It's about damn time. Don't get me wrong, I adore both chocolate and Buddha in all of their respective splendors, but the design was getting a little old.

I decided to go with a Boston Legal theme for version 5.0, more specifically Alan Shore because he's wonderful in that sort of arrogant prick sort of way that always seduces me terribly on television. The colors and layout was originally inspired by a BL avatar I found *points below*. Like all design projects I set out on it didn't turn out anything like I originally planned it to, but overall I'm rather pleased with it. It was fun to get back into a web project of my own for a change~ :B I haven't had one of those staying-up-until-3am creative nights in a really long time. I know offhand of a couple tiny layout bugs that I have yet to work out, ignore them for the time being and they'll go away eventually.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I can't promise the new layout will look mostly good, a little good, or even half decent in Internet Explorer 6. Because I DON'T CARE. The only way to purge the web of the EPIC FAIL that is IE6 is to stop designing for it. If you have IE6, for the love of everything holy, if you won't change web browsers completely then at least update to IE7. *Waves a little Firefox flag*

I am sad to announce that I am a little on the unemployed side right now. Last Friday I was laid off from my job downtown, so I'm starting into my second week of depressing jobless-ness. I am also starting into my angst-filled second week of trying to get my new web portfolio to work in Internet Explorer, which I think we all know by now should really just be classified as a wasted effort. =_=; In any event, I'm adamantly chasing a job that I really want, and have wanted for quite a long time now, and am very slowly going into my second week of crazy because I still don't know if I'm being hired or not.

Hopefully none of the above will painfully bleed into a third week. We're keeping our fingers crossed. *so much sadness*

Last week Amanda and I had a splendid girly movie night filled with chocolate cake and squealfully cute Audrey Hepburn movies. I'd never seen any Hepburn movies and have since decided that both Breakfast at Tiffany's and Roman Holiday are both freaking adorable. I have also since decided that people need to start saying "darling!" with the Audrey accent because it just makes everything that much better~

Camping is coming up this weekend! I get to use my shiny new tent! More distractions from depressing job hunting! YAY!

And the first peak at the upcoming Clone Wars series in CG. Grievous! *glee* Asajj! *glee, but to a lesser extent because she's not as cool* Did I mention again, Grievous! *much more glee*

*Has an inkling to draw more fan art now but has no time because of angsty IE portfolio problems* DAMN YOU, BILL GATES! *throws sharks with eye lasers at you*

But hey, look, on the upside of it all I finally have a suitable reason to use the Toby avatar. Oh Toby, we *heart* you.

Countdown until Harry Potter book seven: OMG, only 32 days!

Obviously this is primarily because of the chocolate.

So YEAH, wtf, totally a new blog layout because as much as I adore the good General to pieces, he was getting a bit old and I wanted something fresh and springy and a little insane. (The whole Buddha chocolate thing was the obvious choice.) I'm still working out a few kinks with the new template but I don't think there's anything that'll seriously hinder the actual blogging-ness so we're all good.

Look look omg I'm actually using Blogger's commenting system! Haloscan, kiss my bum.

All right, bed now, actual posting tomorrow hopefully.

I'm not even going to try to upstage my sister in her excitement for the July 21st release announcement for Harry Potter 7, Deathly Hallows, because to do so would mean writing in size 20, bold, capslock font, with abounding exclamation points, and maybe the odd animated gif of exploding stars and hearts. Which would make my blog cry, and in the end wouldn't really even convey the actual level of excitement that courses through my veins like chocolate infused with crack cocaine. All I can say is that I am very excited, and by comparison, I don't believe any of my friends are nearly excited enough. (There was a disappointing lack of squealing from Daniel at the news. I mean, wtf, man? WTF? *cries*) There will be a countdown, mark your ass. Starting. . .now.

I've been watching glorious gobs of House M.D. lately. I'm currently watching my way through the season one DVD box set and Hugh Laurie has very quickly nestled himself a little nook of his own in the twisted, insane little part of my heart reserved for angry, bitter, lovable male characters that I go gaga over. It hasn't helped any when I found out that the spot-on American accent is completely fake and that Mr. Laurie is actually sexy British~ He's like an adorable Simon Cowell with a limp. :B

Lawl. Yay for breaking out in random choreographed dance routines.

