Progress!

As you can see, I'm in the middle of another redesign here. Just trying to make the site easier for me to update. I should have the conversions done in the next couple of days and hopefully will have some new strips after the weekend.

Things are changing with the design so hang in there. As always, I'll probably be tweaking it more as the days go on. If you like the changes please post something about it in the guestbook. I'm working on getting the poll back up and the message boards back (razzle frazzle old service vanished), so in the unlikely event anyone wants to talk about this stuff there will be something there to talk about.

More updates as they happen.

k9

Home Home Home Home

Ah, Wednesday. Half awake and I feel like a truck ran over me. We did roughly 850 miles in 2 days over parts of PA that were so remote, well I did that story already. :) What was really weird was that we were on top of some mountain on our way home last night and we were picking up Chicago AM stations. You know you're far out when you're starting to get Chicago stations while still in PA. LOL.

I'm tired. I really am. We didn't get home until late last night and I'm sitting here dreading even moving right now. Thankfully my mom did most of the driving on the way home, so I had time to stare at the full moon and wonder "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" on the way home.

Right now TechLive is on. Erica's talking about the IBM change of leadership. What's sad is that I'd LOVE to watch the nightly TechLive but if I do I can't watch the morning or afternoon TechLives because they're recycling things so much. I hear Michaela's having a lot of fun on that show, but I can't do it. It's not compelling enough to change from Prime Time Network programming and I really don't want to sit through these canned segments over and over. I know I used to do it with the old TechLive but my god, they were just that day -- they didn't carry over to two days! Or Three!

Weekends are the absolute worst with TechLive. If you catch the Friday night show and tune into the Monday morning show you come in expecting new news. I mean, they've had the entire weekend to get tech news after all. SORRY! Ya get the same recycled news from Friday night. Maybe an update or two, but nothing to really tune into.

I've seen this pattern on other sites, it seems like we're all watching less since the November bloodbath. I mean more than just all of use geeks who were turned off by the loss of our friends in the blood letting. Viewers should be coming back by now but it doesn't look like it's happening. Personally, I have the morning TechLive on and that's it. 10:30 AM hits and I flip to CNN or something else. I have problems remembering the afternoon show or call for help, there's nothing compelling enough to watch the reruns of the other shows (I mean Screen Saver reruns are OVERKILL), and I usually am so turned off by reruns that I forget to tune into the Screen Savers every night. I'll catch it halfway through or catch the end. But then I won't watch the reruns because what I've seen is in no way compelling enough to tune in again.

I'm glad they seem to be working on tuning the show. For quite a bit it was turning into the dumb segment show. I mean from the lite windows tip to the lite site of the nite to the lite (and innane) IM thought of the moment, they were shoving stupid segments down our throats. I love Megan, Megan's great, but you know what? She's supposed to be the BRAINS and not the BIMBO. If I have to sit through one more extended Megan segment where all she does is bash Windows while saying nothing of substance (my god, for a while I should have been doing the wuzzi fuzza bapa moopies for Megan instead of Jessica). I swear, I'm flipping and I'm skipping her segments and not coming back. Don't get me started on Cat. "Yah, like the world like is so much like huh, cooler, because I'm like showing you this like site of the night eyah!" I'm also skipping Leo's constant inappropriate sexual comments (I thought *I* was a dirty old man, but Leo's far far older than I could ever be j/k) and the total MAC Bias by some folks on the set (perpetuating the myth that the MAC is useful), and I'll just wrap it up by saying that I'm glad it looks like they're starting to focus more on actual relevant tech issues and less on the Wal-Mart shopping format that they've gone to (Buy Leo's book! Buy the videotapes! Blue light special! Blue light special! Rollback!). That's good. For as long as it lasts.

k9

On the Road Again ...

Heading out in a few to get my allergy shots and then I'm on the road to the outer solar system, err, Kane, PA to do mystery shops for the day. I am NOT looking forward to this.

Had a weird dream (as usual) to wake myself up on time. I had a dream that Shakespeare was haunting a castle and only I could hear what he was saying. He was quite good at terrifying everyone there (run tourists! run!), but all he wanted was someone to listen to his fantastic tales. So I started to listen, he stopped goosing tourists, and then I woke up. He was telling me something about the reality of dragons ... hmm.

