KaiSchaller.com

I finally booked my trip to San Francisco yesterday. I’ll be there between Saturday, August 11 and Wednesday, August 15. Hotwire came up with a great deal: roundtrip airfare (United/Frontier) and 4 nights in a 4-star hotel (Hyatt) for a mere $450.00! Not too shabby at all. I’ve never been out to California, but the purpose of this trip is to see if it’s somewhere I would like to live and work after I’m done with school in December. Lord knows there isn’t a shortage of web-related jobs in that city!

Jill and I went to a Royals game with my mom on Saturday. It was a great game, with the Royals winning by a run in the bottom of the 9th inning. Got myself a lovely green ball cap while I was at the stadium.

In freelance news: I’m continuing work on a large project that may or may not still interest the customer that requested it. I figure if he still wants it, great; if not, it’ll still be a good site for my portfolio since everything is being built from scratch. More details later, perhaps.

I’ve started re-reading all of my Terry Pratchett books. I’ve accumulated so many that I’ve forgotten most of the stories. It’s like having new books all over again! A picture of most of the collection: http://flickr.com/photos/kschaller/759053096/.

Bye for now.

I finally have my very own copy of The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly Holzshlag. I’ve been wanting this book ever since it was published a while back (the exact date escapes me), but it was at a time where I just couldn’t justify the cost of any more computer books. I was in a bad habit of buying books that looked interesting, getting on with the initial flip-through, then leaving them on the shelf after being distracted by more urgent matters. I didn’t want this to be one of those books, so I held off, figuring that

1. I would be able to give it the attention it deserved at some point in the future and
2. The price would come down slightly from $40

It turns out I was half-right; I don’t really have more time but I am more dedicated, and Amazon.com had it marked down to a more affordable level for my poor college budget. Note: Hastings had actually marked the book up to $45. Shame on you Hastings, no link for you.

I’m still working my way through CSS Mastery by Andy Budd in my spare time; it’s one heck of a great read.

Here’s the way I want things to work out over the course of the next year and a half: I’m going to take a 5 hour chemistry class over the summer in order to be able to fulfill all additional graduation requirements during the fall semester. This means I’ll have my BS in computer science in December and be done with school for the time-being. After that I will take some time to visit my family in Germany — I haven’t seen them in a couple of years and would like to before I dive into my career. All of this time I’ll be working on my portfolio (for web work) so that I can find a decent (and fun; fun is very important) job in the San Francisco Bay area. This means improving and fine-tuning the XHTML and CSS knowledge I already have, but also getting a much better feel for design.

I think one of the biggest challenges will be getting the ideas in my head to be accurately converted into a PSD; there’s always been something lost in the translation because I “build” them differently depending on if I’m thinking about a design or actually trying to create it with Photoshop.

While I have a very heavy course-load this semester I’m still finding the time to do whatever I can in my free time. Currently I’m reading CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd, which is an incredible book. So far it seems to be the most practical CSS book I’ve ever read, maybe I’ll be able to give a full review of it once I finish.

That’s it for now, I’ll keep you updated.