a government position that I did not know existed until just now…

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I found this hanging on our front door over the weekend – I can only imagine what the Country Mosquito Control Commissioner actually does, but something tells me that Jessica here won’t be driving around spraying any chemicals herself…


I did a quick Google search and apparently she didn’t win. I can only hope that she lost to some big, burly dude named Scruffy in a tattered, old coveralls because seriously, who wants a Country Mosquito Control Commissioner who’s afraid to get their hands dirty???

Note to Self: There was probably a funny humor column to be had from this, but that’s what you get for taking two weeks to go figure out what that thing hanging from the front door was…

productive in a private sort of way…

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I commented on Twitter this evening that I kind of feel like I’ve been neglecting my usual blogging and tweeting lately.

Sure, I’ve had a few scattered posts both here and on Twitter, but for the most part it feels like I’ve been kind of quiet since we got back from Disneyland right around a month ago, which admittedly is probably nonsense because my wife will no doubt be the first to express that I’ve been working my ass off the last couple of weeks on one thing or another, in that it feels like I’ve been “scheduling” time with her on a one random evening at a time basis ever since!

I guess the truth is that I’ve just been so nose-down in other projects lately that pretty much everything else is falling to the wayside in the process. I have a pretty bad habit of planning more for myself than I can ever hope to complete in a given time period, which unfortunately tends to result in me beating myself up at the end of every weekend for not conquering the ridiculous list of tasks that I had allocated for that same time period when I’m also supposed to do chores around the house and relax from the stresses of my day job to boot!

For what it’s worth, I have dialed things back a little bit for this fall, in that I ended up cancelling a project that just wasn’t going to come together the way I had envisioned it, but there’s still a lot left to go in the form of website redesigns, new websites to build, holiday stuff to prepare for The Humor Column, and a few other things that I don’t want to spoil, but am really looking forward to. And ultimately while it is very busy and stressful, I keep telling myself that this is the kind of work that I need to put in if I truly want to make writing my career – that until I get to the point where I can make writing my primary job and free up those other 45+ hours a week, I kind of need to bust my ass and make the most of the other time that I do have…

It’s definitely a tough struggle and I most certainly can’t wait for that fateful day when we do get to make the decision that “it’s time” to finally say goodbye to the comforts of the day job, but at least I can admit that when each of these projects is all said and done, I can almost always look back and be happy with the product of the time that I put in. I may not absolutely love every other step along the way, but I think that’s a different aspect of the creative process that we can talk about another day.

Just think – come Christmastime, with any luck another three or four of these bad boys should finally be behind me!

…and when they are, there’s another two or three already on the docket to slide right in and take their places…

*whew*

This is probably bad…

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Admittedly I have been seeing some strange behavior from our home server lately – for example, I’ll try to access a drive from my desktop and get an “Unable to Connect” error, then come to find that the box rebooted and is sitting at the Windows login prompt. Login to restore file sharing and within a couple of hours, it would do the same thing again.

I haven’t had much time to research this yet, but I’m kind of hoping that this is one of the older drives in the system. It contains something like 4 drives total – 1 relatively small drive just for the OS, an older 80GB drive, and then two 400GB drives that are on their own controller. Honestly, it’s been time to address this for a while – noise has been getting pretty bad and we’re going to be losing the spare bedroom that it currently resides in sometime next spring, not to mention storage issues of just needing more space … so maybe this is an opportunity to do a little upgrading in the process.

I already have a “leftover” 1.5TB drive that I tried to use to expand our DVR (didn’t work – box had too much lag and got confused by the disk size). I see I can get another one for like $80, so I’m thinking about maybe picking up a second to use in a mirror, with probably Mozy as a secondary off-site backup. I’m also seriously considering Windows Home Server – right now it’s just running an old XP license that I had, and some of the features (backup, streaming) look kinda cool. It’s one of those upgrades where part of it would be legitimate protection for our important files (10 years of photos, music, all of my creative work), but a good chunk would also be me geeking out … and that’s ok, but I still need to get a better gauge on what we can squeak through in the budget first.

In the meantime, I copied over a few working files that I needed and shut the thing down. Later I might try to disable that drive so that I can at least turn it back on, although again, not being sure what’s even on it, I won’t really know if that would be worthwhile until after actually doing it!

