Weekendy Updating

It was a quiet weekend at the Villa Sternberg. We did a lot of yardwork on Saturday, mowing and trimming and cleaning and doing all of the mundane, suburban things that I've more or less settled into. The children were made to go outside and get sunlight (oh no!), and Kouryou-chan and the neighborhood kinds tore up the place with the kind of enthusiasm that 10-year-olds can muster.

The strawberries are still alive, which surprises the hell out of me. Cleaning out where they're still alive, getting the blackberry and grass away from them, is going to be a herculean undertaking.

Sunday was more organized. Omaha had a morning event to go to, and I ended up driving her to Columbia City, one of the last neighborhoods in Seattle to be proto-gentrified. It's going to be, real soon now, as it's probably one of the few places in Seattle where I could get a home for what I paid to live in Burien, and the bus lines aren't as murderous. It's not nearly close enough to the light rail line, but it will be soon. This is one of those neighborhoods due for an upgrade. There's a wonderful old-school used bookstore there, along with the immanent yoga and yogurt shops.

We had our Sunday D&D game after that. Omaha led Yamaraashi-chan through the process of roasting a real chunk of roast, with vegetables and everything, and while we slaughtered orcs and kobolds by the handful (it was a gruesome hack-n-slash session, where I learned that monks are mostly immune to damage because of their awesome armor class, but in a fight against lots of nasties they don't kill 'em quickly enough) Yamaraashi-chan fretted over slicing and browning the meat, prepping the vegetables, and mixing the gravy.

After the guests were gone, we got the girls into their nightclothes and I read to Kouryou-chan. We've been reading Watership Down, and we just read the last two chapters of what I think is the creepiest part of the whole novel, the "shining wire warren." Kouryou-chan was more than a little disturbed by the whole notion, and I could see the wheels in her head turning as she tried to fit the lessons of those chapters into what she knew about how adults lived.

Perfection is damnably hard

So, I spent about an hour mashing my static to-do list with its awesome typography into a django version of the Rails to-do manager, Tracks. I tracked down where I got the "right now" thing from, Merlin Mann. I've changed the typography to a modern sans-serif, updated the javascript clock, and put in a second column.

And now comes the hard part: preserving what I love about my project list without cluttering it up with controls or decorations. This means that the page is going to look completely not like a smart page-- there are no underlines, no icons, no nothing to indicated affordance. Instead, I'll just know that text is clickable, and know what to do where-- just like paper. That I created all of the actions is helpful, and the idea of putting an "advanced controller" for actions above and beyond "add task", "mark task done," and "add project" will be all hidden on another administrative page makes me happy.

But that means that the functionality must be both hidden and obvious. So the task list only appears when you click on a project, and it scrolls down smoothly. It must also scroll up when you click on another project (only work on one thing at a time rule), and the control icons on the right must only appear at certain times-- like when you mouse over the last quarter of a task item.

All of this "intelligence" is nit-picky and damnably difficult, but it must be just perfect. This is something I have to live with, if I'm going to use it. It'll be fun.