I turned 27 the 29th of July and I promised I’d show you photos of what I got so here we go. Besides these things I also got money.

Rug which fit my kitchen perfectly.

Movies: Bridget Jones Diary, Push and Chicago.

Books: Drömmarnas flod (River of Dreams) by Gay Courter and Alltid Amber (Forever Amber) by Kathleen Winsor.

I wanted a cake with strawberries so my family made me one. Strawberries is a must when your birthday is in the summer.

Another lovely thing that happened this summer was the trip to Stockholm I did and the cruise I went on. The 4th of August I took the train up to Stockholm to visit my friend Milla and on the 6th I met up with my family for a one night cruise to Finland. You can look at the photos here.

As you can see the Happenings gallery is up and running again. It’s my photo blog where photos of the things I do will end up. That means everything from parties to walks in the nature. Photos of the latest stuff I bought and such will still be shown here in the blog.

Other than that today is a big day because it’s my first day of school this term. This fall I’ll study 3D modelling, Graphic design for the web, Information Technology and Swedish working class history. The first three classes are more or less related to web design but the last one is purely for fun. Contrary to most people I find politics very interesting so I’m really looking forward to this class. Studying graphics will be great as well since I’m ok at the coding part of web design but suck when it comes to creating graphics.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I want to finish this with thanking those who stick with me and my blog even though I so rarely update it nowadays. Lots of love to you.

After not blogging for weeks I should probably start this with an update on what I’ve been doing. I’ll summarize it for you: fear of cancer and too many doctor’s appointments, angst about money, web design, a bit of shopping, taking long walks on beautiful summer’s days and being depressed inside on rainy summer days when all I want is to take long walks on beautiful summer’s days. I’ll now explain everything in detail.

1. Fear of cancer and too many doctor’s appointments
Like two months ago I discovered a lump above the knee on my right leg. I googled the problem and read that basically either it wasn’t dangerous at all or cancer. Being someone who’s not easily scared of course I assumed what I had wasn’t dangerous at all. Hahaha yeah right… I immediately assumed I had cancer which led to the conclusion that I was dying. Knowing that I was dying I imagined saying my farewells to my family, cried and then started imagining (planning) my funeral. After deciding on the ceremony, music and type of flowers to lay on my casket I cried myself to sleep that night. Eventually I went to see a nurse who sent me to a doctor who sent me to another doctor at the county hospital. Turns out it’s just fatty tissue, one of those nice tumours that does no harm. Obviously this was great news and I immediately stopped planning my funeral.

2. Angst about money
I’ve been a university student since January. It’s a well known fact that it’s now June. That means school is over for this term and so is my student loan for this term. This leaves me without a income and that means I’ll live on government welfare money this summer. I’m not sure exactly how much (little) I’ll get but it will be a few hundreds of dollars less than what I’m used to. I’m trying hard to focus on the bright side of this which is that at least I get welfare money which means I get to keep my apartment and don’t have to sell my computer, body or left kidney to feed myself. Alright I wouldn’t have to sell my left kidney if I didn’t get these money but I would have had to move back to my family’s house. That would be traumatic for both me and my family. Traumatic for me because I’m almost 27 years old and have lived on my own for four years and traumatic for them because I’m almost 27 years old and they thought they got rid of me for good when I moved out of their house four years ago. Anyway, that was the bright side of this situation; I get to keep my apartment. Unfortunately focusing on it is hard when there’s also a not so bright side which is the fact that I won’t be able to afford a vacation this summer. Bye bye bike vacation on Öland! T_T

3. Web design
Since I’m being witty about things that I in reality find no humour in it’s only logic that I’ll be dead serious about things that I’m happy about. So here we go, here’s me not being witty but serious. I recently finished a web design commission I’ve been working on for a while. It’s a site for the town’s karate club. I got the job because two of my siblings are active within the club but that doesn’t mean I can’t take pride in it. This is the first time I’m doing a web design job for people I don’t know because obviously there are more people in the club than my siblings. They liked it and I feel very accomplished. Take a look at it here: www.whirlwind.nu/1 As you can see the layout is still located on my domain since I want to finish a few small changes before I upload it to theirs.

4. A bit shopping
You know what, I’ll leave this to another blog post. Partly because I don’t have the energy to edit photos right now but mostly because that means I’ll have something to write about in my next blog post.

5. Taking long walks on beautiful summer’s days
Say what you want about Hultsfred but during summer several areas of town are quite beautiful.

6. Being depressed inside on rainy summer days when all I want is to take long walks on beautiful summer’s days
And say what you want about Hultsfred but on rainy summer days most areas of town are quite depressing since grey skies and rain makes an alredy depressing excuse of a town look even more like a depressing excuse of a town.

I’m kind of obsessed with having my entire site validate correctly but why shouldn’t I be? Valid code is like correct spelling. Sure you can read a text that’s badly spelled but it’s probably harder to understand. It’s the same with browsers. Sure they can display invalid code but often it looks kinda funny and not at all how you intended it to look.

