Archive for January 2004

First day blahs

It seems that there might be something inherently wrong with me. I just realized that I’ve had two five-day weekends in a row (working two days each Christmas and New Year week) and I’m sitting here at 10pm Sunday evening positively dreading going back to work tomorrow. The truth is that I have a very good job with a great company, plenty of autonomy and very few hassles, and so on et cetera, ad nauseum, but no matter what I do or how I try, I can’t muster up even a shred of enthusiasm for it tonight.

No doubt the lingering depression I’m dealing with has something to do with it, but I also need to find a way to deal with the fact that I’m really not challenged by anything in my work anymore. I’m still doing the things today that I mastered a year (or two or three) ago, and the truth is that I’m don’t see that changing much given the company’s current direction and client base. I could create new challenges by moving in entirely new directions with my career, but thus far I haven’t had much luck in ever making that happen. The only direction that the executive team sees a need for is back to project management, and my years in project management already showed me that while I’m very good at it and clients love me, I hate it with the heat of a thousand fiery suns. Or, uh, something.

Unfortunately, there are only a handful of technical people in the company, and there are things that I do that the other tech people don’t know all that well. While they’d figure it out if they had to, at this point those (billable) jobs are too valuable to simply write off because I’d rather do something more interesting.

There’s the side issue that I’m not really sure that I find those new directions really interesting, either, and it leaves me wondering again if the problem is really in my own head and not with anything in the situation itself. Round and round I go in my head, with plenty of questions and very few answers.

Drop-down dilemma

Drop-down menus for navigation are a huge problem for many developers, especially those who want to create pages that are clean, easy to maintain and consist of valid XHTML markup using CSS for design elements rather than a mess of nested tables and invalid, inaccessible Javascript code.

Unfortunately, designers (and clients) adore them. They are, admittedly, an easy way to get lots of options in front of the user quickly (let’s not discuss whether or not that’s a good thing right now), so developers are often forced to find a way to work with them whether they like it or not.

For a site I did recently, I collaborated with the other developers at work and came up with what I think is a pretty elegant solution to the problem. Originally based on menus done by another firm for the Cingular web site, the main navigational elements are unordered lists. The drop-down functionality is still Javascript-driven, but the sub-menus are also unordered lists. The menus themselves are easy to maintain and move around as needed, and the functionality (aside from the calls to the JS functions) is completely separate, and those were my two main goals.

Resolve, not resolutions

New year, new placeholder…

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