The Pool is Up!

Last night we tried out the pool for the first time. A little cold because it just finished filling yesterday and the boiler didn’t have any time to heat up the water yet, but it felt good after a one hundred degree day in the sun. Hopefully on Saturday we will have a little pool party so give me a call if you want to come over.

Jason flashes new look

During my morning website perusing, I noticed that Jason updated the look of his website. Awesome. I like it.

Unbelievable Bug Removal

I think this has to be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen:

Bug Removal

Thanks Kristy for wrecking my apetite.

Pool liner is in!

Now the water filling begins. Two hoses on two different spigots have been running for about 3 hours now and there is maybe 4 feet in the deep end. Looks like I’ll be waking up in the middle of the night to turn it off at the correct level. Tomorrow they put in the steps and water inlets and then we fill to the next level. Sounds like Saturday it should be completed and then we start to heat the water to an acceptable level…

Opera VS Firefox: browser review

I tried Opera 9 today for Linux. I thought to myself, “Wow, maybe I found a Firefox replacement that fixes the areas of Firefox I don’t like”

So I installed it. Props to Opera for even making a version that works with Ubuntu Dapper Drake. The install was painless, and it put an icon in the Internet category of the menu, right where expected.

I fired up Opera for the first time and I have to admit, I was impressed with the smoothness. Tabbed browsing with the closing “X” right on the tab, built in support for RSS, the whole nine yards. So I started to try out “quirky” sites that Firefox renders differently than IE. Same results for Opera, strike one.

Then I tried out the RSS reader integrated in the browser. It imported my feed list with ease although it was rather clunky and then slowed down immensely once it updated all my feeds, strike two.

Well, it was starting to look bleak for Opera compared to Firefox so I gave it one last chance and started browsing around to some of my favorite sites and noticed that sites with a permanent redirect in place do not redirect but rather die with an “unable to connect” error, strike three.

Too bad for Opera, because I really wanted to give it a chance, but it looks like Firefox is my main browser for another day.

Pool goes in this week!

Hopefully by the end of the week our new pool liner will be installed. That will be nice to have out of the way. Spent most of the afternoon cleaning up the back yard and trimming/removing overgrown trees. It is starting to shape up rather nicely but there is still a lot of work ahead like staining the fence and house. I really wish there was more time in a day. Maybe I just have to start taking some vacation from work to start getting caught up.

Xmod Starter Kits

I seem to be getting a lot of referrer links for the Xmod Starter Kits I created about a year ago. Unfortunately the link is no longer valid and thy are now located at http://gdxm.dotdnn.com. The Xmod documentation lists that there are multiple ones available for free but there is only one as the other was very close to one that exists in the Xmod template exchange.

Daily Links Section

You may have noticed on the bottom of the left column of this page, there is a section titled "Daily Links". This shows all of the links I bookmark throughout the day that I find interesting. You may also notice that I update that section a lot more than my blog. It just happens that way cause it is easier to do. All I need to do to have a link show up there is bookmark it with del.icio.us which I do anyway throughout the day. So actually it doesn't create any work for me, but gives you the benefit of seeing sites I thought were interesting. Just another thing I like about WordPress! Enjoy!

WordPress so far

I really like WordPress so far. It has a lot more options than Blogger. The one thing I do miss though is the ability to post to my blog via email. I will have to look into this and see what I can come up with or maybe my blackberry can handle the website interface to create and post…

Summer classes suck

I can't believe what a mistake taking 3 online classes in the summer is. I don't have time for anything. The only class I kinda like is the networking one, because I don't have to think about it too much. The writing one started off as fun because I kinda like to write but 3 stories a week, proves to be a bit much. Last night I sat for almost an hour trying to think of something I hadn't already written about. The third class, Dreamweaver, takes entirely way too much time for value received. We are like doing the entire book at a pace of about 200 pages per week. Yes per week.

I can't wait until classes are done for the summer, cause next fall I am taking at max 2 classes. I really don't care how long it takes to finish anymore, because it seems for every class I take they add on another 3 in requirements to finish.