Well I decided to can the last skin. The purpose of that skin was to try and create a more professional looking site. In the past year I combined studioid and urlgreyhot and was having difficulty figuring out how to organize the site. So in the last skin, I created main categories for professional and personal content. It worked I think at positioning my publications and portfolio better, though I haven't updated the portfolio in about 3 years.

The problem now is that I actually do not want to do freelance work. In the past 6 months I've been turning down about 3 freelance jobs a month. Most are small jobs, but some have been medium to large size projects. For various reasons, I just can't take on any extra work right now. So I've reverted this site to a minimal design that just puts everything out in front and doesn't try to make my professional work so prominent. The only different thing I've done with this skin is to use Dave Shea's CSS Sprites image replacement technique for the navigation bar. That has to be one of the coolest CSS ideas I've seen in a long time. I hope to get that brown palmtree skin working some time in the coming months as well if I have the time.

In any case, with the cancellation of the Miami conference and some depressing bouts with illness these past few months, I've been spending a lot of time researching a warm place for us to go real soon. We're also talking about researching warmer climates where we might be able to spend longer term stays during the winter. This is what a lot of NYC retirees do. They're called snowbirds, because they fly south, usually to Florida, for the winter. If we can afford to, I'd like to eventually find a place where we can rent initially for a month to start. Then it would be ideal to buy a small condo or something and rent it out. I'm seriously looking at San Diego. Looks like a wonderful place to be.

In any case, this site will be changing very slightly. I'm awaiting a Flickr API and hope to use the Flickr module for my photos section.