10/01/2002

Whoah, two updates in two days. This one promises to be brief and mostly pointless. Looking for things to do in my downtime at work, which is often considerable. Keeps the job pretty low stress overall though. :) Working for a phone company, I'm told that I can make long distance phone calls at work. I haven't run it by my supervisor yet, which I think would be wise. So who knows, I may make a couple calls to some folks who are far away, especially those whose names rhyme with Nathleen. And if the money is an issue, I could always just use that calling card I invested in. :)

Been fiddling some more with colors as per suggestions from K, and decided to steal a color off of this page and brighten it just a touch. She stated "slate" as a target, and I thought the current color seemed such to me. Good? Bad? Send comments this way..

That banking program I've mentioned on the programming page is coming along nicely. It mostly works on the backend at this point, now I've gotta write what the user will actually interact with. Good fun. I have missed programming. I'm really glad I found an itch to scratch, simple as it is. :) I look forward to not depending on a gui program for my finances. Also, I don't need all the fluff in GNUCash. It's a great program, but it's overkill for what I use it for.

10/09/2002

Well a rough couple of days for me, but a whole lot rougher for Kathleen. Thank the Lord, she's recovering in a hospital bed, and my mind is much at ease. Just got off the phone with my Dad giving him the latest on her situation. After she called me this morning, I headed outside to go to work. The day was all the more beautiful; a cool fall day with a perfect blue sky spotted with just a few clouds. Got a great parking spot at work.. :) Ah yes, simple pleasures, but I bet someone up there is just giving me a chance to sit back a bit after the last few days. I'm very very happy. :) Now I just have to contain myself until I hop a flight back out to B'more. That'll be really nice.. :)

Uh, so yeah, weblogs should be about the web. Hmm. I got nothing. Go read Strong Bad's latest, updated every Monday. Cheers!

10/11/2002

Reports are trickling in that there are some more people viewing this site than I thought. I don't know when I told anyone about this, but I know I've been meaning to. :) Anyway, if this is your first time, maybe last time, I hope you enjoy my ramblings. I think I'm gonna try not to post so much here on the front as much as write more extended observations and archive them separately. I've already posted a little rant about how IE sucks that's linked at the bottom of this page currently. So, you should find a new link in the index in the vein of these writings. I've got some ideas for some more. Enjoy.

Oh, yeah! What's a web log update without a link of some kind? Hmm, here are those ramblings. In the index too..

10/15/2002

WARNING: You may be experiencing breakage (as far as this website goes..). I'm getting rid of my frames, because they're bad™. I switching it up to pure CSS divisions, in the vein of my brother's site. Should be good, Once I get the conversion done. Until then, you may well experience a couple things: the Site Index menu appearing twice, links popping up whole new windows (sorry..) and the Site Index dropping off the face of your browser. It'll be fine when it's worked. So despite that the whole web is "Under Construction," mine is now officially in that state also. Let's all hope for a speedy resolution. A day or two I'm guessing. We'll see.

In real life today, I put a down payment on a dresser! Yeah, that means I can stop living out of my suitcases soon, and get all the crap off my bedroom floor. Life is panning out nicely lately, mostly. :) And I'm going to see Kathleen in a couple weeks! That should rule.. Til then back to the grind.

10/16/2002

Well, breakage should be gone. If you see anything obviously wrong, lemme know. The switchover to CSS styled <div> tags should be complete, with little to no downtime. :) It should basically even look okay in IE, but the menu on the left should stay in one place, rather than scrolling with the page, floating above the rest of the page. I think it looks nice, like how the frames look, but without the disadvantages of frames.

As far as normal life, work is going well. It doesn't look like the family is gonna make it in this weekend, so John and I will have to find a way to amuse ourselves somehow. I still might be able to swing a trip out east for next weekend, thanks to a loophole at travelocity. That's still up in the air, unfortunately. Soon, but never soon enough.

10/18/2002

I keep digging and I've found yet another bright spot. I'm heading back to Baltimore next weekend. Got a pretty good deal after a couple of hours on the phone with Travelocity over the past couple of days. So off I go to visit the kids out east again. Should be oodles of fun. Kathleen sounds like she's doing much better, now that's she off the prescription painkillers. Yay! Work is going well, and the weekend is wide open.

What to link up, what to link up..? Hmm, how about Something Awful? Home of the infamous Jeff K.

Finally indeed. 'Gratz to "I think I know who you're talking about.."

10/22/2002

In site news, I've added a new link to the index, and removed three. Both Italy and Jackie & Scott's wedding have been put under the new Pictures heading. There's also a couple more things there. I also put the DLUG Links link on my main links page. Lemme know if anything blows up. As far as stuff on the wild wild 'net, I've got little else to add. Check out the links page and follow any links you haven't seen yet. How about this: check out the best news page on the web.

Oh, yeah. I saw Flogging Molly last night with my brother. Andrew WK opened, and they were really fun, despite the pretty gross looking website. Overall, a very fun show. Flogging Molly is an Irish style punkish/popish band, while Andrew WK is somewhere between punk and metal, with keyboards and a positive attitude thrown in for good measure. Good times were had. It's great working second shift, because I can easily stay out late on a work night, and even have a couple drinks. I'm just fine by 3pm the next day. :)

10/24/2002

Just a bit more than a day (one sunset) away from the big, but too short, trip out east. I'm pretty psyched indeed. Tomorrow I've got a lame 3 hour training class followed by a full 10 hour shift at work. It should be a very very long day. Then a bit of shut-eye before flying out of lately-rainy KC. John wants to get a quick drink in there somewheres, but, uh, we'll see. :) It should be a fun and laid-back weekend. I'm so glad to get the chance to see K again with all that's happened. Well, I'd be pretty jazzed to see her even if she was in full health. :) Anyway.. I gotta get to bed.

Hmm.. Links, links. Uh, use Mozilla on Gentoo GNU/Linux. You'll be happy. Well, once you learn a bit about UNIX. Yah UNIX! Okay, I'm a dork.

10/29/2002

I had a wonderful weekend in Baltimore. I know what you're saying: "Brian, tell us all about the amazing things you saw and did in the beautiful Charm City, the Greatest City in America, as it is called?" "Well" my answer would be, "basically nothing of note." Had a delicious dinner prepared by Lisa G., and Jackie and Scott came over and we ordered Chinese food on Sunday night. Other than that, I pretty much looked after a not-feeling-very-good Kathleen. The headaches were pretty fierce, pain otherwise was prevalent, all along with drug-induced (legal, still harsh) out-of-it-ness. She was having a tough time, but was coherent enough to seem happy to see me. :) So we just spent a lot of time together, and I took care of her, which I actually really liked. So, I basically sat around in a stuffy apartment, but I had a great weekend. I'm maybe a bit too sappy..

Phenomenal! Two new H*R Cartoons! No new Strong Bad though. I think it's a fair trade. I'll watch them when I get home and have speakers. Ooh, anticipation!

Oh, a blurb about my latest thrills with maintaining this site.. After changing the index menu on every page by hand twice in one day recently, I decided I've really gotta find a better way to do this site. After a pow-wow with John on the way to work, he decided to start doing CGI, and I decided to go for a nice pit-stop on the way to CGI (or SSI, maybe). So I built a custom system to make my website based on modification dependencies. I mostly like it because it's homebrew by me. It's completely not general, but the philosophy is sound. If I make one change to that index, it shows up everywhere, which is wonderful. What makes this a nice pit-stop to more dynamic page generation is that I have all the content divided logically. Anyting that appears all over is really in just one place. I'm rather happy with it. :)

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