic responsibility. Apparently, buried underneath an avalanche of coverage of the Virginia Tech mass murder was the news that our military has basically given up on training Iraqi troops and advisors are now seriously attempting to explain to President Bush that in fact, he is not wearing any clothes at all. Turns out Bill Moyer was a White House Press Secretary during the Kennedy/Johnson era so there was plenty of cud to chew about the eerie similarities between the Vietnam & Iraq conflicts. In fact, it's now becoming so depressingly similar that I decided that I'd be better off just getting some work done. I went onto the web just to check in, and saw that David Halberstam had been killed in a car crash in California. It's one of those things where one might not personally know the famous name, but a loss is felt anyway. I was working on some film or other that was shooting at Milton Academy a few years ago and ended up spending a long summer afternoon set dressing in the school library. I saw a book that said "The Making of a Quagmire" and something told me to take it down from the shelf. It turned out to be a highly readable account of the Kennedy administration's clumsy overtures to the Diem regime in Vietnam. For a few minutes I considered slipping the book into my set bag and taking it home, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Some teenaged kid needed to read that book more than I did. I can still remember that war and growing up around its aftershocks and victims. I hope some freshman picked it up that September of 2000 and found it as good a read as I did. A 14 year old in 2000 would be a 21 year old today, probably just getting out of college and hopefully a little more skeptical of presidential foreign policy for having read Halberstam's "Quagmire".

Synchronicity Strikes Again

File this under, "When I get a second..."

A good guide to web apps for small businesses. If only someone could invent a babysitting/diaper changing web app, I'd be all set. Google, did you hear that?

File this under, "When I get a second..."

One Good Link Deserves Another

Via kottke.org's post today about the "low wattage web palette". This guy, Mark Ontkush runs a blog about green computing and designed it with colors that don't require a lot of wattage from your monitor. Worth checking out and cheaper than that 4 pack of 7th Generation toilet paper I just took out a loan for. ;^)

One Good Link Deserves Another

My Virtual Pat on the Back for the Day

I love Web Worker Daily. It keeps me from feeling like "a lonely insignificant speck on a has-been planet orbited by a cold and indifferent sun". There are others out there. Today "best practices for the self-employed" caught my eye and when I checked it out, it was encouraging to see that I've done at least SOME of the stuff they suggest.
Anyway, it's a great site, go check it out.

My Virtual Pat on the Back for the Day

If a twit falls in the forest, will anyone care?

Again, it's been too long since posts but I've actually been working, for actual dough, so at least I'm not going to complain.
To be perfectly truthful, the war in Iraq is getting so much nastier, so much faster, that a lot of things that I would normally post about seem even more trivial than usual. But today I figured "what the hell" and here's a post about something completely trivial for your snacking pleasure.
Just to start off, I love the name "Twitter". It's very descriptive of what the hype is actually all about: an app that allows one to see who's on line right and what they are up to. I'm a "don't knock 'til you try it" type and if it's still around in about 12 years, I'm sure I'll be using to see what Chloe's up to after school. But all that ranting and raving about how awful/amazing it is cracks me up. Let's all take a second shall we? You've just spent about 10 minutes (or 2 hours, it depends) setting up a little page at Twitter. Good for you! Now all of your friends can aquire instant knowledge of every minute of your day. Whether you want to tell the world you are having intestinal issues with your lunch is entirely up to you, but at least if someone really cares they'll know. Maybe your mom. To be fair, there are those of us who are hard at work, trying to find ways to make Twitter-ing actually productive, but it comes across as a similar act to trying to walk a cat on a leash.
Remember when AOL had instant on-line messaging? (The back in the day kind, circa 97) I was on line one day and suddenly this little window popped up, blocking what I was doing. It was my boyfriend's (now husband's)nephew. "Hi Uncle Chris! How are you?" It wouldn't go away until I answered so I yelled over to Chris: "Hey! Your nephew wants to know how you're doing!" "OK!" he yelled back. I typed in "OK" and tried to go about my business. Then another window popped up. "What are you up to?" and so on and so forth ad nauseum. I was having an online conversation with a 10 year old boy and I wasn't even wearing an ankle bracelet.
I guess the beauty of Twitter is that you don't have to answer people back. It's the kind of app that Andy Warhol would have come up with if he hadn't had such an overworked nurse and had taken up software programming. I'll file it under "sounds like fun, but I'm really too busy right now." I think it would be fun though, if you could somehow get some Al Qaeda folks to sign up for it. "AlSaid69, Whassup?" " Heading out to the souk with my bros" "Have a blast! ;^)Json"
So, there you have it, a post about nothing.

If a twit falls in the forest, will anyone care?

I'm sorry I can't do that Dave...

