I love this show. I especially love the improv comedian doing this skit. After the depressing week Christine and I have had, this helps to return us to some normalicy.

Enjoy!

photo to be added soon…

This last Sunday I found out that my grandfather had passed away late Saturday evening, due to pneumonia aggravated by asthma. To me he was a strong-willed, intelligent individual that had a love for God’s creatures. He kept in close contact with his daughter and sons, especially in recent times. What stuck out most in my mind was his unswavering feeling of one’s origins and nationality. He embodied the age-old phrase “Be proud of who you are, not what people think you are.” Even though I know these things about him, I wish desperately that I could have gotten to know him better.

Rest well, Grandpa. May the memories of your life continue on in our family.

Hello again! As you all can see, I took down the ImOnline plugin. It was nifty at the time, but I really don’t need it. Besides, after talking with the developer and futzing around with it, I still couldn’t get it to notice me on Skype. All it recognized was AIM.

Anyways, I have a replacement for that sidebar plugin. It works with my new photo gallery and is even linked to it! As you again can see, it randomly spits out a picture from the gallery. You can click on the little picture to see it in the gallery directly, or you can click the link I put up to see the gallery’s front page. I also thought it’d be a good way to introduce the new gallery to all my family and friends! Oh, and I also made the “About the Author” page (finally!) to give people some insight into who wrote this stuff that they’re reading!

The ASCS site redesign is coming along good. Actually it’s not so much a redesign as it is a re-coding. I’m not changing the layout; it’s great the way it is. All I’m changing is the way it’s presented in the browser. It’s a challenge, considering how different IE renders pages compared to all the other, more web standards-compliant  browsers. People, I respect Microsoft, but the Explorer browser sucks! I heartily recommend Firefox to anyone over the other browsers. Please do yourselves a favor and check it out!

Work was great this week, but the next two weeks are going to be hell. I didn’t have much of a choice in the way I scheduled things, but the least I could do was to give us an easy week this last one. I just hope I make it through this month intact, because the next two months are going to be much bumpier!

That’s all from me. Cheers!

Hello All!! Wow, I can’t believe it’s June already! How’d the time go by so fast? Actually I have a far-fetched theory on that one, but it’ll have to wait for another post sometime. I’d mainly like to talk about the changes to the blog and what I’m doing lately, and also what I hopefully will be doing very soon. By the way, the pic was taken just now with the webcam. Thommen loves being on daddy’s shoulder! click the pic to see full-size.

First, the blog changes. As you all know, I switched to this WordPress format and all but completely ditched Blogger.com. I’m glad I did! The server space I’m using on PowWeb went down once since I started this late April. Blogger has had problems several times a month. Now, PowWeb is going to more reliable servers when they already have a 98% uptime rate. But I digress! I’m very happy with the design theme I settled on, a custom theme designed by Evok Interactive (see sidebar). I know I could have designed my own, but the problem is integration. I haven’t yet learned PHP and MySQL integration, since I’m still finishing up HTML/CSS training, but I will soon. The WordPress blog relies heavily on PHP to do many of its calls. Fortunately, PHP and HTML go hand in hand and integrate well together, so I was able to at least change the font sizes and colors, as well as formatting. I also managed to change the format of viewing the entries so they’re no longer excerpted when you view by category or month.

Earlier this last month, I integrated the “Now Playing” section into the sidebar so you can see what music I’m listening to at the moment. The page refreshes every 2-1/2 minutes to keep it updated. I tested out the comment box to make sure the refresh wouldn’t screw up anybody currently composing a comment. It’s all good! I plan to get some software that will let me broadcast what I’m listening to out on select channels. I will also have an “On The Air” link underneath the artist info when that happens, so you all can listen in. I may limit it to just five listeners, to keep myself out of trouble. Added to this, I recently installed a ImOnline plugin that shows everyone if I’m online and what Instant Messengers they can use to contact me. Finally, I changed the link colors on both the main section and sidebar, so visitors can actually SEE that they are links; before, they were the same color as the rest of the text!

Going back to talk about Blogger. The only reason why I’m not completely nixing my old blog from them is because I visit other blogs on there and if I comment on someone’s entry, I want them to visit that blog and play “follow the link” to this blog! Plus, I have ASCS’s blog on it… That’ll do for now.

Now to talk about business. So far I haven’t gotten around to finishing my Esoterik Graphics site. I should be doing this NOW (!!!), but I wanted to write first. So far, I have that to finish and I also have the whole ASCS site to move and re-design! That is going to be a big job; I spent mucho time designing that. I already started the first phase of the move, which is the main page move to seedcrackers.org. The .com domain is still active for another year, to let everyone adjust. Last weekend, I started and completed a rough draft for a client (my second one!!), and I still have to wait for him to respond with thoughts and suggestions! Going slow is my business and implementation. Hopefully, I’ll be able to speed this up. The big thing dragging me down is my day job. It’s taking up so much energy that, when I get home, I don’t want to do much of anything! Well, I noticed that my energy comes and goes in cycles throughout the year; here’s hoping the upswing will come soon.

I think I’ve just talked my fingers off!!! I have more to blog about, so I may post another, completely unrelated, entry sometime this evening. Until then, cheers!

This first link is to PCWorld.com:

PCWorld’s 100 Best Products of the Year

I loved reading about all the cool products, even though it was making me go green with gadget envy! Another plus: Apple has five products on the list.

This second link is to a rather scathing article by MacDailyNews, going on overload about Microsoft’s latest attempt at anti-virus tactics:

Mafiasoft launches Windows protection racket

I have to agree with a lot of comments on this article. Especially one user who said:

“It would be like buying a Pinto and Ford selling you fire insurance instead of fixing the flaw…. that’s just not acceptable.”

I DO think MDN’s comment went a little too far:

“If you’re stupid enough to pay Microsoft $50 per year to “protect” the operating system that Microsoft should have made secure in the first place, then you deserve to use Windows for the rest of your life.”

If not for that comment, Windows users around the world will likely become very peeved at MS in a relatively short amount of time!