I want to go diving again.

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When we were out for Sara’s birthday last weekend, at one point when we were BS’ing with the other couple at our table, the topic of scuba diving came up. I told all of my fun stories that I remembered from long ago – seeing baracuda and nurse sharks and eels in Florida and then returning back to Michigan to dive with basically nothing. The ironic punchline of the whole thing is always that I moved to the Tampa area so I’d be close to the water for diving, even though I’ve lived here for 7 years now and haven’t done anything of the sort since…

To add insult to injury, I pulled out my old dive log off the shelf this morning and realized after flipping through it that I technically haven’t been diving since 2000 – over a decade!!! Sure, I guess I’ve been “busy,” but sometimes I look back at diving much like playing the guitar and it’s another one of those things that I really miss doing, even though I have no idea when I’d have the time to do it anymore these days.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that I’ve got a ways to go before I think I would let myself go out again. First and foremost, I’m not doing so great with my weight right now, and I can only imagine how much lead I’d have to be carrying to actually get my fat ass down to the bottom! I don’t want to make this post about being overweight, so let’s just say that there have been some advances recently that I’m really hoping are going to help and leave it at that.

Secondly, in addition to actually losing weight, I kind of need to get comfortable with the water again. I’ve never really been super comfortable being in water over my head, but somehow during the dive class that I took over a decade ago, everyone managed to help me calm my nerves in deep water at least when I had my gear on … maybe it helped decrease that whole fear of drowning – I don’t know! That said, having been away from the hobby for so long has definitely caused that fear to return – specifically, I had a couple of problems when went snorkeling during the cruise last year, and even the deep parts of the lazy river over at Stormalong Bay at Disney make me nervous, even with lifeguards literally every five feet along the wall.

That’s basically two things that I know I need to work on if I want to don a regulator and explore life under the sea again. I think I can do it – the weight loss coming before the swimming proficiency – but it is something that I’d like to start working more actively towards, maybe next year. Sara has expressed an interest in diving as well, so it could be something cool for us to do together, plus I know that my old dive buddy Tim would love to do a little exploring the next time he’s able to bring his family down to visit.

One last reason that I want to get back into diving – this entry this I found in my old dive log:

6/21/98 : Davis Reef – Islamorada, Florida
Best dive so far!!! Saw a nurse shark, two eels, two lobsters, and Buddha! Tons of beautiful fish…

Who knew I’ve been a Buddhist all this time?! Apparently only King Triton and his court.

VoicePulse: The Epilogue

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(aka Yep, VoicePulse Lost a 5-Year Customer Over $39.95)

So to follow-up ever so briefly on my much more verbose VOIP-related diatribe from over a month ago at this point, I’m officially no longer a VoicePulse customer and now a satisfied member of the VOIPo family instead. Our home number is now up and running on the new service, we’ve got a better plan for 30% cheaper than we were paying, and I just mailed VoicePulse back their dead hardware this afternoon.

I’m kind of done with the whole being pissed at VoicePulse thing and at this point I’m just happy to be getting the service that I’m paying for again, but it’s still a little disappointing to look back and realize that the reason I left VoicePulse is because they’re not willing to support their own hardware. The idea of charging fees to replace their own device to me is just deplorable, and as much of a pain that it was to transfer my number to a new provider and even pay for their service a year in advance (it was cheaper that way), I just couldn’t in good conscience pay VoicePulse forty bucks for something that they should’ve taken care of themselves.

Doesn’t really say a lot for how you value loyalty if waving a $40 fee isn’t worth keeping a 5-year customer around, now does it???

An Evolution of Web Design

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Sometimes it’s interesting to look back at the various websites that I’ve built over the years, to compare notes, to see how I’ve improved, and even sometimes just for a little bit of that embarrassing nostalgic cringe…

Even after finishing the rebuild for pumpkin tonight, and my D&D site earlier this summer, I still have a couple of other redesigns that I’d like to tackle this year – maybe I’m just in the mood, or I feel guilty that they’ve gone this long, or even simply that I feel like I’ve finally got the technical know-how to at least somewhat do them justice!