What I hate even more than invalid code is code that’s valid but works differently in different browsers. This layout should work fine in all browsers besides maybe the most unusual ones but I think that has more to do with those browsers not being that good than my code. Still, it’s annoying. I remember back in the days when you coded for one browser and put up a disclaimer stating which browser (and resolution) your site should be viewed in. Not very user friendly, but still, easy.

It’s interesting to think about how coding has evolved in the past ten years. When I built my first web page back in 1999 I coded in HTML and didn’t use any CSS whatsoever. My first site was basically two frames. One with a text link menu and one main window for the content. The menu frame had a black and white background with tree branches (a photo I scanned) and the main frame was black. It didn’t look too bad considering what many other sites back then looked like. I’m proud to say that Whirlwind never have contained ugly clipart, dolls or annoying moving GIF images. Besides my celebrity blend phase I’ve always kept it pretty simple, not using too many colours or too much graphics.

I wish I still had my first layout saved but every layout I made up until 2001 were lost years ago. There wasn’t that many of them but still, it would have been cool to be able to look at them.

When did you start web designing and what did your first layout look like?

I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent working on this one but somewhere between Friday and Saturday I stayed awake for 36 hours, coding non-stop. It was all worth it in the end, of course, because here it is and I love it!

I noticed something when I upgraded Wordpress. I’ve always uploaded my photos into www.whirlwind.nu/images but now even though I haven’t changed the image code the photos won’t show! If I use use the full adress img src=”http://www.whirlwind.nu/images/pic.jpg” it works but not if I use img src=”images/pic.jpg” like I’ve always done. What is this? Why is this? Is it because they want you to use the Wordpress media manager update thingy or whatever it’s called? Well I won’t because I’m old fashioned when it comes to coding. I upload by FTP! I wish Wordpress wasn’t so automatized. I want to make changes in the layout by coding, not by changing settings in the admin panel. Like I said, old fashioned. It’s just the way I’ve always done things.

The gallery isn’t up yet. This is because I made major changes in the coding. The only part of my site ran by Wordpress used to be the blog section. All other sections (she, site, gallery, www) were my own code. I preferred it that way but making first one layout for Wordpress and then another one looking exactly the same down to the smallest pixel, while it was structured in a totally different code, was a real pain. You really couldn’t tell it was always two layouts and I’m proud of that. Enough is enough though. It’s just too much work. First making two layouts and then making sure those two works in five different browsers (I test in Opera, FF, IE, Safari and Chrome). So, now my entire site is ran by Wordpress. Not the way I prefer it but I just can’t be bothered with all that extra work any more. Now I need to figure out a way to structure my gallery. I don’t think the way I coded it works in Wordpress, with using pages and all. Oh well, I’ll figure something out.

So, what do you think? See any errors? Let me know if something isn’t working like it should. Thank you!

What do you think is the fugliest make-up faux-pas and what’s the worst make-up mistake you’ve done?

Oh and by the way I got a comment about the layout saying that the menu is off and the www link button is located under the start link button. For me the menu looks good in Opera, IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome but maybe it doesn’t work correctly in a different version of one of those browsers. I dont know. Could be the hack I used to make the layout look exactly like I wanted it to in Opera, Safari and Chrome. Different browsers, different standards you know. If the menu is off in your browser please let me know.

Oh and this is the last chance to exchange Christmas cards with me! I’m buying the cards tomorrow so if you’re interested in this e-mail me at quende[at]spray.se today.

Click on image for bigger version.

A while ago I removed the tutorials and graphics I’ve made since I didn’t think they fit in at Whirlwind which is a personal site. Now that stuff is back but now on a site of it’s own. Hopefully I’ll find the time to actually make something of my new little site. I really want to make some layouts for people to use. If I am to make a living out of web design some day I’ll need a portfolio.

Anyway, without further ado I give you Whirlwind Design

A couple of the classes I’ve applied to are:

Web development – Introduction
CSS based web design
Web publication: Technique , design, communication
Picture and graphic design for the web
Web design with JavaScript and Document Object Model
Databases and object oriented programming in PHP
Animation with Flash
Basic Java programming

Some things I’m familiar with. Other things not. Whichever classes I get into I’m still excited.

Speaking of something entirely different. I always see cool candy in American movies and think “oh, I’d like to try that”. Obviously that’s often kind of impossible since I live in Sweden. So I thought, would anyone like to exchange candy with me? You don’t have to live in the US, anywhere but Sweden is cool. You send me candy from your country and I’ll send you candy from Sweden. Anyone interested?

These classes weren’t even the ones I originally planned to apply to but now that I can’t of course I really want to. Oh well. I’ll live. There are other classes.

The world is pretentious. And I guess I am too. Going back to school to study things I already know just to have it on paper.

Anyway, I need to go back to what I was doing. I just needed to rant a little.