in a Muppet kind of mood…

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If you happened to see me driving around suburban Tampa in the last hour, you probably saw me totally rocking out in the car to these two gems…  😯

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTZ0mSuIIA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtJqxWOL5Jc

Happy Birthday, WordPress!

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So I haven’t been using WordPress for 10 years, but even despite my late arrival to the game, it turns out that my now favorite CMS officially turned 10 years old a few days ago.

It actually wasn’t until around 2008 that I first discovered WordPress and began using it first for my humor site, and then eventually for everything else. Before that I had used a myriad of home brew options … obviously, I used LiveJournal for my personal blog, something where I copied all of my posts into PHP files as text for one (maybe an early PHP-Fusion?), I think I toyed around with Drupal at one point, but it ended up being more confusing than I could deal with at the time!

So needless to say, I was a little skeptical when I stumbled across WordPress simply because I’d been so used to doing everything the hard way all of those years. It was weird to have an interface that wasn’t Notepad to work in, and even though I’ve still spent plenty of time tinkering with plugins and themes to get my sites where they are today, it’s meant a lot more time actually spent writing as opposed to fighting with code for simple, core features, and really at the end of the day, I’d much rather be writing than creating a system to facilitate writing, anyways. 😉

I’m very grateful for all of the amazing work that goes into WordPress, and even infinitely more so that it’s all available to me free of charge. It’s really crazy to see just how vast the open source community is with regards to WordPress, and it’s something that I have to actively push myself to keep in mind so that when I manage to figure out something new and cool on my own, I too share it forward for other people just like me.

So in five years time, I’m now running WordPress on 10 different sites, across which I’ve published an excess of 1.5 million words. WordPress makes it easier for me to share my writing with the world, and in celebration of this 10-year milestone, I for one am looking forward to seeing what Matt and his team manage to come up with over the next ten years!  :mrgreen:

Congrats, and thank-you, guys.

Dream Journal : Coughing Asteroids

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You ever have one of those dreams that tries to interpret senses that your body is actually experiencing at that time in real life???

So I’m still sick, albeit finally getting better. But last night I hit a point where I was coughing pretty bad in my sleep, eventually to the point where it woke me up.

But before it got to that point, I was a starfighter pilot! I wasn’t the last one, per se, but apparently on this mission I was racing through an asteroid field that was a little strange.

In fact, the asteroids themselves were coughing … they didn’t have silly mouths or faces, mind you, but were simply making a noise that distinctly resembled human coughing … much like the actual coughing that I was doing in real life, unknown to my subconscious self!

This story doesn’t really have much more than that – I just thought that it was kind of interesting because it happens from time to time when maybe the TV will be on in the background or there will be a really bad storm outside, and subconsciously my body still senses those things and somehow works them into my dreams. Kinda strange, kinda neat… 😉

Just Call Me Old Blood-Eye McSevener…

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So I’ve been sick again for the last couple of days.

It’s been pretty miserable – definitely not how I would’ve chosen to spend my Memorial Day weekend or even the days last week leading up to it.

And then today I woke up with blood in my eye.

Apparently it’s harmless, but it looks kinda gross and really made me nervous until I had a chance to figure out what it is.

It looks pretty gross … I’m not posting a picture, but the inside corner of one eye – maybe 20% of the white area – is filled with blood.

Before I shaved, I looked like a scruffy guy who’d gotten in a bar fight … the one who won, albeit!  8)

So the moral of today’s story is – if you cough for several days straight, there’s a definite possibility that you could blow an eyeball. Because apparently that’s a thing that really happens now.  😯

Dream Journal : A House with Many Passages

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This one isn’t so much about a single dream, but about a dream concept that I seem to have over and over again…

Whenever I find myself running around a house in my dreams, it’s always a big house and there are always all sorts of secret passages running between the rooms. In fact, a lot of the time we don’t even end up using the regular hallways … and why would you when you’ve got secret passages to slink around in instead?!

The dream I had last night that lead me to writing about this had me in a rather large, Victorian-era house, and the secret passages connected a series of playrooms for kids – one with video games, another with toys and action figures, and another with a foosball table, I think it was?

Anyways, what was unique with this dream is that I wasn’t really being chased by anyone, as with what typically happens when I find myself sneaking around secret passages in gigantic homes. Usually there’s some sort of invasion, Home Alone-style, and the passages are used to escape and eventually defeat them, but this time they were just kind of there for convenience, which is how I like to think that they would be used in your regular day-to-day life if you had an awesome house with hidden chambers! Hell, I think I’d even argue that the hidden areas of this house were a bit cooler than the conventional ones!

If I ever have a house that’s bigger than your average lot and I’ve got a little stupid money to spare, I’d love to build in some stuff like that just for fun … I’ve seen pictures of various places that have done it, and I know there are even companies who specialize in it. It’s probably more common in castles, but seeing as there aren’t exactly a whole lot of those here in Florida, it looks like I’d have to build whatever I wanted … but it’d be fun, wouldn’t it?!  😉