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After three days of working like a maniac, my new “His n’ Hers Theme” is finished (well, aside from a few little niggles). Technical details and customisation option information will be added to the theme page when I can face looking at it again!

The idea originally was simply to develop a theme for my Wife’s tumblog (she wanted a pink and black theme), but, as always, I got carried away and came up with the idea of having the option to switch between blue for a boy and pink for a girl. Then I added Twitter and Last.FM features, a nice little custom search widget and all kinds of options (which I may expand on in the future), and SHABAM! — I was thrown in at the deep end!

Having become rather intimate with the Tumblr template engine over the last few days, I have to say I’m quite impressed. I like how focussed Tumblr is, and how simple it is to post different kinds of entry (something I might carry over to my next WordPress theme). I did come across a few gotchas and had a few hair-pulling moments where I was trying to predict which template tags were going to add their own mark-up and which I needed to account for for myself, but all-in-all I think the engine does an admirable job.

There are definitely a couple of things I would do differently next time, and may have to fix this (please add <em> tags instead of <i> tags, Mr. Tumblr Rich Editor Widget!) time — I don’t do well with letting go of things. Captions were probably the most problematic feature to implement, simply because I didn’t have enough experience with the template engine to fully understand how I should be thinking about those areas (trust me — there’s more to it than you might think).

I’d like to see some way of modularising Tumblr themes a little more (without taking away from the focussed nature of the template engine), as including everything in one file was a royal pain sometimes — do a ‘view source’ and you’ll see that the mark-up (XHTML 1 Strict, in this case), JavaScript and CSS aren’t pretty at all (I’m sure I’ll also have to tidy this up in the near future).

Anyway, I’m fairly happy with the end result and learned a lot from the experience. Maybe the next theme will be a bit tighter.

Well, didn’t I have an interesting day yesterday?!

I had a late night/early morning on Monday night (does that make any sense at all?) and had forgotten all about the delivery of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (a rare surprise we were able to pull off for a certain teenager) we were expecting. By the time I realised I had to be up early for the delivery I was too exhausted to stay awake, so I grudgingly set the clock for three hours sleep and hit the sack.

Seems like only five minutes later the alarm went off and I dragged myself out of bed, made some coffee and waited for the delivery.

I actually didn’t have to wait too long which was unusual. I mean, you can almost guarantee if you’re up early for a delivery, it’s not going to arrive until later in the afternoon, right?

So, with the delivery secreted in our room, I got back in bed thinking I could get a couple of hours sleep before getting up for good. However, it didn’t take long before I realised the sleep sickness (well, not actual sleep sickness) I was feeling wouldn’t allow it and then I heard N get up and figured it would be as good a time as any for the surprise (which went down perfectly).

Back in bed and I couldn’t stop thinking about food, so we got up (again) and had some chimichangas and taquitos (who doesn’t eat Mexican food for breakfast after no sleep?!). Finally, feeling sated and with everything that needed to be done done, I crawled back into bed and slept…

For way too long…

I woke up in total darkness at 9pm and stumbled into the kitchen to put some coffee on (again), no longer having any idea what day of the week it was.

Just after I finished my first cup of Joe, there was a knock on the door. Oh joy, it was a cop — or maybe a state trooper (being from England I wasn’t really up on the difference, but I’ve since Googled a bit and realised it was the latter). Great, I think to myself, the mother-in-law has gone too far this time.

Looking like an explorer from Jurassic Park, this charming [sic] gentleman pushed his way into our house and starting quizzing us for ID with no explanation given. Oh no, I couldn’t walk to our bedroom to get my passport without Officer Muldoon following me with his oh so intimidating maglite (never mind that the lights were on in the apartment!). Eventually, we’re told that they had been given information that a certain individual (presumably a former tenant, considering we are currently renting) was living (hiding out?) at our address. Apparently satisfied that neither I, nor my wife, was the man (!) he was looking for, the officer made some crappy joke about the “ugly mug” on my passport photo and took his little friend in a bullet-proof vest who’d apparently been waiting outside the whole time with him, and that was that.

Did I mention I can’t wait to move to NC?

Finally got around to watch­ing Dis­trict 9 tonight. I wasn’t expect­ing to be as affected by it as I was. On a super­fi­cial level it gave me the same high as Ter­mi­na­tor 2: Judge­ment Day — I came out of the cin­ema that night with movie magic buzzing around me.

This movie also hit me in the gut, though. I iden­ti­fied with the aliens a lot. I’m an Eng­lish bloke try­ing to fig­ure out per­ma­nent res­i­dency in Amer­ica — trust me, if you’ve never attempted some­thing like this, you won’t under­stand what it’s like to feel dis­placed or unwanted in that way, espe­cially when you start mea­sur­ing time in years (“Quite an expe­ri­ence to live in fear, isn’t it?”, Roy Batty). I think the movie really got it, though.

Aside from that, Dis­trict 9 was just bloody good. I stu­diously avoided any­thing related to D-9, so I wasn’t sure what view­point the story would come from and was pleas­antly sur­prised by the path Neill Blomkamp decided on. The CG were much bet­ter than I was expect­ing, the iconog­ra­phy (sig­nage, mil­i­tary and gang insignia, etc.) was bril­liant and I absolutely loved the alien gesture-recognition iter­faces (they reminded me a lot of those from Minor­ity Report).

It might have been four years after Alive in Joburg but with immi­gra­tion being what it is and the per­pe­tu­ity of all kinds of seg­re­ga­tion, it’s a very rel­e­vant movie that deserved the audi­ence it got (and I’m look­ing for­ward to Sleep Dealer for sim­i­lar reasons).