Not much out of the usual has been going on, hence the lack up updates. Mostly it’s been snippets of thoughts that I always think about writing down. Figured I’d share what I had.

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Watched the debate last night. I think it’s the first full debate I’ve sat through. I don’t see how you can see those two men sitting there, explaining their policies and think that McCain is the right choice. Watching McCain sitting there, flustered and agitated and go on the offense, while Obama sat composed and collected (and admittedly, a bit on the defense at first), it makes me wonder how soon McCain would suffer a stroke from the pressure if elected President.

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There’s two words that should strike fear into the hearts of not only Americans, but world-wide: President Palin.

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Received a newsletter from a group downstairs that they wanted posted on the internal website. Took a half-hour and structured it properly. The result was 289 lines of code. Took the same document and did a “Save as HTML” in Microsoft Word. That came up to 3865 lines of code. I consider that a half-hour well spent.

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Two Bodies of Mass Cannot Occupy the Same Spot #1: To the lady driving the SUV while on her cell phone and brushing her hair; do me a favor and check your mirrors, look over your shoulder, anything to make sure I’m not in the spot you’re currently trying to occupy.

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For those Windows users that want to switch to Mac but are tied to expensive programs (namely Adobe’s Creative Suite), Adobe now has a competitive cross-upgrade program that lets you upgrade from Windows CS3 to Mac CS4.  They don’t seem to advertise the cross-upgrades that much and they’re only available when purchasing the upgrades over the phone (800-833-6687). But if you’ve been wanting to go to Mac, why not go and upgrade to CS4 (Aside from the obvious cost!)? via TUAW

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Kung-fu bicycle fight. This is what the intertubes were made for.

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I’ve been researching CMS‘s for work. Which means ASP/NET based CMS’s, as opposed to PHP, which I’m used to. There are a lot more free/low-cost PHP-based CMS’s than ASP (at least that I’m familiar with). And some of those ASP solutions cost as much as $90,000. For that much money, it better design and program itself, follow up on sales leads, integrate seamlessly with the CRM system, never crash, and get me coffee.

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Two Bodies of Mass Cannot Occupy the Same Spot #2: Don’t scowl at me because I almost hit you on your bicycle. You’re supposed to stop at stop signs just like the rest of traffic. If you’re going to ride in traffic, obey the rules!

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Evernote is a cool little app -  I used it to capture some of these thoughts so I wouldn’t forget them

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Fall is here! Great riding weather, and hopefully, if I get off my ass, great picture taking opportunities. The wife’s been bugging me again about more pictures.

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Best example of a tange getting all tongueled up: “A fresh of breath air” – from McCain at last night’s debate.

And that’s it for now!

Gotta love it when the headlines write themselves – and the editors that let it fly:

http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/31/35/31_35_mm_bjs_reaction.html

I’ve always been unorganized. I’ve tried several different ways to keep things organized, but I’ve never stuck with one. As a result, I have task items and calendar notifications in Outlook, AOL.com and Google. I have Post-It notes everywhere. I have scraps of paper I scribble on. I have a Franklin Planner that I write in religiously…for three days or so, and then it gets buried under the scraps of paper and Post-It notes. I need to find a way to organize pretty much my life in general. Anyone have any tricks or tips or thoughts? What do you use to organize? Do you follow the GTD crowd? Do you use a PIM of some sort?

I bring this up because I dropped the ball on a project that was due this past Wednesday. Thankfully the marketing manager I was supposed to do this for wasn’t concerned about the date (in fact, he left me voice mail last night stating he had changes to the web pages he wanted to make), but it still grates that I missed this. I was in the middle of doing “urgent updates” to the website for another department that was launching a product today. Because it didn’t get in the production schedule, I really wasn’t supposed to be doing it. As a result, it’s going to be late, along with a couple of other projects.

I foresee a late night tonight, especially if I’m sitting here writing journal entries rather than cranking out the work.

