Lizzie had a bad cold this past week and no matter how much I tried to protect myself, she passed it on to me. And when I get a cold, I get one hell of a cold. I thought I was going to avoid the bad one this fall, but I unfortunately I was mistaken.

So my brain’s not really functioning now and I don’t really have anything compelling to talk about. I should mention, though, that I’ve launched a couple new parts the web site:

dmPhotoBlog - There aren’t any photos up yet but I’m going to start bringing the digital camera around with me and taking pictures of whatever seems worthy of a picture. There will probably be a photo there by next weekend, and it’s going to be a once a week kind of thing. You’ll probably end up seeing some pretty pointless pictures there, but ultimately it should be fun. This is the perfect time of year to start it, Minnesota is really pretty in the fall.

dmGraphicsTutorials - I’m rethinking the design on this one, I think I might scrap the blog-like layout and go with something else but I’m going to start publishing some educational content here for graphic designers and web designers on all difficulty levels. I found myself searching for how to do something the other day and thought that I should start doing some tutorials to help others out. And it’ll be a good start at preparations for my very distant future goals of a graphic design college teaching career, which you’ve probably heard me elude to a couple of times now.

So those are the two new things. Don’t forget about the Rock&MetalTop40 and of course the NASCARBlog (which has become a very popular part of the site after just a couple months).

I started this web site in October 2002, so it’s three years old this month. I’ve been writing here the entire time, and it’s been a fun hobby. I guess it’s not just a hobby, it’s gotten me work, too. Thanks for visiting, especially to those of you who have been with me since the beginning three years ago.

Talk to you again soon!

I’ve uploaded the photos from last weekend’s NHRA races at Brainerd to the photo album. Click here to check it out. Of course, a permanent link is on the main photo album page. Enjoy!

Now I’m off to go watch the NASCAR race on TV. They’re at Michigan this weekend, and Michigan is always a good race. So I can’t miss it. See-ya later!

For a guy who doesn’t watch much TV, I watch a lot of TV. I just don’t watch network shows. When I have time to watch TV, I either want to watch a movie, or a documentary, or a documentary about a movie, or “Wildest Police Chases.” Yep, I really love a good grainy chase down a North Carolina road, waiting for the moment when the drunk misses a turn and rolls thirty times. Of course, he won’t be killed. No one is ever killed on these programs. And no one is EVER gets away.

A couple nights ago they played a chase that summed up everything you’d want in a police chase. An escaped Alzheimer patient driving 80 MPH down the wrong side of a divided highway. He clips a school bus full of children with such speed that his front axle flies off, then he T-bones another car, slides sideways and collides with another car head-on. Sure enough: “Amazingly, no one was injured in the accident.” How? How in God’s name is this possible?

I’ve been pretty irritable all day. Everything has been incredibly annoying. Went to the grocery store, and no one moved fast enough for my needs or purposes. Got behind a woman who was wider than her shopping cart, and moved at two feet per minute down the exact center of the aisle. I wanted to drop back ten yards, roll a grenade under her cart, hold a newspaper in front of my face to shield me from the rain of flesh. But I didn’t have a newspaper. We’ll let her live. This time. Then the person in line ahead of me had 15 items in the 10 or fewer lane. Oh yes, I counted.

Why do I have these kind of days? I’d give anything to always be in that coffee buzzing enthusiastic happy-go-lucky perfect kind of mood that I get in sometimes. But no matter how much coffee I drink, some days I just can’t be pleased.

I guess it’s not usually another person’s fault that I get in such a bad mood, so that’s good. Often times it’s because of the weather, the car, the job, or the balance at the bank that puts me in such a grim mood. I guess if I didn’t get so worked up about things, it would probably mean that I didn’t care. Then I’d probably be in a much worse situation.

