If you've been visiting my homepage regularly, semi-regularly, or even only once before today, you may have noticed that I redesigned it a bit. It's now just about 99% written in [php]! The overall look is a little bit more streamlined and more consistent. Plus, my [photos page] is now much more interwoven with [Flickr.com], pulling all sorts of information from the picture hosting site via their [API]. I think the next item on my to do list is to revamp this journaling system and write journal entries in XML...then maybe a few php admin pages for myself to update the journal and photo albums online (rather than having to write files offline and upload them). [Nori] would undoubtedly yell "You're such a geek, Oliver!" And she'd be completely right :).

Some of the members of the [Sounds of Silk] quartet, a group I play with from time to time, performed this past Saturday at Rittenhouse square in Philly for three hours as a fundraiser for the victims of Katrina. I'm so impressed! It's such a naturally, beautifully right thing to do, yet when I imagine myself in the quartet's manager's (the mom of two of the original founding members) position in trying to go out and do something like this, I feel like I'd be very anxious about doing this. I just have so much admiration for her and her entire family - in a world where "encapsulation" (or, the shutting off and caring only about oneself plus a small circle of people; one of my students' dad called it such in a conversation I once had with him) seems to be the rule, it's so rare and thus an honor to meet people with such inspiring genuine magnanimity.

Quick entry because it is 3am, and I ought to be sleeping because I have orchestra auditions tomorrow. But, entirely a slave to my inner geek and thus continuing to feverishly work on my homepage to make it ever more standards-compliant, feature-rich, and just plain beautiful, my entire site is now XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant, with the exception of my journal entries, which, being spread out over a whole collection of files, will take a while to convert. Additionally, some of the albums listed in the [Photo section] have this tiny "RSS" button next to them - those albums are the ones very likely to continue growing, so I decided to provide links to the Flickr.com-generated [RSS] feeds so that you, if you so desire, can be automatically notified about every picture I upload. Not that I actually expect anybody to actually do that, but I suppose that's the last thing on a geek mind, no? We do things because it's cool, who cares if it's actually not that useful?

That's it. Peace out :)! (Not sure why I wrote that. I never say it.)

Day 3 of major geekiness and homepage revamp. Everything, including all past journal entries, is now XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant; I added some tags to journal entries to indicate mood and sound (like lj lets you). Also, while looking through [Haw-bin's blog], I got curious about the little "XFN Friendly" icon on the right side of the page...As it turns out, XFN stands for "Xhtml Friends Network" which aims to humanize the web by allowing web users to specify their relationship to other web users by decorating hyperlinks to web pages with tags describing the nature of the relationship. Curious? [read more] about it.