Check out the last link to the left side for yesterday's blog and the big announcement that I'm about to redesign the site. In redesign notes, I went to a 1 day at a time format here to cut down on clutter. But, as always, previous blogs live on in the archives.

Another volunteer walked out this morning. Thankfully, not one of my team members but I was cc:'d on the e-mail. This is turning into a daily event and it's silly. If one or two things were changed on both sides everyone would be happy. This time they're not pleased with how management handled things after the initial walkout. I don't know what to say. My former folks have their minds made up and they're not going to stay. Instead of begging and pleading and making promises I can't keep, I'm letting them serve out their time and go. It's a volunteer position. It's not life or death, and while they help out me on my job a great deal, I know that the way they're leaving is open ended and if they want to come back they'll be back. I'm also not ending the friendships because we disagree right now. That's a big thing.

In the past I'd freak out or handle this differently, maybe fight to keep people here, but you know, this isn't my fight. It wasn't my area that sparked the walk out and while I'm being hurt by it, it would only make things worse for everyone if they awoke the sleeping doggie and I got into the fight.

Missing people dearly,

k9

Ooops I did it ...

A little bit later, head hurts worse than before. Tomorrow's going to be a longer day. I'm heading for more mystery shops up near Kane, PA. Think about what it takes to go to the dark side of the moon and how much effort it will take and you'll have an idea about how far it feels going all the way up to Kane from here. It's worth it for the money but doh, it's a PITA that I'm thankful only comes up once every couple of months.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: I'M REDESIGNING THIS SITE.

I love the way the site looks right now. I really do. Unfortunately, I can't keep up with it. The way I have it laid out is that I do the layouts of the main index pages in Macromedia Fireworks first then export it into Dreamweaver. I then correct the HTML, correct the titles, test it, etc. etc. While the end result is great, the process ... well, the process is a PITA.

Right now with all the changes going on at work and because of how strained my time to do anything is, I have to make some changes in order to streamline things around here. While the strips themselves will remain how they are (I'm not crazy, they're my bread and butter!), the main index and other areas are going to go through some changes to a low tech but stylish style. Not exactly sure how it's gonna happen, but I do like the format I came up with for my blog and we might go with that.

What's funny is that I realized I did something again. Whenever my best friend is away, I always do something to redesign one of my websites. It's usually a huge redesign and I can track it back. Each time, lol, I fill the former hanging out time with redesigning something huge. So once the mystery shops settle down this week, I might be up to my neck in html code for the rest of the week or two. So watch for it.

I'll probably start a trend again by announcing it, but hey, as always, this site is often imitated but never duplicated. We set standards. That's both good and bad and I'll address that at a future time.

But for right now, I'm heading out.

Be good.

k9

Home Again

Monday evening now and I'm home, with a headache, and I'm pretty tired.

Today's Mystery Shops were post offices in the State College, PA, area, which is about an hour and 10 minutes from here. It's not too bad, just time consuming, and you know I love being on the campus of Penn State when we do post offices. You see all the most wonderful girls doing the most wonderful things, jogging, walking, talking ... and then I realize my mom's in the car with me. Yes, we work together on mystery shops (she had several in the same area); there goes all the fun of being on a college campus filled with girls.

All I can say is life is unfair.

And they didn't have girls like that when I was in college.

So I'm home and I checked mail over on my work account to find a stack waiting for me once I get some braincells back.

Life is unfair.

I wanna go baaaaaack.

k9

Running, Running and More Running

It's Monday morning and I'm taking five minutes to relax before I have to get on the road and go mystery shop in St. College, PA.

It's been a busy weekend. Besides getting the insane idea to redesign my blog, a lot has been going on elsewhere. Mainly work related stuff. My main volunteer assistant from one of my areas (who doubled in another area), quit this weekend. Not because of anything I did, she was upset at things going on in the other area. It was a mess and she took half her team with her, who, unfortunately, all also doubled in one of my areas. Suddenly I'm a message board host and librarian again until I can get more volunteers to check those areas.

So far this morning I updated twenty or thirty message boards and answered a ton of member e-mail. The e-mail is strange. Last week we changed our message board guidelines. We had been too strict in the past and they had me put up a notice that we had loosened up the standards. Instead of reveling in the new standards, members are writing me NARCING EACH OTHER OUT for any rules violations they can think of. It's nutty. LOL.

