My niece, Scarlet, showing us how she really feels.
Whooey
It’s been a very busy couple of weeks around here. Work has been full-on, both the day job and the moonlighting. I just posted a rough draft of the new web site for NCMAMA, the North Carolina Mountain Acoustic Music Association. I am glad to be working with these fine folks again, and am excited to be a part of the preservation of the mountain music and culture.
I have a rough draft of a site for a fine guitar player up too. Check out PaulPieper.com. So far it’s not much more than a Photoshop layout, but I am currently working on XHTML-izing and CSS-ifying it. There will be CD’s for sale, a dynamic calendar, and more once all is said and done.
Other than that, we are excited about finding out what sex our next prodigy will be in a couple of weeks. I need to buy the domain name and get the site for him/her started ASAP 🙂
Da Da Da.
The Stick
The “stick” is a kind of weird chain letter whereby some other blogger passes this list of questions on to you to answer.
I got The Stick from Thommy Browne. Here goes:
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
I want to be “The Cruel Shoes” by Steve Martin.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
If a fictional character counts as one in a movie, then yes, Padme Amidala would be the one.
Last book you bought is:
I bought “TCP/IP Primer Plus” by Heather Osterloh in the bargain bin at Books-A-Million.
Last book you read is:
I re-read “The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy” in preparation for the movie coming out. I never saw the movie because I didn’t want to be let down.
What are you currently reading?
All I have time to read these days are magazines. I get several free subscriptions to trade publications such as Federal Computer Week and Goverment Computing News that I read in the bathroom.
5 books I would take to a deserted island
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, the prequal to that, and the one right after it.
Now I pass The Stick to Jacksonian.
Revenge of the Sith
At Last
Ok, all I can say was I was utterly and completely blown away. This movie far surpassed my expectations, and brought tears to my eyes twice. I plan on seeing it at least two more times during the next week. It was immense, epic, and a completely satisfying end to what many felt had turned into a lame excuse to generate money on poor acting. Even my buddy Chris said it was a good flick, and he’s not even into Star Wars.
Man o man. At this point, I would venture to say it was the best of all 6 episodes.
Changes
I changed this site around a bit. Just continually playing around when I can. Reload the page for a new pic up top. Have fun.
Coffee Shoppin’
I have been enjoying the activity of sitting in coffee shops after work lately. Working downtown allows me to do this now, and just to sit here and surf the web using free wireless internet access from my laptop is relaxing.
Currently I am sitting here enjoying a frosty, hand-squeezed lemonade. Unfortunately, Bjork is being pumped through the audio system here, so I am seriously considering the placement of my iPod in my ears. Bjork scares me for some reason. She reminds me of a freakish troll that haunted my dreams as a toddler.
On another note, I shaved my goatee the other day because I had not seen my chin in over five years. I think I will put it back in hiding as soon as possible. I look really weird (and young), and the dorkwads at work have called me everything from a pinhead to an 8th-grader. Ah well…at least I have the option of growing facial hair. The AF d00ds are not allowed, and well, the AF d00dettes still haven’t figured out how anyway.
This weekend will be a big one: Gray’s 2nd birthday occurs, and both sets of parents are coming in town. We may see a brother and/or sister or two as well. You can be sure I will take a lot of pictures.
Passing Time
Time has been flying by quickly again. Not that it ever really stopped flying by quickly, because we all know that as we approach the dimensional shift, time speeds up anyway. Right?
We had a little yard sale today. By little, I mean our whole street organized a big sale and about 12 families participated up and down the road. Exit polls indicate that we made out the best of the families, breaking the $100 mark by noon.
Today was also Kentucky Derby Day, and I planned on watching it, but then I remembered it was on when Alicia, Gray, and I were at the bookstore. I think this is only the second one I have missed watching on TV since I moved away from Louisville in 1992.
Speaking of Louisville (no, I’m not mentioning basketball), the Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO) reviewed the Crain re-release. They never reviewed it when it came out in 1991, so it was good to see they had the guts to do it this time, and it was better to see that they liked it.
I’ve been quite busy with home-based work lately, and am currently working on 4 projects. One is for a Washington, DC-based guitar player, another is a remake of the NCMAMA web site, another is for a Waste Management software company in Kentucky, and the last is for something else which I guess I shouldn’t announce until negotiations are finalized.
