Yes I do.
My old theme, however cool-looking, depended very heavily on A) a huge wide banner image at the top and B) dynamic image replacement for the post titles. Result: long loading times. And of course I sometimes have the attention span of a stressed hamster on meth,thus I got bored with the look.

This theme, by the way, is called GenkiTheme 1.0, and is available right here. Of course I’ve edited it here and there, but I kind of dig the cleanliness while still looking colorful and…well…cheery.

Hope you dig it too.

As a muddling designer I always have one or two color ideas when working on a new design, but you need more than just two. I’ve tried various pieces of color matching software in the past, but now my need for matched color ideas is combined with my love for my iPod (I am the proud owner of the most excellent iPod Classic 160Gb) in Koloroo for iPod, a free (well, careware) little tool that turns my iPod into a very spiffy color picker.

I can wax poetic about it all day, but this is one you just have to get and use to see what a great little tool it really is.
And remember, it is Careware, so you do actually have to do a nice thing for someone else as ‘payment’. I myself helped a friend dig out the foundations of his house (which gave me muscles sore enough to hinder my mouse use at the moment).

While reading up on the history and art of the Soviet Union (don’t ask how I got there, but it was very interesting anyway) I stumbled upon cccpfashion.com. I know that basically any symbol, meme, idea or quote is a free target for commercial exploitation (as long as they don’t have lawyers), and actually I agree with that on principle, but this one got me thinking.

Here’s a regime that for nigh on 80 years dominated the lives of billions of people, was considered the greatest threat to the free world for most of that time (or so we were told), committed loads of heinous crimes against individuals and peoples and generally perverted a pretty neat idea (let’s share what we have amongst all our people equally) into a dogma of hate, distrust and corruption.
And now you can buy the T-shirt.

Yes, you can say the same for basically any symbol: any commercial outing of an ideology, good or bad, could be called a perversion or at least mistasteful. But hey, this is the free market, right?
I guess I shouldn’t whine. I normally find the skewing of established symbols funny (like the Viva the relativity T-shirt from my friends at Thinkgeek), but this one kind of erks me. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading up on the Soviet Union and what really went on in there (which means that this feeling will pass over time) or maybe it really is kinda wrong.

Yipes. Brain hurts…must decide…funny versus morality…no…answer…

Let me get back to you on this one

I keep having to tell people this, so I thought I’d might as well bung it on a T-shirt. Available in dark and light colors, long and short sleeves, get some right here!

If bullshit is not what you want, put on my latest design:

Available in different shirt models and colors right here.

Adam Darowski has a very interesting post up on his blog (link) on using the URL as a direct-access user interface. I completely agree with what he’s saying, I use the described way of URL hacking as well to see if I can access other parts of a website, but I’m often foiled by completely unreadable URLs or URLs that rely on code numbers or hashes. A quote:

If people use your site enough, they’ll want an even faster way to reach the content they want. They’re not browsing anymore. They are power users. They know what they want. Give them a nicely hackable URL to do this.

Read the full article here.