Life makes so much sense.

On that note, I'm running out the door. Have a good day.

k9

P.S.

P.S. These neat little titles are from Blogger Pro. I know, I'm a geek, but I'm easily impressed! :)

Almost There!

Well, after a nap, I'm back and I'm almost done. Just looking for a couple of pictures to add to the left side.

If you're thinking "well, he's gonna have to get rid of the previous blog" stuff from the main screen, you're absolutely right. Since I found a template with a built in archive, gonna have to figure out something to replace the link. Can't say I'm going to miss updating the old page though. It was a PITA and I was very happy when I found that blogger could do it all for me.

It blows my mind that all this html editing from the last 24 hours has just been to a template that is then automatically updates the entire site to the new format (well, automatically after I click "update the buggers"). Apologies to those who tuned in here and found a bunch of different designs last night. I'm an old dog and it takes me a while to figure out the stuff.

This is blogger pro, btw. I spent the $35 for a yearly subscription that I can cancel at anytime. Yah yah everything's better than this and there are a hundred different options out there -- from other services to hosting a blog myself. But I like Blogger and I'll support Blogger since I do know how it is to be one person doing a monster site all by himself. I want to see blogger grow and hey, blogger pro is add free and has some nifty little features.

What? All the folks at TechTV are going to movabletype? Let 'em. They're just sheep sometimes. Be unique, stand out, and stick to what works for you is what I say. So :P to those telling me "but with movabletype we can post responses ..." I'll again point to my e-mail link, my semi-broken message boards, and my guestbook. There respond. :)

Sorry to see the Megan Picture Site is going down. I'll be replacing it with a link to GnomeRadio later on.

Best,

k9

Still Testing ...

Sunday afternoon and I have a headache. I forgot how much of a pain plain old html code was. I'm so used to dreamweaver that I wasn't ready to sit down and edit the template for this blog just yet. Add to it the blogger codes and I have a headache that's growing by the moment.

We're getting there though, coming close to what I want with the design. Thankfully, I'm not starting from scratch and I'm just extensively modifying one of the blogger templates to do this. Without that base I'd probably be totally lost.

Yes, the site was down most of last night. More server problems. Well, it's a glitch and somehow they lose packets on the connection or something like that is what they're saying. It's not their servers but the connections through the internet to their servers. Alas, mine is on the one machine that seems to be having the most trouble. So if you can't pull the sight up, we didn't vanish overnight, we're just down, and we'll be back up soon.

I like the snazzy logo I came up with at the top of the page. Again modified from the one that came with the template. I'm really happy that the 50x50 pixel squares worked at the top. I'd like to do more with that in other parts of this site. Sort of like the old MAD magazines with doodles at the top. I plan to change the squares depending on mood so watch for it. :)

Ugg, Cat the cat just proudly brought a dead mouse to the back door. That's my boy, he didn't eat it but wanted to show it off to the other cats. My mom took it from him and he's dejected now. Poor guy ...

k9

Testing ... Testing ...

It's a Saturday night and I'm testing out Blogger Pro. This page may change quite a bit tonight.

Blah blah blah. :)

k9

Monday Blahs

3:39 PM

It's Monday afternoon and I'm avoiding work and blogging again. It's snowing, and the world outside my window literally looks like a cheap snow globe. Huge flakes coming down, but thankfully, it's not really sticking all that much.

Just woke up from a nap and it looks like my mom decided to go out in the storm to go to the store. I double checked that my dad was still downstairs when I got up, since it would be just like our luck to have him decide that he's having another fake heart attack in this weather. I sure as heck don't want to drive in it and I think my mom's nuts for going out in it in the first place.

Work is work. It made me toss and turn during my just finished nap. We made a number of message board rule changes in the area that I work and my mailbox is filled with responses to my announcement of the changes. Surprisingly, not a lot of positive or negative responses, just a bunch of stuff about how we need a folder for a team that's changed divisions, even though they haven't officially moved yet and there's no chance that anyone would post in the folder for the team since they don't post in the current one. I guess people love to bitch and panic over just about anything these days.