Ah well…

I probably sat here trying to think of how to start this for about 5 minutes. At first I was going to apologize for lack of posts, but that strikes me as stupid and a bit narcissistic; after all, who should I be apologizing to? It’s not like people pay to read content here. It’s not like people hang on my every word.

So yeah, I haven’t posted anything meaningful. Oh well

In truth, I have been busy. It seems like when it rains it pours. Work has been crazy, but even more so is after work stuff. Not only am I coaching Sarah’s soccer team again, with practices two nights a week, but I’m on the office softball team as well. And on top of that, I have 4 freelancing clients I’m doing side work for, and they all decided they needed stuff done at the same time.

So that’s where I’ve been

I can’t promise to write more. I can promise I’ll probably change the WordPress theme more often than I should.

So it looks as if Google is entering the browser market with their new open source browser, Google Chrome. As the cutesy comic they released indicates, it sounds as if they have some good ideas concerning browsers. All I see out of this, however, is another version of the browser wars. I can see a time in the futures where not only will designs and layouts be different in Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc… but apps won’t work either. I guess that happens now, to some extent, but it’ll be worse.

I honestly think it’s faster to design and build a new site, than to tweak it into working across platforms nowadays.

Driving home last night, I came upon a police checkpoint. This checkpoint was in my neighborhood, literally 400 yards from my house. They were doing a driver’s license check.

This bothers me. I feel like there’s no valid reason for me to have to show my license unless I’ve specifically broken the law. As I was not being pulled over for speeding or some other moving violation, I felt as if they had no right to ask me for my license. I asked before handing it over what the purpose was, and was simply told “To make sure you have a valid license.”

It seems too much like a bad movie when you see the KGB (or Nazi’s or some other facisct police state) asking to see your papers. “Prove you’re a citizen and you can be on your way. If you have nothing to worry about, you shouldn’t have a problem showing us your papers!”

Am I wrong to feel this way?

I’ve been following Ben Willmore on his blog for some time. He’s a photographer that has really experimented and perfected (if there is such a thing) the art of HDR Photography. He travels the country via a Prevost Bus and gives lectures, writes books, and creates DVDs. Quite frankly, I’m a bit jealous of his lifestyle.

He recently did a two part series on HDR at Pixel Perfect with Bert Monroy, who is an amazing digital photo-realist artist. In the video, he goes in to detail about how to create HDR images and the though processes behind it. Ben also introduces us to a Photoshop plug-in called Photomatrix that really lets you have complete control over the HDR process.

This is a great video series for someone (Krysta?) looking into expanding their photography skills and experimentation. The Wife and I were just lamenting last night on how our goals for this year (her to do more pottery, mine to do more photography) have fallen woe-fully short. Watching these videos gives me an itch to go out and shoot. Just gotta find (or make) the time!

And apparently I put way too many things (is that possible?) in parenthesis.

It’s no secret that I’m a Mac fanboy, and have been for several years. I use a Windows machine at work, and it gets the job done. I honestly have very few complaints about Windows boxen (assuming it’s not Vista. Don’t get me started on Vista). I think my biggest gripe is lack of aesthetics in your typical Windows computer.

Dell just might change that though. Their new Studio Hybrids are quite sexy.

I think any of these would be a compliment to any room of the house. Nice.

Assuming I can install XP or Linux on it.

Enough lollygagging.

I’ve been flipping back and forth over so many aspects of this journal/blog/site/what-have-you that it’s been nearly crippling me. So much so that for two months I’d think “well, I have this idea I want to write about in the journal, but geez, I still haven’t completed the new layout I have in mind, I have to update to WP 2.6, maybe I want to switch over to EE instead, but I also need to figure out if I want to focus on something specific, or if I want to continue the way it was…” blah blah blah. I’m my own worst enemy.

When it comes down to it, I’ve missed writing. Whatever I’ve decided to write about, I’ve been missing it. So while there will be some tweaks to the layout here and there, the text will still be up. It might be all skewed as I play around, but you all are used to that, right?

So again, welcome back me. This time I’m not going to close the curtain unless this show ceases production.