So I had to check out yet another bitchy Oscar's red carpet review. (Priorities you know) And I was right in the middle of a complete takedown of Faye Dunaway and what should pop up but this.

"Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

Why does this only happen when I am trying to check out my morning brain candy? It's as if Bill Gates is sitting in his underground bunker somewhere saying "Back to work lazy ass, I see you slacking over there!" And then it has the chutzpah to ask if I want to send an error report. To who? Why? What are "they" going to do about it?

And I know it's not just me.

I'm sorry I can't do that Dave...

Fun With CSS

It says something about how fast the web world moves when I can recall my days at AINE in 2003, listening to my instructor say, "yes, sometimes designers use Cascading Style Sheets for formatting headers, but for now, just use the bold tag". Nowadays, anyone teaching web design would probably be stoned publicly for such heresy, but at the time, we all just innocently nodded our heads and kept plugging away at our page-sized Photoshop documents, slicing the images and placing them into tables to create our projects.

I started to see more and more sites that boasted little windows that looked like Chiclets. Then came the logos and banners that reminded me of the Jellies sandals that I had coveted so much in Jr. High. Before you could say CSS2, the web exploded in a visual extravaganza of Kandy Kolored glossy rounded corners and something that I was rapidly learning about called "suckerfish dropdowns". At the time, I was trying to come up with some sort of business plan for my in utero design shop and after tooling around a couple of times on Google with the term "Salem web designers" I stumbled across Simplebits the "tiny web design studio" run by Dan Cederholm. So I went to the site, loved the deceptively simple looking design and decided to e-mail him. In my newbie frenzy, it came out something like this:

"Hi Dan! I like your site! I am a web designer who's starting out and trying to get a handle on all the new technology that is around. As someone who has been designing for a while, what do you think is the best approach for learning about Web 2.0 development?"

Anyone in their right mind would have sent something like this right into the deleted bin, but either he's unusually patient, or, if he's like anyone else I know who does this kind of work, he was too sleep deprived to know better, but Dan responded with an invitation to join a css discussion list.

Soon my e-mail inbox was displaying messages from people with names like Ingo and Gunlaug who dispensed advice on queries like "Help! My a :hover link doesn't display in IE 6!" and "Why won't my div span float with my 3 column header?". To be honest, most of the time I hadn't the faintest idea what these people were actually talking about and for days at a time I would simply plow through all 17 pages of postings and delete them without reading them. But after a while, I started feeling guilty and dutifully tried to make sense of the various discussion threads. If anything, it was a great way to spy on what other people were doing for web design.

Finally, the inevitable happened and I got hired to re-vamp a local company's web site. It was going to be a challenge. The first time I went to their site and hit View>Source, I freaked out. It had more nested tables than a Chinese import shop. I collected every book I had that even mentioned CSS, invested in Red Bull stock, and went to work. (editor's note: I was going to link to Red Bull's site here, but it requires Flash 9 or it won't work. :^( Accessibility counts people!)

Now I can see what all the fuss is about. Although I don't have any mysterious white lines going through anything, my life is now a constant rhythm of tweak, F5, preview in browser, rinse, repeat. I was really proud when my Home page design finally displayed perfectly in Safari, then slightly nauseous when the two left columns poked up into the navigation in Firefox. My moment of shame came when I tried to shift the side bar div to underneath the content for the "About Us" page and forgot that I was changing it's position in the Home page too. Whoopsy.

The only thing I can compare the process to is this little puzzle that my grandparents used to give me to get me to stop bugging them for cookies. It consisted of a small plastic square with grooved edges. The square contained 15 tiles which, when coaxed into the correct configuration, showed a picture of Deputy Dawg. (Ralph Bakshi, who knew?) I would shift one tile over to the right, then see that it would block the tile I needed on the top, then shift that and it would knock the whole picture out of whack. I would so wrapped up in shifting one tile back and forth, up and down, that it wasn't until I put the damn thing down and went to watch "Wonder Woman" that it would occur to me what the solution might be.

So, long story short, I'm loving the CSS, and it's kind of fun to see the look a client gets on their face when I mention using a suckerfish dropdown.

Fun With CSS

Tragic Synergy

In what can only be some kind of universal confluence of events, Anna Nicole Smith died "suddenly" due to what is likely a drug overdose, on the eve of the nationwide release of "Factory Girl". Both Anna and Edie were beautiful and fragile and surrounded by tragic events in their lives. I never watched Anna's reality show or the various media events where she wobbled through somehow. I only knew her through her Guess and Trimspa ads and Kathy Griffin's take on her appearance on "The New Hollywood Squares". I stumbled across "Edie; An American Biography" when I worked at my hometown library in high school and it's a pretty good read. Like Anna, once you looked beneath Edie's make-up and earrings, there was something kind of scary yet fascinating going on.

