I’ve decided to just leave this work-in-progress layout up, and I’ll add bits n’ pieces as I go along. Obviously there’s a lot of work to do still, but at least I’m a bit happier with this than I was the last one. And the brown layout I had (Which most of you had the fortune of not seeing) was hideous. Wonderfully ugly. I don’t know why I spent the time with it…

In other news, I’m currently testing SeaMonkey, which is basically the Mozilla Suite re-packaged. I use Firefox and Thunderbird on a daily basis, and each time I lauch them both, they launch two seperate instances of the gecko rendering engine. By using SeaMonkey, and launching only one instance, I’m hoping to improve performance. I’ve noticed there’s a few quirks and such that I miss from Firefox already (extentions, integration with Adium, etc…) that I’m hoping are addressed in subsequent releases. I haven’t gotten rid of Firefox and Thunderbird totally, yet, but if SeaMonkey can keep it’s head afloat, it might stick around in my dock.

So let’s see…that brings the total count of browsers on my Mac to 11. Wow. Aside from MS Internet Explorer, I think each of them have their own plusses which makes me keep them around. Plus it’s good to check page layouts in various browsers now and then.

So I finally get around to do a somewhat new design, and you know what? I already don’t like it. Not only is it too restrictive, but it’s not very different. I was hoping for a layout that was more unique, or if nothing else, a fraction of a difference than the average CSS Blog layout. I don’t even know if I want to fix the comments now (yes, they’re borked too).

Bah. Now I’m depressed.

I noticed a few days back that the right speaker in my headphones was dead, with absolutely no sound coming out of it. I hate listening to music with just one earpiece, so I threw the headphones away.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I noticed the crappy back up headphones I have were doing the same thing. A quick check of my sound preferences revealed that I had the balance set all the way to the left. After putting it back in the middle, the crappy headphones worked just fine.

Dammit. That was a nice pair of headphones I threw away.

IconBuffet is pretty much what it sounds like, a site to get icons. They obviously cost money, but what’s cool about IconBuffet however, is that you can sign up for a free delivery of a set of icons once a month. Once you have one or more sets available to you, you can send them to your friends.

Currently, I have the Shanghai Tech and Shanghai Smilies icon sets. If anyone’s a member and would like to trade, let me know! There’s a couple of other sets there that I’d like to have. I’m an icon junkie (which is so easy to become when you own a Mac), and want to have as many as possible.

I’ve been neglecting the site in more ways than one lately. I haven’t posted, and I haven’t changed the layout. The reason I haven’t posted (aside from not having much in the way of interest to share), is the fact that I hate the layout. And the times I get to work on the new layout are frustrating exercises in futility it seems.

Hopefully that’ll change soon. I solved a problem that’d been holding me back in my new design. Naturally, that revealed a whole different set of problems, but at least I’ll be working on those fresh. In the meantime, assuming I can find some meantime (I seem to be terribly busy lately), I’ll probably upgrade to WordPress 2.0, work on once again implementing the WPG2 plug-in, and hopefully getting the mini-blog sidebar issues worked out.

So, hope everyone is having a wonderful start to the year, and hopefully I’ll be back posting with some regularity soon.

Happy Holidays everyone…I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday!

My brother alerted me to a great little extension for Firefox called Stumble. Basically it shows you different websites based on some interests you set up. It’s quite the time waster, and I’ve found some cool guitar and art sites already.

Oh, and if you are still an IE user, and aren’t using Firefox…why?

So, obviously, I’ve given up on the K2 theme…which is OK. I’m going to run with the default for a bit, until I have some time to whip up my own design. Hopefully I’ll get everything I want included.

Time will tell. And as I have some vacation coming up, I’ll try to put it to good use.

For some reason, I can’t get anything below the “Asides” category (which I really need to rename) to show up in the sidebar. I’m not sure why the Categories, Archives, or various other stuff isn’t showing. I haven’t had time to really sit and suss out the problem yet, so it’s going to be rather blank over there for a bit.

Because of this, I thought I’d start filling in my Asides. It’s basically going to be like my Livejournal page was: Simply a place to post weird/funny/interesting tidbits I find around the web.

And if you have any ideas about the sidebar bit, I’d love to hear them.

This year was the first time in my 13 years of marriage (13 years as of the 27th!) that we didn’t spend Thanksgiving with either my family or the wife’s. It was just us and the kids for Thanksgiving this year. It was nice and quiet; we didn’t go out and get a huge turkey, just the breast of one. The normal casserole’s and side dishes, and of course, pumpkin pie for dessert.

I spent most of the weekend configuring and optimizing my wireless network. Having experienced the fact that not one but two of my neighbors have wide-open wireless networks, I wanted to lock it down as tight as possible. So now it’s WEP enabled, and requires a MAC address known to my router to get in. No pingbacks are allowed from outside the LAN either. Quite nice.

Aside from that (and eating leftovers), it was mostly sitting around enjoying the broadband, watching football, and not shopping. I don’t know what it’s like in other countries, but damn, the frenzy here on ‘Black Friday’ is just out of control. I prefer sitting home (or in the case of many people, sleeping in. We had a neighbor get up at 4am to be in line by 4:30…and that line stretched completely around the store!), and watching the news about the frenzy. Martin? What about your corner of the world? You guys get crazy there in Oslo? And how about you Sarah? Same sort of craziness?

Regardless, I hope that those of you that celebrated Thanksgiving had a nice and safe holiday.