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Like minnows through my brain.

I had an interview today at a temp agency that supplies graphics people to large multinational corporations. I took a PowerPoint test and finished the one-hour test in forty minutes, doing stuff most people would never do to PowerPoint: Standardizing chart formats, matching RGB colors and typesetting away like Robo-Gutenberg. And then I spent the next twenty minutes on one thing, which was how to start numbering pages from “1″ starting on the page after the cover page.

I looked under every menu and sub-menu for the magic formula, clicking headers, footers, options and tools until the timer dinged. I asked the guy in charge of the test room, “How do you make the page after the cover page be 1?” And he answered:

“You number the cover page zero.”

All right…it’s not like there’s actual multinational corporate work flying around out there.

My badge is tired, and so am I.

WordPress, the blogging/content management software with which you’re viewing this blog unless I change my mind, had a big convention on November 14th and 15th at Baruch College’s Vertical Building. The people who designed the Vertical Building were very thoughtful. They knew that bloggers sit at a desk so much of the time and rarely get enough exercise, so they built elevators that only go to the third, fifth and eleventh floors and the escalators weren’t working that weekend at all. And since events were taking place on several different floors, often within minutes of each other, we had plenty of opportunity to move.

But even though the building had a learning curve, attendees were enthusiastic about pursuing more info on our favorite tracks. Mine were “Blogger” and “Beginning Developer” and I zoned in on everything about Themes, including:

• Daisy Olsen and Adria Richards, who were informative and proved that I’m not the only woman who likes to make a cartoon of herself.
• Allan Cole, who had a funny presentation on Parent/Child Themes, something I didn’t even know about and one that may ultimately solve my “customization” issues: The parent theme gives you the framework and the PHP code, and then you adapt the CSS to your own nefarious ends. (This is, of course, dependent on my having the patience to figure out CSS to begin with.)
• Jim Doran, who does the websites for Johns Hopkins, and showed us how to make Javascript easy with jQuery, and answered the question “Oh, so that’s what happened with Javascript since the last time I learned it and never used it.”

Towards the end of Day Two I was saying to myself, “Okay, enough with the theming; six months from now you’ll be kicking yourself for not having sat in on some of these other great topics.” So I went to a presentation on podcasting and when I got there, the guy was talking about theming.

The conference finished in the auditorium, so we didn’t have to run from place to place but I think that’s where I picked up a bad cold despite copious applications of free hand sanitizer, courtesy of Microsoft.

Some random stuff:

• The winner of a plug-in contest was “Conversation Prompter,” which “allows you to prompt your readers to comment by asking them to answer a question specific to that post;”
• There’s a WYSIWYG application called “Elastic” being developed that will make designing WordPress themes even more like using Dreamweaver;
• The guys at the Genius Bar showed me that I was smarter than I’d thought, or at least they ran through the same steps that I had when troubleshooting my problem;
• There was free cheese.

And I enjoyed Erin Blaskie‘s “Lifestreaming” presentation. The name makes it sound like the latest in New Age self-help, but it’s really just having this “You Central” that unites your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and videos in one place. It’s a narcissist’s dream, and my New Year’s Resolution for 2010.

Now that the blog is up and running, I have a few ideas for making it look better.

First off, I’d like the banner to go straight across the top of the page, with a 3-pixel rule across the top and the bottom. Then, I’d like to pick a different blue, somewhere between a sky-blue and a robins-egg blue. And then I’d like to employ the “Bevel and Emboss” feature in Photoshop so that the banner stands out in a sort of mock 3D. And then I think I’d like to drop-shadow the sidebar, and put a margin on either side of the content so that it’s centered between the left of the screen and the sidebar.

Oh yeah, and fix the code so that the comments show up. But that part is no fun.