Had a little fun downtown during lunch this afternoon:
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=2047412
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=2047417
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=2047434
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=2047442
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=2047448
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=2047453
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=2047460
http://ssevener.textamerica.com/?r=2047468
Woo hoo – wi-fi is working again!!!
Man, do I need to clean off my laptop…
Finally was able to dive in and start getting the feel of Movable Type tonight, although it doesn’t look like I’ll be needing many of its features the way I’m utilizing it anyways. Hopefully tomorrow evening I can hammer out a few last graphics for the index pages and carryover the formatting that I’ve done to the archives and daily views and all of the other crazy templates that MT wants to use! Fortunately after this, all I’ll have left is Gallery and then it’ll be back to finishing up my own layout stuff.
With any luck, I could have this new site up in a week…after Lori delivers my new brain graphic, that is… 
So it turns out that my mystery packages from the other night were actually just documentation about the upcoming Syniverse IPO – woo hoo!
So I learned today that it looks like I’ll be keeping my job just a bit longer…that’s certainly a good thing. Bad news is that along with 15-20 people who are being transitioned into new jobs, that left another dozen that were given notice today. (I am in the group being transitioned.) Mind you, with the exception of three people who were let go today, everyone else was given at least two months of lead time so that’s good. Well, it’s still bad, but it’s as good as one can hope for in such a situation… 
Also, I came home tonight to find UPS notices for two packages and I have absolutely no idea what they could be. I’m certainly not expecting anything and the shipping details state that they’re coming from New York City…I don’t know anybody in NYC. I wonder if I should be concerned about this or not…
P.S. I won’t go into details because I don’t want to jinx it, but I’ve also been making some nice progress with the beautiful, young lady whom was mentioned a few posts ago. I do hope to be able to talk more about her here in the future, though, because she really has proven to be an amazing person thus far and these past couple of weeks have featured some of the happiest times since I moved to Florida.
All in all, it’s a very surreal experience to me and at this point, all I can hope for is that I don’t wake up anytime soon… 
So the big company celebration was Friday evening and to say the least, it was freakin’ amazing! Hosted at the Marriott Waterside downtown, we already knew that it was going to be a pretty swanky event. Point in case – this year they gave away a Mercedes. But nonetheless, the créme de la créme of the evening came only about five minutes in when we walked into the main ballroom and heard…wait for it…“Ladies and gentlemen – please put your hands together for Grammy Award-Winning Artists, Hootie and the Blowfish…”
It’s stuff like this that reminds me how much I really don’t want to lose my job with this company! Oh what a night, indeed.
Lori – check it out…it’s a Disney version of that Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Guitar Display!
Maybe we need to take a trip to California – this is so cool…
File swapping vs. Hollywood
“While P2P technology unquestionably can be employed for a variety of legitimate purposes without giving rise to rampant copyright infringement, the record…suggests that (the file-swapping software companies) have built their particular P2P networks around the ‘draw’ of massive copyright infringement,” the solicitor general’s brief read. They “cannot evade liability…merely by pointing to other, legitimate uses of the technology.” <<MORE>>
Yeah, just like “gay people contaminate the good people of our country,” and “my Dad is tougher than your Dad.” Could we please have a leader who is capable of thinking on a 20th century level???
I’m happy: Other than a few graphical selections, I think that I’ve finally settled on a new layout for the website.
Really, it isn’t changing all that much – mostly navigational modifications – and no, I’m not going with Flash!!! It took me about a day’s worth of messing with it yesterday to realize that my vision was insane for all that I wanted to do (it mostly involved planet / atom-like orbits for mouseover effects on the buttons…would’ve been cool, but oh well), so I’m going for a minimalists approach so that I can get this transformation done with and get back to actually writing again – NO MORE EXCUSES!
I’m also proud that in making these changes, I also learned some very rudimentary things about PHP that I should’ve picked up years ago…I guess that’s what you get for rushing into a project with only the deadlines in sight. Nonetheless, I’m guessing about a week or so for the conversion, depending on how crazy the next seven days become.
Progress – I’ve got ‘ye in range now…