Tragic Synergy

Much More Exciting Than One Hand Clapping...

Or much creepier depending on how much of an arachnophobe you are. The sounds of spiders mating, enjoy.

Much More Exciting Than One Hand Clapping...

Movie Review: Monster

This movie kept popping up in my path over the past 3 years. I knew Charlize Theron had won an Academy Award for her role as Aileen Wuornos. I had heard words such as "powerful", and "chilling" used to describe it, but somehow I had always kind of passed it by on the shelf at the library, clicked by it on cable, thinking, "I'm sure it's great and all, but I would really rather watch "The Simpsons" right now." I recalled watching about 1o minutes of it a few months back and the scene in which Theron's character describes having her newborn baby taken away after giving birth in a home for unwed mothers was so depressing that I switched back to the Style network.

Lo and behold, I was flicking through channels on Friday night and it was on IFC again. It was kind of weird, because I quickly realized that I had started watching it again pretty much at the exact point where I had left off the first time. And this time, I couldn't click away. I've recently been undergoing a rebellion against my film school background and was getting some kind of perverse pleasure gorging myself on "Isaac" and "Access Hollywood". Screw you Jonas Mekas! Tara Reid had a botched boob job but she's bravely bouncing back from her downfall. "Clap for her people!" Between that and coming of age in an era where Julia Robert's character in "Pretty Woman" was supposed to be inspiring, I really have an aversion to movies about prostitutes. It's usually either some kind of Lifetime Channel-infused ABC After School Special for grownups about what kinds of horrible things happen to people who don't go to college, or it's some kind of trumped up fairytale about a hooker with a "heart of gold".

That kind of media atmosphere is what makes Theron's character so fascinating to watch. There's a lot of scenes where you can tell that she wants that heart of gold, but deep down she knows that she's really got a heart of battery acid. And thank you, makeup department for turning Ms. Theron into something so much more than that brand of "Hollywood" plain jane like Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce". There are quite a few times when she looks so believably wasted and shot-to-hell that I found myself leaning back in my seat. Thank god I didn't see this on the big screen.

And there's a lot more to this film than some overly stylized glossy movie about what Hollywood people think lower middle class Anglo-Saxon Americans act, think and look like. (Tony Scott, I'm looking at you.) Aileen Wuornos' only glamour is the fact that she is so unsettlingly real. She's the woman you've seen sobbing outside a casino at 3am in Las Vegas. She's the one you saw washing her hair in the sink at a truckstop in Montana on your post-college cross country road trip. She's the one arguing with her partner at the bus station until the security guard walks over. She's the woman who kept bugging you and your friends for cigarettes at that seedy motel you stayed at. She's someone everyone has seen out the corner of their eye and kept moving, not wanting to really know or get involved.

It actually turned out to be a pretty good movie which was more than I expected. There was a scene in a lawyer's office when Aileen tries to quit hooking and get "one of them office type jobs" that was hilarious. The lawyer is the first person who actually has the guts to tell Aileen that she is wasting his time and has wasted her life and she verbally lets go with both barrels at him. I started laughing until I realized that I was rooting for a woman who killed seven people. I really like films that do that to me.

Movie Review: Monster

New Year's Resolution: Get 'er done.

So...
I feel like I got a lot done last year (see above), but some things are still being pushed around on my plate like birthday cake at a Weight Watchers' meeting. I got real ambitious a couple of months ago and posted about re-designing my website, it's gonna be great, blah, blah. If you've ever seen that episode of "The Office" where Michael Scott eats the free pretzel with all the toppings, you'll know what I'm talking about; one gets all hepped up about a project, collects all the crap on Del.icio.us that one can find, does a bunch of layouts and sketches and then what? A new client comes along, it's Christmas, your baby starts learning how to walk and she's constantly lurching around the living room like a drunken sailor...
I'm such a victim of our national obsession with time-management and organization that it's not even funny. I'm pretty sure there's a church basement somewhere right now full of people standing up, hands shaking around a cup of coffee saying: "I'm Bob, and I'm a Google Calendar addict" I sit down in front of my monitor everyday with a wad of stickies saying things like: CVS list, lists of books to look for on Amazon, stuff to do on Squidoo, things around the house to organize.
This year is going to be different though. I've sworn off the obsession with writing every little thing down on a sticky note because a) it sometimes takes more time than actually doing the thing itself, and b) I just went through a bunch of paper scraps that I had squirrelled away in a drawer and 85% was stuff that really wasn't that important to do in the first place.
But back to the website redesign, I DID start to work on it and ideas for a timelapse effect animation going on the background of a blog-like index page are starting to congeal. A quick (3-minute!) experiment in using an animated GIF as a background image did work and can be seen here.

New Year's Resolution: Get 'er done.