Working on more strips tonight if I get through this mail. I have three our four abstract ideas that I'd like to do with some of the screen savers folk. Just little ideas about how to add back story to some of the characters we haven't played with. I'm currently to footage from early September for Techlive and Screen Savers. Call for Help is all over the place. The rest of the shows are pretty generic so I'm not worried about timeliness and I don't think anyone's going to notice time changes since Jennifer London, Sumi Das, and Kris K. rarely change their hair. They're beautiful women, mind you, but they're not like Kate or Erica -- they don't go through a million hairstyles in a year so the footage pretty much stays the same.

Kate's funny, btw, I realized we really ran that joke for everything it was worth and then kept going with it. That's why, yes, it ended in the last strip it was mentioned. I didn't mean to pick on her this much and, Kate, if you're out there reading this, SORRY! I'm going somewhere new with it for the new season and SORRY! in advance to it. I keep forgetting that she does plays in NYC a lot so from time to time she's really only a four hour drive away from kicking my sorry butt from here to Cleveland. The rest? Neener neener neener, you can't find my hidden super secret hideout on top of the mountain in -- ha! I'm smarter than that! :)

While I'm thinking of it, Evil Jim is credited for me adding "that's swell" to Leo's little Gangster routine in the last strip of season seven. I guess he remembers Brady Bunch better than I do. BTW, also mentioning it so he isn't offered a bribe to sell me out since he's been to the super secret lair and probably would give directions to anyone who meets his asking price. :)

In another random note, for those thinking that I think Leo is the source of anything Evil ... well, I'll admit that Leo, by nature, is a being of pure evil, I don't blame him for being anything other than Leo. While he's being used as a catalyst for change in the current round of strips, don't think he's responsible for anything of that nature in real life. I know I didn't have to make it clear but I do want to get it out there. The changes were made by forces far greater than Leo. Obviously they were needed at the time, but two and a half months later the network is well ... what it is now. I just hope it survives the year.

On that note, I'm out.

k9

11:43 PM

It's a Friday night and the site is finally back up. It was down for most of the afternoon with server problems. Hopefully they're fixed.

It went down, of course, 3 minutes after I sent the link to the latest episode to Robyn Huggiebear to apologize in advance for the Supergirl outfit. Good lord I don't need to be zapped. I feel bad enough already. Between my foot hurting and this cold I seem to have all the bases for discomfort covered. Well that I can think of right now anyway.

BTW, if you hadn't noticed, we're back. 4 (and maybe 5) strips in 3 days. Didn't really plan on doing this, just sort of happened. I've been bored, other than a trip to the emergency room with my dad the other night (another fake heart attack), I haven't had a lot to do. My best friend is gone again, Mrs. Burstein hasn't been around to terrorize, and most of my other friends are exploring the concept of having lives off-line. It's amazing. So here I am with an empty buddy list on another friday night. What do I turn to? Doing more strips, of course.

After reading the latest batch you can see that I'm going in the direction of writing people off who are no longer with the network. It's getting into kind of darker story than what the site normally features. That's just where the story is going right now. It's a change of pace as I get back into writing these things and I really didn't feel like doing upbeat stories when essentially I've been saying good-bye to long time characters. While a few have a couple more appearances left, once we run out of footage, they're gone and probably not coming back. Well, for now anyway.

We'll just have to see where I go with this. For now I've planned to do the retirement of the older footage with the start of Season 8. I might still have flashbacks here and there to use up whatever I find in the old stuff (and let's face it, I have a TON of old stuff left), but I have to bring the strip towards more recent events at TechTV. It might take a season or two but I'll get us there. Eventually. :)

For those looking for pictures, here's the deal. I have to get some time to get on my reallcoolsite account to upload the next batch of files. They're coming. So have faith.

k9

11:51 PM

Hey look, new strips went up.

No big story here. Had a couple of things to try out and put them up. More to follow eventually.

We might actually finish season 7 one of these days.

Stay tuned.

k9

9:00 PM

Just some randomes tonight as it's a Sunday night and I'm sitting at the computer desk with my right foot taped up. About four hours after my last blog the phone rang and I smashed my foot into the door, breaking at least one of my toes in the process. Didn't go to the doctor and it took me half the week to listen to the advice of those wiser than me and tape it up.

