Yeah, no updates for a while. I took a week off of work for the kids' spring break and it was pretty relaxing. I go back to work tonight (joy). Got a lot of good kid and gaming time in, but not much wife time. Sarah refused to go outside and play at all, all week long. She was basically plugged into my backside or Julie's and spent every minute with us. She's 8, so that's a little strange, but it was pleasant anyhow. She hasn't been that way since she was a lot younger and it was like having a baby girl again (sorta). It's funny, she loves Warcraft III, so we spent a good many hours with that game. She's quite good at it too. Lance enjoys some of the more "elitest" board games now and scoffs at the thought of playing Chutes N Ladders or Candyland.. hehe.. We play stuff like Settlers of Catan, Tigris and Euphrates and Talisman, which I have been slowly collecting parts of. I also started re-collecting full sets of the Star Trek CCG game, but I only want a few sets of them. The game was excellent, but unless you had a lot of cards, it was just too hard, especially if you had to share your deck with others.

Nothing else really going on.. Julie has picked up the EQOA (PS2 version) addiction, which allows me to play some of my single player games without guilt of lost quality wife time ;) I like watching her play anyhow, so does Sarah. Today is Greek Easter, so we're heading to my aunt's house for some good eats.

Just playing with some stuff here.. I used to have a BBS by the same name for many years (1987 - 1994 to be exact). It was an awesome BBS (I thought so). Anyhow.. If anyone remembers BBSs, they were kinda modular in design. All of them had a 'main' menu which allowed you to navigate to subsections with specific material. I am a theme-oriented person when it comes to design and function, so I had a theme running throughout the BBS, based on Voivod concepts. It just fit. Each menu system was a "vortex" and I had names for all areas that evade me now.. but it all fit into the theme. That's the way I will attack this site as well. The blog won't always be the main focus, but for now, it is the main "vortex" page.

I always enjoyed randomness on my BBS, so every time you visited, it would look different. I was constantly changing menus, colors, looks, etc.. Some of the BBS software allowed users to change their prompt templates and almost always the way their messages appeared in the message base areas. To keep with this design, I have employed a random quote javascript which pulls from a .js file containing all the quotes and displays them upon page load. If I get proficient enough with some JS, maybe I'll allow people to add their own quotes. I know this is easily possible with PHP, but I'm taking this one step at a time. With PHP and MySQL you can create a small database to handle all that... Oh yeah, the quotes won't make sense to most people, unless you happen to know the songs they are from. I tend to pick the most twisted passages from the music I listen to ;)

I also tore apart the template for this blog (this doesn't help my viewers any, just me) and put the style codes into a separate file so I can call it from any page. I've kinda decided the current look is good enough to use on any page, barring any font/color changes that can easily be changed via the style sheet.

Ok once I get the color fixed, I'll start building a site. Yeah, really, a site. For what? I don't know. See, I am sorta learning web site development at work and kinda self-teaching myself along the way. Editing and manipulating a blog template is a little like web design, especially if it's a complex one. I've always wanted a personal web site, just never bothered (too lazy) to do one. The last time I bothered, I got my wife kicked off of her hosting service because the 1.5MB Excel list of all my MP3 albums put her over her bandwidth limit when people viewed it. Not to mention, that's not really a very smart thing to do.. show all the things you've downloaded, regardless of buying a good portion of them in the end.

So anyhow.. I am into music, books, gaming (all types) and of course, family, so that's what the site will be. Maybe a page for each with news, etc.. interests, general blabber.. Who knows, maybe I'll learn something. The more I work with the web at work and here, I learn that I really enjoy it, especially when it all works.

Well, keep watching, maybe something will happen. ...

Screw it... I'm going all black until I can figure out this web color dithering stuff.. I also found a better chart: Color Chart.
I select dark blue and it looks green.. I select dark purple and it looks brown. So, I give up for now. Enjoy the darkness ;)

Bah!! This is what happens when you develop on a machine with very specific settings in the dark... The site looked like a rich, dark brown-toned environment until I checked it out on another PC and realized the colors were hideous! Ugh.. It looked so good. Well, turn down your brightness and contrast a little bit and you'll see what i was seeing - haha! Not sure why the brightness was so low on this machine.. Oh well, I'll fix the colors tomorrow. I did find a great site to help you coordinate your web colors though: Complete HTML Color Chart - Very handy.

Also, just for total kicks.. grab this font: Voivod. This is the font used in the older CD inserts, designed by Away of Voivod. The TTF font is a conversion by Dan Matlock, but it only looks decent at larger oint sizes. Pop it into your Fonts dir under C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINNT. If you don't like it, just remove it later and it won't display anymore ;)

Not much to say lately. It's time for taxes today. I think this day is one of the top 5 most frustrating days of the year. Not only is it annoying to tally up and organize all your expenses and income for the year (if it were just my income, it wouldn't be, but Julie has incomes from many different sources due to her line of work), plus medical stuff.. ugh that stuff is always depressing. Oh well, once a year isn't TOO bad. All I can say is BAH.

Wow, it's Saturday already? It's been a busy couple of days. Between animals, kids and daily house stuff, it's just been busy. Nothing really to say, just finished this week's homework for school. Yay.

DOH I nearly forgot. (I didn't forget this morning, just forgot to mention it for the purpose of this page).

This is a very special day. Eleven years ago last night, I was stationed at my to-be wife's house for a few days, arriving one night before (I left home with just a backpack and my shitty car - a Chevette). I was looking for a place to crash until I could find a place to stay back at college (as if they would take me back, I was expelled). To make a long story short, by the time morning came around (April 1st), something happened that would change the course of two lives. We spent all night sitting across from each other and Julie kept evading a question I kept asking her. Finally, she gave in and said she "kinda had a crush" on me, and that's it.

Eleven years later and here we are... This year is also our tenth anniversay (in December). Yay!

Some small structural things going on here.. Things may look broken from time to time. Oh yeah, thanks to my loving wife for fixing my archives, I never did get around to doing them ;)

Okay, I got the winamp JS working. It's kinda neat. Just gotta mess with the formatting and shrink down the guy's "powered by" plug and we're golden. Actually, I'm removing it for now, sorry blogamp guy. It was just too big and fubared my frame. I'll shrink it and put it back, the guy deserves credit after all.

Thanks to Karri for another idea for my bland blog ;)

Oh yeah, and a word to all those network admins + web designer wannabe's.. the BACKSLASH (" \ ") is for LOCAL directories and the FORWARD SLASH (" / ") is for web folders.. sheesh.. only took me 20 minutes to remember that.

Happy Tuesday. Tuesdays stink.. I end up staying late at work for meetings, barely get sleep and usually attend school at night, so very little family time. I feel crappy so I'm not going to class tonight. It's not like I have to go, i'm currrently at 99.9% and there's only one test and a final coming up.

I don't have anything exciting or funny to say today. It's just not a funny or exciting day.