I added a new page to the photo album this weekend as promised. I uploaded the Car Craft auto show photos, click here to check them out. Or don’t, whichever you prefer. As I’ve said a billion times, I’m working on the “Where I’ve Lived” photo album, I’m going to try to make it something truly worthwhile and quite large-scale (kind of like all the work I put in to the family tree), so that’s why it’s taking so long. Plus, I have to find time to get all the pictures taken. I’m going to have to do a little driving to do that.

Speaking of the web site, I was looking at the stats this weekend and noticed that the web site passed the 100,000 mark last week for total unique visitors since the site started on October 17, 2002. (By unique, I mean that it doesn’t include repeat visitors.) Yeah, that might not seem like much considering there are sites out there that exceed 100,000 unique visitors every day, but I think it’s pretty cool that in just a little less than three years over 100,000 people have visited some part of my web site. This all equates to over 16.5 gigabytes of data transferred from the web server onto other peoples computers over time. Total page requests is over 400,000. To show how good of a job I’ve done at keeping this web site free of broken links, in the three years there have only been 23 failed requests. Anyway, just thought that was all interesting and worth sharing.

See you next time.

Since you’ve made it here, I guess you’ve figured out that I’ve changed this journal around a bit. I moved it to the stuff page for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to seperate my personal opinion rants from the main web site a bit, as the site is being used commercially to attract clients. If someone sees that you support an issue they are strongly against, you may have just lost that customer. It’s sad, but true.

Not everyone will stop hiring John’s Plumbing just because he has a Bush/Cheney 2004 sticker on the back of his commercial van, but some people are that rabid that they would stop hiring him, even if he was the best and lowest priced plumber in the business.

The second reason is that posting things the old fashioned way were just getting very tedious. With this new system, I just have to log in, write my message, and hit send and it’s there. It’s layed out on the page all nicely and automatically put into an archive. Whereas before, since I’d have to create every little web page and it just became a chore and it discouraged me from posting, even when I had a thought I really wanted to talk about on here.

So this will make things easier for me, and so I’ll probably be able to post a lot more often. I’ll probably try to do it maybe even every day, or every other day, as long as I have something to say I guess. When there’s nothing interesting going on in my personal life, I always seem to have something to say about current events. So no matter what I should be able to get posting here more often.

The truth is I need to vent stuff out a little more. I talk to Lizzie and a couple friends a lot, but there’s just some things they aren’t all that interested in. I’m sure you’re not interested in everything I say, but this way at least I get to say it and if you don’t want to hear it you can just skip it.

Other than setting this stuff up, I spent today at classes and working on homework. Nothing exciting going on right now, I’ve just been really really busy. With school winding down it seems to be getting even busier. This weekend I’ll be going up to Brainerd, MN for some NHRA drag races. I’ll be meeting my brother and best friend up there. That should be fun, and a nice escape from the craziness around here.

Talk to you again soon.

If you’re really observant you’ll notice that things are speeding up around here. I’m in the process of making some enhancements to the website so that it runs faster, more smoothly, and with 100% less errors. It seems my web host decided to switch servers recently and corrupted a bunch of my images in the process. This finally compelled me to start doing what I should have done a long time ago, fix a lot of the problems with this site. I’m going to be integrating a lot more flash features because it’s much faster and the old way I did it just loaded too slow. So, that’s all I have to say about that. It doesn’t look any different and I made it faster so there can’t be any complaints.

Not much going on around here, we got some snow a couple days ago which buried us pretty well. I ended up late for work because of it, even though the roads were clear by the time I left for work. I’m not sure why the traffic is different even though it’s not snowing, and the roads are clear of all snow. I think it’s just a matter of it having had snowed the day before and everyone is too stupid to realize that it’s not snowing anymore. Well, I’ll just have to get used to waking up earlier, because I want it to snow. I want to get those snowmobiles out at Christmastime.

I have the 22nd through the 30th off for Christmas as you’ll see on my schedule. It will be nice to get out of town for a week. I’ve got some big projects to get done for school and some freelance stuff I’m hoping to get finalized this month so I’m going to have a busy next two weeks.

Not much else to say, will update again soon. Take care.

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