The computer is doing okay. Had some driver issues with my graphics card. I ended up completely uninstalling them today and reinstalling them. Things seem to be running better. I mean I can do the Maxx Payne tutorial level without crashing, which I was previously unable to do. Going to try Everquest later to see if the problems I was having are fixed.

Right now I'm watching TechTV's best of CES. Good to see Robyn Huggiebear on the air again. Weird to see her civilian military gear, err TechTV CES uniform, and not all dressed up for the now dearly departed interact desk.

I had Fox's new gameshow, "the Chamber" on earlier. I turned it off after a couple of minutes. If I wanted to see people being tortured while answering asinine questions I'd go back to Jr. High School. It was the lamest thing Fox has ever presented. Even worse than Boot Camp or Temptation Island 2 or X-Files with Mulder.

I'm also spending time defragging my d: drive. I was getting buffer underrun errors when I ran my cd-rw earlier so it said to try to defrag my hard drives as part of the solution. So, of course, I lost my mind and decided to defrag the bigger of the two hard drives. Of course all my html and work files are stored on that drive so lol I'm sitting here trying to figure out what else I can do without interrupting it for the rest of the night.

Found an internet radio station from Chicago to listen to while I'm flipping channels now. The best of CES led to Cybercrime and there's nothing that gets me to flip the channel away from TechTV faster than Cybercrime. I mean even if Jennifer London is a living Barbie Doll, it can't salvage that show. It's lame beyond compare and the segments are even lamer. I saw something on Laughing Gas and wished that she and Alex Wellen had outtakes getting high on the stuff so they'd come off as HUMAN for once.

Currently thinking of getting back into tae-bo once my foot is healed. The Screen Savers reminds me every night about how much weight can be gained during the holidays. I mean seriously, even MARTIN gained a ton of weight this year. I'm begining to miss Jessica more and more. I mean, thinking about it, she was the only normal person on the show. Each night it's been getting worse. Between everyone turning into nerds and all the weight gain the show has gone from THE Techie show on the air to what looks like a reject from some sort of obsurce Russian public access channel. Or better, they're turning into a living version of the muppett show. Leo is, of course, Ms. Piggy. Fill in the rest of the characters yourself.

Have the TV on E!'s "E true hollywood story" of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Going to flip to cheers at 10. I love Cheers. While the ones with Diane were good, the show really got funny once she left. They were able to explore the characters outside of the Sam/Diane romance and expand the scope of their universe a bit more without the ever present story limiting things.

On that note, take care.

-- k9

11:08 AM

Morning is almost over on a Saturday and I'm sitting here ON MY NEW COMPUTER. :)

I gave up and took a late nap yesterday and I sort of had not expected anything. I was lying in bed for an hour and I couldn't get to sleep. Didn't hear anything out of the ordinary but I had to go to the bathroom so I got up. After doing my business, I went to the living room and looked out our front window and I spotted a box on the porch. Ta-da. UPS had stealth delivered a package, yes, THE package ... my new motherboard and stuff!

So yesterday afternoon was spent catching up on work and last night was spent putting the computer together. Had 2 problems: Windows XP required a call to microsoft to reactivate and my new modem wasn't working with AOL. I swapped the modem with the modem from the dead computer and ta-da everything worked.

Now that they delivered, I can reccomend http://www.antaresnow.com for barebones computer systems. While they were slow for me due to the holidays, they really did come through and made sure all the parts I ordered were working before sending it out (the modem was a driver issue, btw, not their fault). They even mount the processor on the motherboard and add the cooling to it. A+ in my book even with the wait.

Right now I'm downloading my copy of paintshop pro 7.0 anniversary edition and, oh yah, creating the site cache so I can do updates again on this site. We'll see what happens, but thank you so much for being here and putting up with me while I was bonking out. Another couple of days and I'll be up to speed. Well hopefully anyway. :)

Have a great Saturday if I don't blog again,

-- k9

10:00 PM

The halftime show is on at the Rose Bowl. Miami is winning by a million or so to nothing and Nebraska isn't going to be coming back in the 2nd half. This game is painful to watch but there's nothing else on.

Got word that my computer parts shipped today and with any luck they'll be here tomorrow. But with my luck they'll be here Monday. Never order 2 day mail at the end of the week. Even though I ordered it on Xmas day, they shipped on a Thursday and guess what? 2 day mail when shipped on a Thursday is just like regular UPS. Screw the extra money. If you know that it's not shipping until late in the week, just do normal UPS.

