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 ;)