I need to make a new blog layout. :P This one is more than a year old and is in need of a face lift. The trouble is, when you do web design everyday from 9 - 4, five days a week, the last thing you're really in the mood to do when you get home is more web design. =_= Maybe I'll do some layout sketches tonight. . .while watching more House. . . ¬_¬

Countdown until Harry Potter book seven: 166 days!

Curses! I've already used my Snape avatar already! Good thing I have a spare!

A visitor to one of websites sent me an email today alerting me that someone had added popup windows to the front pages of all my sites that apparently exploded with Trojan viruses if you clicked on them. I checked all of my sites and it turns out it's true (the popup window thing anyway, I don't know if they actually sent viruses or not, it's not like I tested them to find out.)

So it turned out that it was some ass from Japan that hacked into my account somehow and placed two lines of iframe code at the end of every "index.html" file that existed on my server which I had to remove one by one. Moreover, I think aforementioned ass also changed my login to my webhost control panel because it refused to recognize my password and I actually had to get them to reset it all before I could get back in. Fucker. Well, that's it. Dishonor! Dishonor on you! Dishonor on your family! Dishonor on your computer! YOU BRING SHAME UPON ALL OF JAPAN. I wish for all of your chopsticks to stick straight up and down in your stupid rice bowl for all eternity.

While we're on the ranty bandwagon, what's with the freaking GAS PRICES? 112.4 cents a litre?! 1 fucking 12 point 4?! It's going to cost me near to $50 to fill up my tiny Cavalier! HAS THE WORLD GONE INSANE?! IS THERE SOME CLIMATIC, OILY, EARTH-SIZED HEMORRHAGE THAT I AM NOT AWARE OF? *Pulls out hair* I have never been more inclined to make use of the public bus transit system.

On a non-ranty note, I'm trying out BitComet, and so far it is rather groovy (blatantly stealing Amanda's sixties catch phrase) with all of its individual file batch torrent downloading and so on. It does seem rather slower than the regular BitTorrent though. . .time shall see. . . *Cackles for dramatic effect* I'm also slowly starting to redesign Beans which I've neglected terribly into a nasty hiatus limbo for the last two and a half years. Hopefully, this time I'll actually finish the revamp and get that site online again. . .as long as I don't get lazy. . .again. . . =_=; Man, I just noticed that I have four different computers running in this room, with all the DVD burning, scanning, BitTorrent-ing, and regular computing stuff; six if you count the two double monitors on both the main Macs. It's like NASA in here. *Sweatdrop* Dad's gonna have a conniption. Oh yeah, HE'S OUT OF TOWN, HO HO HO! WATCH ME SPLURGE ELECTRICITY! *Frolics among the humming wires and fiery sparks of liberation*

It's new! It's different! It's green! (With a subtle hint of pimped out cyborgyness. Tastes minty. . .)

I've been meaning for a while now to whip up a new blog layout since Photoshop was reinstalled on my computer. Gaara is obviously spectacular and all that, but Fangirl was in need of a new spotlight, and Grievous was the obvious choice since he's, you know, AWESOME. Actually, I was originally going to do an Orochimaru theme, but the artist who drew the piece of fanart I wanted to use so badly in the layout refuses to reply back to my email requests. So General Rock Your Face Off got the honors instead. (OOOH. . .and I totally made his lightsaber myself. See that lightsaber? Yeah, that's all me, baby. "SHIT, how the hell am I going to crop his freaking sword?! THIS IS GOING TO EAT MY SOULLLLLLLL-- waitaminute, ovaaaal toooool. . .feeeeeaaaaather. . . Ahhhh.")

This new template has been in the works for days but between my exciting new forty hour work week, a social life, and the BITCH CODING this one involved, I haven't been able to find the time to finish it up and actually get it uploaded until tonight. The new fancy pop up menu navigation happies me to great extents. It is also the reason behind the whole BITCH CODING I was talking about. . .probably about seven hours of bitch coding actually. The experience reinforced the fact that I can not read or write Javascript myself. IT'S HARD. Lots of posting my wails and pleads for help on the help forum and most likely annoying the nice individual who made the menu code were involved.

Anyway, there's still a couple kinks to work out which I hope aren't noticeable, so I'll have to fix those. After that I'll do a real post to catch up on the past week of blog posting neglect.