Was back on Classmates.com tonight. Added the rest of my schools to my real name. We moved every few years so my memories are better from schools where we stayed more than a couple of years. But in Maryland, for example, we were only there 2 and a half years and I only knew a handful of people. I was skipping school because "I was sick" half the time anyway. The only names I recognized were either total idiots (the guy I wrote about in a previous blog), or one girl I had a little crush on for like half a semester who is now married with children.

Actually gave in to boredom and updated my profile on my "official" high school's alumni site since it was free from the extortion fees of classmates.com. Turned it into a plug for this site and made it clear that I barely remember high school. So if you're browsing from that site, hey, how you doing? I probably don't remember you but glad to have you here! Whomever you are, hey sign the guestbook to confirm what a dork I was. :)

On that note, I'm out of here.

Gods of UPS please hear my cry. Bring my computer.

-- k9

9:23 AM

Okay on the computer front got a K7AMA motherboard and an xp 1800+ AMD chip for it. The motherboard is still shipping. I'm putting 1 gig of SDRAM into it because that's the max the board takes and I had a one time discount deal from work. The dead new system had a 40 gig hard drive that I'm sticking in and I had an 80 gig hard drive I was going to put into the old system that's already formatted for windows xp (I had it in my old old machine), I have a soundblaster audigy platinum sound card and an old ATI All in Wonder Radeon video card to stick in there (saving for the new version of that).

I'm sticking with Windows XP once things get here, btw "Screw You Leo, XP Rocks." Err, I had to get that out of my system. I've actually missed XP for the week or so that I've been on this laptop. Windows 98 SE was like an old friend but I miss all the new and fun stuff from XP. I also miss my files and being able to do this site. While this laptop is surprising me (upping the RAM last week from 96 to 160 megs really helped), I'd still like to get a working desktop system back. If only the the parts would get here.

Half tempted to take the old mother board and try to stick that in the machine and see if it works. I have a feeling though, that if I did that the other parts would get here today or tomorrow and I'd just have to rip them out. I'm being patient. Or at least trying.

BTW, I'm never ever EVER doing anything computer related around any major holiday. I've learned my lesson.

With that I'm back to work. If my 3 readers are still out there, hey, sign the guestbook and let me know. :)

-- k9

7:44 PM

Blogging on a Wednesday evening. My new case came in but nothing else did. If you'd like to see what it looks like, here it is:

http://www.colorcases.com/cases/0701.htm

I sort of like it. The entire case cover slides off if you flip up two levers on the case so there's no screwing or unscrewing to get inside. Once the case is off it's easy to access everything from both sides and there's holes and plugs for the various sizes of motherboards it supports.

I got an 80 mm fan to stick in the front (there was a slot for it), and once the motherboard comes I'll be back up and running.

Hopefully.

-- k9

1:50 PM

Ugg my head. Ugg my stomach.

Woke up and had the traditional dream day off meal of a sub. My mom picked it up for me yesterday and I saved it for this morning. When she asked what I wanted on it I said "just a little mustard and some onions." Of course it turned out to be triple onions and lots of mustard. I'm paying for it now.

Before my nap this afternoon I read the first tradepaperback of a manga series called "Video Girl Ai." A typically Japanese story of a boy who somehow has a magical girl enter his life through the TV. It has traits that remind me of "Oh my Goddess" (boy gets girl through magical telephone), but it seems to have more spunk to it as Ai seems more like a bratty little sister than the girl of his dreams.

Whole story? Boy is in love with girl. Girl is in love with boy's best friend. Girl confesses love to boy's friend with boy there, boy's best friend rejects her, boy is hurt too. Boy goes to rent a naughty movie at a weird place and magical girl comes out of the video when he plays it.

Got that so far?

The twist is that his VCR was defective so she comes out weird. Her personality is a little warped due to that. She also starts to fall in love with the guy instead of being someone to help him get the girl of his dreams. She, as a magical being who only lives as long as her tape is playing, also has a 3 month life so ultimately she's going to have to die at the end of the series, or so I assume since I've only found volume one.

The Anime has been released on DVD and if it's anything like the comic was it's worth picking up.

Back to hiding from bowl games.

-- k9