So I figured I’d run down to the store and pick up a case for my new ipod for a few bucks. I was so wrong. Last night I started looking online, due diligence type stuff, to see what was out there and price ranges. I was peripherally aware that a whole industry had erupted around these miniscule slices of silicon and plastic, but I did not fully apprehend the fact until about 3 AM this morning. They have ipod cases made out of brushed aluminum, magnesium, space-age nuclear-phalanx-proof plastics, carbon nanofiber. You can get cases that make your ipod look like something out of a soviet munitions labrotory, and tiny millimeter-thick cases that look like they’re not even there. I am now paralyzed in indecision by the bewildering array of stuff out there. There is surely a case out there which would cause me to have an orgasm every time I handled or gazed upon it. But what if I buy the wrong one? It would truly be tragic if I was to be forever denied daily iPod-induced orgasms.

(This is obviously an attempt to get my intrepid readers to do my research for me and post links to the sexiest ipod cases they’ve seen. I feel better now, with that out in the open air and everything.)

Somewhat related, those earbuds always looked kind of fragile and dainty to me before I held one in my hands. Oh lawd is that not the case. You could probably do a good bit of damage with those little buggers, provided the right momentum and proper aim. Good to keep in mind if anybody ever tries to roll you for your ridiculously expensive and tiny music machine.

So yeah, I redesigned, and it looks almost exactly the same. No one was surprised. I make no promises as to the content, but rest assured that the bones of the site, at least, are brand spankin’ new. Something like 8.5% of my crufty two-year old code was reusable. I started out wanting to do away with date headers (as it’s becoming pretty rare for me to write more than one entry in a day, they seemed superfluous), and I ended up with a crash course in just how hard it is to get a blogger blog to look like anything but a blogger blog. To be fair, it probably would be the same with wordpress or moveable type.

Another lesson learned was that I am not a designer. Photoshop was not the first thing I opened when I set out to redesign the site; TextPad and SmartFTP were. I have never in my life mocked up anything, not about to start now. The design comes from the structure, the structure comes from the content, the Tao is all.

My second goal — after I put in the surprisingly large amount of work to do away with date headers and still have something recognizable as a blog — was to make the site somewhat more structural, doing away with a lot of DIVs and H5s and replacing all with DLs. Learn to love the DL. It’s still not perfect in terms of semantics, but I’m not geeky enough to write my own DTD. Though my code would look like <post title="Whee!" date="20060218">Foo bar.</post> if I did.

Dammit. Now I’m not going to get any sleep tonight.