Last night, I made my first trip over to the casino in almost a year. Once we started hording money away for the condo, I had to put the kaibosh on my semi-regular trips to the blackjack tables. One of the members of our investment club suggested the Firepit Bar & Grill as a meeting location, so I found myself back once again. It was an odd feeling walking back in there - there's nothing like the constant chirping and ringing of the slot machines in the background. Quite a rush. I played a bit before and after our meeting, and ended up a few hundy' ahead. As I drove ...
Congratulations to our own Dan Cody, who was drafted with the 21st pick of the second round of the NFL Draft on Saturday by the Baltimore Ravens. Dan will be playing defensive end alongside NFL stars Ray Lewis, Chris McAlister, Peter Boulware, and Ed Reed. (On a personal note, Dan - watch out for that Jamal Lewis. He's a baaaaaad seed.). I haven't read the scouting reports, but I think Dan may be a little undersized to play end - but who am I to second-guess. His drafting was the latest of a recent string of eventful events for Mr. Cody - new job, new baby, and now this. I'm unsure how this affects ...
Last night, Judy and I joined her sister and brother-in-law for an evening of one of my favourite things, drinking lots of wine. WCTC held a fundraiser at the Country Springs Inn out in Waukesha. Your entry fee got you a wine glass, which you were free to ask the servers to fill up at any time. There was also a fair amount of foodstuffs to be had - a pretty nice buffet, and a few restaurants were set up for you to sample their wares (Mr. B's crab cakes were fantastico!, and the ribs & beans from "Q" were, too). As for the wine, after sampling for 2+ hours, you start to lose ...
It's always fun to take a peek at my server logs. For this site, it's entirely a curiosity thing; for my other site, I track the effectiveness of some advertising I do online, and generally see what's getting traffic and what isn't. I popped open the stats page a few minutes ago, and saw a tremendous spike for last Thursday. For April, I had been averaging around 200 "hits" a day or so - Thursday the 14th was 4,523. I assumed I'd see some additional traffic after the CCI launch and hoopla, but that's a big spike. I also noticed that one of the higher entries in the referer list was ...
I just saw a press release titled "About Adobe - Adobe to acquire Macromedia". Adobe is the company that produces Photoshop, among many other great products -- primarily print-orientated applications, although Photoshop is the defacto standard application of web designers. Macromedia generally has stuck to Web apps in the last 5 years - Flash, Cold Fusion. This bothers me from 2 perspectives. It's the #1 and #2 companies in the field merging -- and I'm not even sure who #3 would be at the moment, but they're not not even close. So much for competition. I'm sure the deal has to go through regulators, etc., and will take months and months to ...
My soon-to-be-former insurance carrier, American Family, "upgraded" their web site about 3 months ago. I'm not sure if I didn't notice it until this month, or if it just didn't bother me as much, but their online payment system doesn't support Firefox anymore. Which is bullshit - it's pure laziness on the part of their developers. There is no good reason that a system like that shouldn't be accessible by any browser that supports a 128-bit SSL connection. Period. So, I wrote in to explain the difficulties I was having yesterday. With a bill about to come due, I needed to make a payment on my account, and couldn't get it done from within Firefox. So, dammit, I opened ...
In a followup to my last post, I'm proud to announce that my work on the CCI-SAP web site is being featured on the "Unmatched <Style>" site. For the moment, there's a screenshot on the home page - although as they add new sites, it will drop off. There's also a short opinion (which I did not write), and of couse, a link to the site. Horray for me!
I made mention recently about the frustration of being primarily a web developer. The bulk of the work I do goes into building CMS tools for my clients to manage their sites - the kind of thing that has a password on it and I can't exactly post a link to it. Screenshots are nice, but don't do the work justice. I've also worked on some top-secret market research projects recently - I can't even post screenshots of that work. But, every now and then, I get to actually do some design work. My good friend Chris Carter hired me to redesign his consulting firm's website. It took much longer ...
For the longest time, I've been sitting on an this $99 Sam's Club office chair. It was one of my first purchases after moving back to the lower 48, going on almost 10 years now. The chair has seated me well, but over the last 6 months, the gas in the cylinder post has started to go. I'll sit down in the morning at full height, and by 9:00 AM, I'm looking up at the keyboard, which has started to cause some back and neck issues. So, today I made a trip out to Brookfield - Office Max, Office Depot, Office Warehouse, Office World, Office Universe, Office-O-Rama, and Office Outlet are all ...
Hot on the heels of last month's National Television Debut of a nice Polish boy from the South Side and the triumphant return of the world travelling former junion polka champion, I've just been notified that another Bay View kid has jumped into the spotlight. Mr. Andrew Eberhardy (B.V.H.S., Class of 1990), longtime employee of a multi-gazillion dollar international financial megacorporation, was named "Banker Of The Year". He's featured in the 2004 Annual Report. To save you the 2.11 mb PDF download, here's the good stuff (p. 9): Andrew Eberhardy, Project Manager Elan Financial Services, Milwaukee, WI Andrew Eberhardy's skilled support made all the difference to Oregon-based Umpqua Bank during a recent ...
From the fox.com website: THE ONLY TIME YOU'LL GET THREE CHANCES! Since this episode is so important, you can catch an encore of show 4.16 "10p-11p" on Friday 4/8 @ 9/8c and on Sunday 4/10 9/8c (But don't get used to the repeats...)
The long, long, long in development graphic novel-to-film version of The Watchmen appears to be in trouble - again. The Watchmen is widely regarded as the seminal work of the graphic novel genre. The book is set in an alternate version of the mid 80's, where real-life masked heros have been around since the 30's, and Nixon is serving his 5th term as president. These heros don't have any superpowers, they're just normal people who decided that they wanted to be wear costumes and fight crime. They're eventually outlawed as vigilantes, and the few remaining heros get tied up in a murder mystery. I'm afraid to say any more about the plot - if anyone wants to ...