New job, new house in a new state, new car, new EVERYTHING.  Life’s been a little crazy lately, but also a lot of fun.  I’m really enjoying the new job so far, and with the learning potential and challenges ahead it only stands to get better.  I continue to be very pleasantly surprised by how passionate everyone there is about making truly usable, beautiful, accessible, and standardized websites and apps.  That attitude goes a long way toward getting me excited about the future there.  The work they’ve done recently is really genuinely good stuff, equal to just about anything else out there, and superior to a lot of it!  They have some very talented designers and developers, and are bringing more on board all the time.

Virginia is pretty great too, it’s beautiful out here.  Mountains west and north of us, and hundreds of square miles of beautiful greenery in between.

The site re-design has sort of been victimized by the whole moving process,  but every now and then i’ve had a chance to go in and make a little change, most of which have little to no visual impact , but are important nonetheless.  IE6  rendering isn’t as bad as I expected, but there’s still a little housecleaning there to be done.  That’s about as low as i’m going to go on trying to give a browser the full experience, anything older will have to suffer through a little ugliness.  With IE7 out now, 99% of the population really has no excuse to not be using a halfway decent browser, and I don’t feel any responsibility to enable them by making things pretty at the cost of awkward hacks and invalid code.  That’s the real joy of having a personal site, not having to cater to everyone!

There’s still a lot of little WP template issues i’m sure.  Forms on obscure pages I haven’t even looked at yet, etc, so I apologize to anyone happening across any ugliness on here.  I’m working on it!

I’ve been compulsively using StumbleUpon for a little while now, and every single day, without fail, I still find a half dozen or more really great sites that I probably never would have seen otherwise. My bookmarks have exploded since I started using it.

The first day I installed the toolbar for Firefox, it seemed like every single time I clicked the “Stumble!” button, I was taken to a page that was either extremely useful or cool or both, and that happened probably a good hundred times in a row. I’ve been hooked ever since. It really is a marvelous little toy to tinker with, and I highly recommend it. You can see the pages I’ve liked by viewing my StumbleUpon homepage.

For some time now I’ve had this little javascript “The Secret” banner across the corner of my site’s index. I first watched the movie in July of 2006. I thought it was fantastic, and still do. Since then, it’s had a lot of skeptical press and negativity rained down upon it by about every media outlet on earth. I think they are misunderstanding the film.

Unless you are a really vapid individual, you don’t view The Secret and then start thinking that you can conjure things from midair, which is apparently what these media types are taking from the film. What the film is trying to tell people is that positive people attract positivity into their lives, and that no one ever successfully jumped through a hoop without thinking about successfully jumping through a hoop first. It’s about believing in yourself, and caring enough about the things you want to try and make them happen. The presentation is gorgeous and engaging, and the message is sterling and clear. If you don’t feel energized and excited after watching the movie, your skepticism has murdered your imagination, and you should immediately make every effort to snap out of it and regain some shred of the spark for life you were born with.

Since two seasons have passed since my last update, and I had some changes to make to the contact page and the about page anyway, I figured I’d go ahead and type up a little entry here.

Since I lost all my readers when I quit updating with any frequency, this is mainly to make me feel less guilty about having a cobweb-ridden page sitting around taking up space on the web. I’ve had all kinds of ideas and intentions floating around in my brain for a few months about freshening the design around here and making an effort to resume posting, but then I get busy doing something else and forget all about it for a month.

I’ve meant to sort of transform the site into a place where I can put my web-work portfolio and such for a couple of years now, and ironically i’ve been too busy creating websites to do that. On the bright side, once I get around to it, my portfolio will be nice and fat!

The header image above is bugging me. I always meant for it to be temporary, since it is pretty poorly done, but since the colors are right I just never did anything with it. I like all the green, but next time I redo the look, i’d like to get a little brighter, more colorful. And the header is going to have to be much more crisp than the current one, for my sanity’s sake.

The first thing that’s going to happen is the entire site getting transitioned over to WordPress. MovableType is great in many ways, and has served me well on numerous sites i’ve done, but the rebuilding every time I want to update something drives me nuts. It’s slow, and clunky to a degree, which is unfortunate since I like the rest of it so much.

I’ve used WordPress for the past two blog/news type sites i’ve done this year, and it is so much easier for people to use, and so much more modular and well thought out, I must make the switch on principle alone. I make a point of using well-written, well-designed and open source software when it is feasible to do so, and this is a case where it is, once I can find the time to get everything moved. Suggestions on streamlining that process are welcome!

The other night my PC died. It had been trying to go for a long time, but I wouldn’t let it. This time it refused my strenuous attempts to bring it back. I bought it in February of 2001, and it has served me very well since. For a PC that was almost 5 years old, it was quite the performer. Very snappy and responsive, and took everything I threw at it with grace, including 200 MB PSD files.

I sort of wanted to upgrade and I sort of didn’t. My old machine worked fine… (until it died), and I didn’t see any good reason to drop hundreds of dollars on a new one. All I really use it for is web surfing, email and web design. The most torturous thing my PC’s go through is Photoshop by a long shot. I’m not much of a gamer, and on the occasions I want to play one, I usually head for the PS2 instead of the PC.

With that being said, Civilization 4 is out, and i *really* love that series of games. My old PC didn’t meet the minimum specs for the new version, so I haven’t bought it yet, but it was bugging me in the back of my mind. I broke down the other day and ordered all the parts for a new machine from Newegg. With next day shipping it came to around $809, which I think is a pretty fair deal for what I got. Athlon64 3000+, Asus A8N-E (S939), a gig of Corsair XMS, a WD 120GB SATA2.0 drive, a really nice Antec TruePower2 430 watt PSU, a DVD burner, and a beautiful CoolerMaster Cavalier 3 case. I skimped on the video card, since I’m not really into PC games, and got a Radeon X300SE 256MB. I actually considered buying something pre-built (for the first time ever), and called Dell. Not only was the customer service person I talked to Hispanic and very seriously lacking in the mastery of the english language department, but they quoted something like 600 bucks for a very low-end P4 system with zero bells and whistles and a proprietary case/psu. I’ll pass. I prefer AMD chips anyway.

The new PC is shockingly fast, and was the easiest build I’ve ever done. I put it all together and booted it, and everything worked perfectly. That’s a first for me. There’s always SOMETHING that’s borked at first, be it a dead component or a conflict or what have you. Not this time though, it was a very smooth and simple process. Here I am 4 hours later and XP is fully updated and patched, and I’ve got most of my basic stuff installed and configured. Still need to get the stuff off my old HD though. Maybe tomorrow. I’m quite happy with the purchase so far, and I hope it has the same staying power as my old one did.

God i’ve been so busy lately. The days just fly by. Uh..biggest things on my mind right now in no certain order are as follows: dual core processors, xdisciplex a.d.’s “the revelation”, work, the reason why full flavor KOOLs taste less harsh than my trusty KOOL mild 100’s, the lawn, and dogs.

my favorite links of late:

Edwards Wire Rope - almost there!

HardOCP goes without saying

XBit Labs - a new favorite

LouisvilleMojo - good forums, keeping Louisville weird

Maxthon - won me over from Firefox, article to follow at some point.

Newegg - venice cores? bueller?