Let’s Get Small

As I ease into Blackberryness, with the assumption that I will be keeping the T-Mobile model, I’ve started to look at the intricacies of designing for tiny screens. My first foray is this site: I’ve redone it a little bit behind the scenes. It doesn’t look any different for you looking at it on a computer screen, but it does now work nicely on a Blackberry screen as well. (As does Zen la la, Sara’s blog which is running beside mine on the same software installation.)
It didn’t take much work, actually — just a bit of rearranging so that content comes first and looks decent, then the associated sidebar junk comes at the end. I’ve been looking at quite a few popular sites and it irks me that all their junk comes first, so I have to scrolllllllllllll way way way down to get to the content. (BoingBoing: the finger points at you. For such a tech-savvy group, your site is an almighty pain on a mobile device.)
I haven’t yet gotten into designing stylesheets explicity for handheld devices, but that sounds like an interesting challenge and I’ll tackle it when I have a little spare time. Right now, I have a ton of little things to do: finish laying out a book, a brochure, digitizing video for said brochure, a few corporate videos, producing and packaging DVDs of last weekend’s 48 Hour Film, and a wedding video that’s been sitting here on my hard disk waiting patiently for, oh, three years or so.
Wish I could make my to-do list small, as well. But I suppose the only way to actually accomplish that is to do things.

I can’t help wondering if having a Blackberry will make me feel more able to leave my home office behind and go outside. That makes me sound like I’m a slave to email, and I’m really not; but I am one of those people who is mesmerized by sitting in front of a screen and paranoid that someone is trying to contact me and can’t. Why else would I have — count ’em — phone numbers in 703, 408, 800, and two 408 mobile numbers, not to mention untold email addresses? Of course, 95% of my emails are spam and probably 50% of my phone calls are wrong numbers from people calling Commonwealth Telephone on my 800 line.
Still, I spent a good amount of time outside yesterday. I actually laid out on a beach chair in my backyard, shirtless — a blubbery white mass exposed to the sun. My backyard is very private and isn’t overlooked since we all have little one-story houses here, but for some reason I’ve always been reluctant to sunbathe in my own yard. It was nice.
Then I rode around on the scooter for an hour or so, exploring the neighborhoods around me. Just on the other side of the freeway from my house is San Jose’s College Park neighborhood, which I discovered for the first time. It’s lovely — quiet streets with lots of trees and beautiful houses. Not as ostentatious as Rose Garden, directly to the west, but filled with largish bungalows in various styles. If I find that six-figure job, I might think about moving across the road to College Park some day. Still, our neighborhood is nice, just a smaller version of College Park — 800-900 s.f. houses rather than 1500-2500. Just the right size. Small.