And to top it all off, I found my toenail and fingernail clippings collection yesterday. I didn’t want to mention it here that I had lost them because I feared I might cause mass-hysteria. But yes, I had thrown them into a tupperware bin that I had stored some knick-knacks in in the basement a few months ago. That was a major oversight on my behalf. In celebration of finding them, I clipped my nails this evening. Pictures soon to follow.
It is Friday
Today I report on several unrelated things. I realized it has been a week since I posted, so here is what has been going on.
New Site
I have almost finished up a new site for the Asheville Real Estate Network. The site makes use of something called IDXSearch, which is a property search tool for MLS listings. In order to use it, you have to frame the page from the IDX web site in your site.
I don’t need to mention the plethora of reasons that frames are a horrible thing to do to a web site, but nevertheless, this was the only solution offered. I was more disturbed to see that the IDX tool doesn’t work very well in non-IE browsers, and offers no capability to customize the interface. It just goes to show that there are still programmers stuck in 1998.
More Crain Reviews
Using Google and the referrer logs for crainspeed.com, I have located a few more reviews online of the Speed re-release. I posted links to them on the front page of Crain site. I continue to be amazed at the response to the CD, 14 years after it was originally released.
Cool Artwork
Even though I am married to a talented, trained artist, I have never been much of an art aficionado. However, a few styles of art have always caught my eye, including the style used in vintage magic posters.
Today I ran across a site about the illustrations of Arthur Radebaugh, whose work you will likely recognize if you have ever looked through old Life magazines. Something about the organized, structured style I like. It is reminiscent of the Soviet-style propaganda posters from the USSR era.
Oh Yeah
Oh yeah…Alicia is pregnant again.
Good Times
I turned 32 this weekend, and in celebration, we had some folks over to cook out on the new gas grill Alicia bought me. We ate a lot of meat, including burgers, hot dogs, and fish. There is nothing like a good Ball Park Frank to raise the bar and make you wonder whether or not you will live to tell the tale. Ahhh, the joys of animal lips.
With Alicia having a hand in the making of the burgers, potato salad, and cole slaw, you know it had to be good. Storebought will not do with her, and her flair for adding just enough of this and that makes it all taste great.
I plan on branching out and finding many good things to do with my new grill. Alicia was shocked to see me perusing the Joy of Cooking section on grilling…
I have posted two new photo galleries, one of pics from my cell phone, and another of higher quality digital cam pics, both from this month (including yesterday’s cookout). Check out the Will’s Ye Olde Photo Gallery.
Ogling Google
I posted before about Google Maps and how cool it was, surpassing MapQuest in capability and usability.
Now, Google has added a new satellite view to their maps. For example, you can do a search for an address, click the “Satellite” link, and see imagery of the location you are looking at. This is not new technology, but it is now in a form that is easily consumable by the masses.
This has stirred up some mixed responses from people around the internet. Some people consider it a tool for environmental accountability, where we can see things like the clearcutting around Nanaimo, British Columbia.
For those armchair travellers amongst you, Google Sightseeing offers you the ability to see the world in your pajamas. I found the Planes In Flight post, where people sent in shots of airplanes captured by satellites in, pretty neat.
You never know what sorts of things might be caught that shouldn’t be, however, some obvious ones have been doctored up (notice the “drawn-on” rooftops”). Others are kinda funny, and some are weird (a giant compass[?] at Edwards AFB).
Still, the detail in these maps is nowhere near as complex as that of the property search I found for Buncombe County, NC, where you can see me & my shadow walking up my driveway, my truck out front, and Alicia’s car on the side of the house:
4-11
It is National Information Day, which we celebrate every April 11 (because, hey, it’s like, 4-11 man). On this day it is good to do nothing but surf the Internet in search of useless facts, urban legends, and the cold, hard, truth.
OK, so maybe I made this up and it is only I that celebrates National Information Day. Allright, allright, I have never celebrated it before, and in fact, I have a lot of work to do today, so I shouldn’t be wasting any more time.
At least I finally got my taxes done last night. So much for my new-year’s resolution of having them done before the end of March.