And granted, I owe the vast majority of that success to WordPress – I know that the last two sites turned out as well as they did because in both cases I could take advantage of existing WordPress themes and just modify them to fit my needs. Mind you, we’re still talking more than just moving widgets around – I’m writing php and tweaking images to fit my design, modifying the widths of sidebars, and for the D&D site doing some pretty funky stuff with the loop to get the homepage output that I wanted, but at least to me it’s still a far cry from creating all of my own graphics from scratch, too.

Right now, my design process begins with a sketch of what I’d like the page to look like, then I find a theme (or several) that incorporates as many of the features that I want, and I go from there. It’s nice having the whole WordPress framework to lean back on to organize the actual content, as opposed to having separate files for each and every page like I used to do! Overall, I have a very love-hate relationship with web design because as much as sometimes I’d love to just hand all of this to someone else and say, “You deal with the stupid CSS – I’m gonna go write content!” at the same time design work can be a nice break for me when I’m not feeling as creative from a writer’s perspective and just want to work through a list of website tweaks that I need.

My ultimate short-term goal is to have another three sites redesigned by January-ish – two big ones and one that should be relatively painless, after which I’m hoping to take some time off from design to work on a new book. After that, who knows – maybe I’ll have a new project altogether to focus on, or maybe I’ll be taking another pass at one of these. A web designer’s work never ends…

I DO Love Me Some Pumpkin!

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Hey, look – I got another project completed…


Admittedly this one was a bit humorous the whole time I was working on it – the idea that this goofy, little blog about pumpkins that I threw together a couple of years ago on a whim while I was up to my neck in wedding planning stress is still going strong as it now approaches over 100 posts (a lot for a seasonal blog, anyways), even more so to the point where it finally became time to actually give the theme a bit of a redesign! Don’t forget, it used to look like this:


For what it’s worth, I like the new design a whole lot, to the point where it’s actually making me start to feel a little more confident in my ability as a web designer (more on that in a separate post here in a minute). I was really happy with the color scheme and how everything flows together, and I even was able to fit more ads in than I was originally expecting without having them take away from the look. I also finally got around to throwing a Google Analytics tracker on it, which has frankly floored me in the last week and a half with what I can only possibly assume has got to be seasonal traffic, but I guess it doesn’t make much sense to complain about a surprising amount of traffic to one’s website…

…even if it is just a goofy, little pumpkin blog!

What I’m Watching – Fall 2010 Edition

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Dexter
What can I say? They set the bar ridiculously high last season with arguably one of the best season finales I’ve ever seen, so it’s still tough to say whether season 5 will pale in comparison, but so far considering how they pretty much hit the ground running right where the last season left off, so far, not bad.

The Apprentice
You know this show is headed downhill when their biggest sponsors are popcorn vendors and shoe makers, although I’m sure if you asked Trump, he’d tell you that each are billion dollar industries!!! I definitely enjoy the celebrity version better because there’s a lot less drama – Gene Simmons really doesn’t have much to lose if he gets “fired” – but aside from a few horrible calls recently, this is still one of the better shows I’m watching right now. Not sure what that means…

Weeds
I really only watch this show for novelty at this point. It lost me a couple of seasons ago, but I’ll still watch if I happen to catch it while my wife has it on or something. The individual episodes are still funny, but the overall story arc for me fizzled out two seasons ago.

Top Chef: Just Desserts
This one is just about dead to me. Maybe it’s because they have a bad cast, maybe it’s just because all pastry chefs are catty, gay bitches, but there’s just nothing there in this show for me, which is weird because, well, it’s a tv show about dessert!

Californication
Not on TV, but my wife and I started watching the DVDs when we got back from vacation and are absolutely loving this show! It’s become our new show that we pretty much watch an entire DVD from start to finish when it shows up from Netflix – we’re currently halfway through season 2, so we’ve at least got another 18 episodes left to go. It’s funny – David Duchovny is hilarious; it’s risqué – because, well, you know; and it tells the tale of a struggling writer … what’s not to love?!

Bored to Death
Another one about a writer, sure, but as quirky as this one is, I think I really like it. It has a real down-to-earth feel, like Curb Your Enthusiasm or Flight of the Conchords … maybe it’s an HBO thing. So far I’ve only had a chance to watch the first episode of the new season, but this is a fun one that I really enjoy.