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You know it's going to be a trying day when before you even get to work someone runs into your car at a stop light. I didn't see him coming and apperantly he didn't see me just sitting there at a stop in the middle of the road waiting for the light to change. I didn't hit the person in front of me and of course his SUV was largely undamaged. But, the back end of my car is thoroughly crumpled. I hope there wasn't anything too important in my trunk because it's probably staying there for a while.

I guess it wasn't that big of a deal, and I'm not injured, now I just wait for his insurance company to get back to me.

In other news, Mike Nyffeler's blog of videos and pictures form New Zealand is doing more than twice as many visitors on average. Of course we are talking about the difference between 5/day and 12/day averages.

Site Maintainence

I started working on cleaning up the markup for the site last night. There is still a lot to do sadly. I'm not XHTML compliant yet, mainly because of the falbum plugin generating url's with &'s in them. But whether I get this version of the site cleaned up, or I go ahead and redesign the whole dang thing, I'm very happy with what's in the sidebar now. Thanks to some great Web2.0 applications you can see what pictures I've been taking and uploading to flickr, see what my last 5 bookmarks at del.icio.us were, and also find out what upcoming events are on my calendar at CalendarHub. So, yeah, that's a lot of info about the 'ol timbly without even having to read one of these rediculous posts.

Oh, and here's what I've gotten for Christmas so far.

• Rolling luggage


• Big Bath Robe


• Slippers


• Travel Coffee Mug


• iTunes card


• Yoda


• Lots of Candy


• Gourmet Popcorn


• Bonus at Work

Going home in a couple days, I guess we'll see what else santa has in store. Oh, and yes all my christmas shopping is done. I like buying things and Becca like wrapping things, we're a great team. Actually Becca likes buying things too, so well... you know how it is.

I wait.

I'm sitting here watching the loading screen on Battlefield 2, so I have some time to write. Another christmas is approaching and I am quite happy, I have a good gift picked out for my wife and I am anxious to see what Becca has gotten for me. Last year at this time I was very nervously thinking about how I was going to propose to her. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. It went very well. OK, so she said yes and that is all that is important, but still I feel like I did a classy job of pulling it off. Now, Rodney, my roomate at college for about a year and a half, is getting married himself, he's a fool. Not for getting married... just because he is. :D

Now, this map is done loadig so I shall pause while I practice my skill with the grenade launcher in Karkand. Crap, never mind, the freaking server just disconnected on me. Well, I suppose I have a few more minutes. Anyways, the connection at work on the T1 is about 3 times faster than my Adelphia connection at home for playing games.

I found a couple cool tools last night, one is Writely and the other is Jot Spot Tracker. These are the online replacements for Word and Excel. Completely online, completely free. It seems that there are so many great free hosted services available out there right now. A person could really just keep all of their data and interaction online in this set of online applications that some are calling web 2.0. Which I know sounds just plain silly, these are merely new ways of solving old probelms, with emphasis on certain features for covenience that will shape user interaction standards for many years to come. Tagging is a buzz word, sometimes called labels, sometimes called categories, it's really a simple method of organizing data by keywords. It's the hype of complex javascript and server side interaction that attempts to make the user experience more seamless within a web browser. I like it, and think it's important to my role as a web designer.

Of course, some people still think that div's an css styling are new fangled methods of building web sites, that are unproven and unreliable. Dont even try to mention AJAX, or anything beyone Classic ASP.

Whoa, my mind wandered into geek territory again there. What I really was trying to say though is that there are a lot of cool developments in my career field right now. I wish I had more time to keep up with everything and pick up some of the skills that I'm seeing being utilized.

I'm actually starting to do some real design work at my job now, hopefully I can escape tech support soon. For the past couple of days I've been working with some video for a flash banner ad that we were putting together. Specificaly, I had to mask out a moving horse from a snowy wooded mountainside, and yes the camera did pan and pull just to make the task that much more difficult. It brought back many fond memories of long hours in the lab working with video for school. But I'm still confidant that I made the right decision to stick with the web instead of video. For my own sanity at least.

I have not written on this page as much since I have left school. I think my life is simply less busy in many ways, and when I am less busy I less feel the need to blog. Maybe because I am more bored. Actually, that's not entirely true, the only time I feel bored is when Becca is not around, and that's pretty much the only time I blog also.Mike's Blog should prove to be interesting in the next few months if he can overcome the hurdle of keeping it up to date.

I think I severely dislike Wells Fargo, or more precisely I am greatly dissapointed by the service at my local branch. They have just been so frustrating. Becca and I went in after the wedding to get her name put on our account and have my mother's name taken off. While we were in there we ordered new checks and applied for a new credit card. So we wait a couple weeks and hear nothing from anyone and recieve nothing in the mail. Becca and I call several times, never get to speak with the banker we had been working with, and never get a call back from anyone about any of this. Becca finally goes in one day about a month after the first time and re-orders the checks and has them resubmit the credit card application. Several weeks later the checks show up with my name and my mother's name on them. The package they were shipped in was addressed to my name and Rebecca. Seriously freaking rediculous. I go back in there to deposit my paycheck and find out what their deal is. Of course, my mom's name is still on the freaking account, the second credit card application was rejected because Becca was the primary name on it and she was unemployed at the time she applied.

So I tell them that Becca is employed give them all the vital stats and ask them to please remove my mother from the account, they say they will do this and call me with more information later that day. Oh, and we still havent talked the the banker who is never around now, the head teller is the one dealing with us at this point. So now it's been a couple weeks again and all I have is a letter from Wells Fargo that makes very little sense according to what I was told, and frustration piling up because my wife doesn't have checks she can use. I will probably go back in there for another round of abuse on Thursday. After that I may start looking for another bank, and some sort of formal complaint form.

I am starting to realize that these huge corporations have very little accountability and control so many aspects of our lives that it's frightening to know how badly they can screw up our lives. So the list of companies I wont deal with may grow to include more than just Quest DSL and HP.

Too many subject in this post. Ah well, not much I can do about that now.

He Waits.

Just in case you didn't know, here's the vital facts about Chuck Norris.Facts About Chuck Norris:1. The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.2. Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.3. Rather than being birthed like a normal child, Chuck Norris instead decided to punch his way out of his mother's womb. Shortly thereafter he grew a beard.4. Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn't stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.5. Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.6. Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked someone so hard that his foot broke the speed of light, went back in time, and killed Amelia Earhart while she was flying over the Pacific Ocean.7. Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.8. If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.9. Filming on location for Walker: Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris brought a stillborn baby lamb back to life by giving it a prolonged beard rub. Shortly after the farm animal sprang back to life and a crowd had gathered, Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked the animal, breaking its neck, to remind the crew once more that Chuck giveth, and the good Chuck, he taketh away.10. When Chuck Norris sends in his taxes, he sends blank forms and includes only a picture of himself, crouched and ready to attack. Chuck Norris has not had to pay taxes ever.11. There are no disabled people. Only people who have met Chuck Norris.12. In the early 1980s, Chuck Norris took a ragtag team of lovable losers and turned them into the state football champions. During their victory celebrations, he walked up to the star quarterback and snapped his neck to teach the rest of the team a valuable lesson about the mortality of man.

Hey, so in case you are all wondering, Nebraska sometimes get's blizzards. Let's all remember to check the weather before traveling next time, 'm kay. Becca and I were lucky enough to stay with the parents of some friends from college