I don’t know why I do this to myself. Maybe I just hate myself more then I’m willing to admit. I had the day off today, which was all well and good since I had every good intention of getting a lot of stuff done in an out of the house. That was, however, until JP came down last night. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against JP or him coming dowe, hell, I invited him down. Since he lives an hour away, we don’t get to hang out too often, and try to when time allows. However, what happened last night was something that used to happen quite often when I was in high school. I would usually end up haning out with my friend Bert on the weekends, and what would ensue was nothing more then a hardcare video game fest. The only time we would break was for food, drink, and bathroom breaks. After about 12 hours of playing or so, we would look away from the screen to notice that something was different. Somehow, without our knowledge or permission, the sun had rudely come up and ended the evening hours, making it now the unholy time of day known as morning. We would curse this fact for a moment, and then go back to playing games until we basically fell over from extreme fatigue. Waking up a few hours later, we would quickly discuss where to acquire more food and drink, and then resume play video games right where we left off. A very simple, and fun time.

Now however, when you’re all gorwn up, it really tends to screw with your system. Especially when you have what seem to be random shift to work during the week. For instance, when JP left this morning around 11:30am or so, I was at that decision point. Do I fall alseep now for a few hours and then risk being up all night or do I pull an Iron Man and go all day without sleep again and then crash for 14 hours tonight. With my decision quickly made, I decided to pull an Iron Man…that was until abut 1pm or so when my body just shut down and I lost conciousness for about 3 hours. Waking up and starting your day at 4 pm not only pisses you off to no end, once again, it screws with your system. Plus, add to the fact that you have to be at work by 10am the next morning, and you still have to do a lot of food and misc shopping before the stores close at 6 pm…your mind suddenly becomes very aware of the slow and precise passage of time. Every minute now suddenly counts a little more then it did a few short hours ago.

So what’s the moral of this little story??

I’M GODDAMNED TIRED AND I’M GOING TO BED

Anyone who knows me knows that I have always had a simple goal for my house. Unfortunately, when I was living here with my ex, I wasn’t able to even try to accomplish said goal. But now that it’s just me here…I’ve been trying slowly to inch closer and closer to my goal, and the other night I came one step closer. I’ve always wanted to have a computer in every room, to have all of those computers networked together, and have all of them online. That way, I can just about access anything from anywhere in the house. Normally, that doesn’t sound like to big of a deal, except for a few small things. Living on my own and taking care of an entire house off of only my income, I have limited tech funds. Also, where I live I have no broadband. Again, very suck ass. So it’s just me, my four networked PCs, one Macintosh Classic II, and a single dial-up connection.

The amount of PCs are one issue, but sharing my connection was another issue. I’ve tried programs like SyGen CyberGate, and I’ve also tried making a VPN with my server. I’ve even gone as far as trying to use the built in connection sharing with Windows XP. But, not good enough. You see…all of my systems are running a differnt operating systems. I have machines running Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98SE, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and Windows XP. Then, in doing some more research, I found a nice little program called WinRoute. So, I turned my main machine into a proxy server, and BAM!! All my computers, including my Windows 3.11 machine, are online.

Ok, I’m really rambling now. I think I should finally get to the point I orginally set out to make in this post. I’ve moved my Fun Fun Media Center machine into the living room. In fact, as I write this I’m chatting on AIM, and watching Star Trek The Next Generation Season 3 on DVD in glorious 5.1 Dolby Digital sound! Life is good. JP is coming down next Friday and we’re going to put in some permanent ethernet jacks both in the living room and the computer room, linking them both together. Good times!

This is getting ridiculous! It’s been snowing for like a week and a half now! We’ve just about reached the 2 foot mark for snowfall today and it’s still coming down!

How bad can it be you ask?? Well, I took this picture of these guys cutting through my yard about 20 minutes ago. You be the judge!!

Great….more snow!! Normally I’m a big fan of snow, most people know this. However, this year it’s getting a little ridiculous. It’s not like it snows everyday, but when it does it’s never just an inch or two. This year it’s been 6 inches or better with each storm. And again, don’t think that I hate winter or anything, but we’ve been caught in this goddamned deep freeze now for literally months. Hell, we set a new record last month with 19 days straight of below freezing temps. That’s 19 straight days where at no point at all during the day did it reach above 32 degrees!! So, whatever snow we have gotten this year has stayed. Which mean that we’ve had one hell of a snow pack this year!

Well…I think that’s enough whining for now. On one good note because of the snow I did get the day off from work. Granted I don’t get paid for the day, but time off no matter what is always good. This gives me a chance to learn Dreamweaver and see if I can finally ditch FrontPage. I know a lot of people out there don’t like WYPIWYG HTML editors, and for the most part neither do I. I still prefer to do as much as I can manually. But, it does speed up a lot of things, like say the creation of a complex array of tables. Plus it’s quicker to add graphics and hyperlinks. I’ve been using FrontPage now for about 4 years and I’ve never had enough problems with it to find a new program until this weekend. In coding the new homepage, for some reason everytime I opened the page up in FrontPage, it added a space after my random logo script. This pisses me off because when the script loads the logo, there’s a black line underneath the logo. I know most people wouldn’t care, but I do. So each time I open up the page, no matter what I do it it, I have to cut and then re-insert the code into the page. But, for those of you who work with FrontPage, you know the frustrations of adding in your own HTML code. especially if you paste. When you paste anything into the actual code, it reformats the text and adds in spacing blocks, and reformats all the punctuation, which, if you know anything about HTML, JAVA, or SSI, is NEVER a good thing. So, I’m at the point where I need a new editor, and I’ve heard some good things about Dreamweaver so I figured I’d give that a try. Man, all of that for the same sentence I started with, I’d feel a little cheated if I were you!

But, enough with my ramblings. This post was about snow and it will end with snow. See!!

My nice snow covered patio this morning.

My side yard looking down into the backyard. Me thinks I won’t be going down there anytime soon!

My poor, poor Neon.

As you can probably see, assuming your name isn’t Matt Murdock, Twev1701.com Version 2.0 is finally online! Not only should everything be easy to navigate, it should also prove to be easier for me to maintain and update more often.

I will have to admit that I even surprised myself that I managed to get this new site coded and online by my self-set deadline of today. Well, not exactly today, but it was done while it was still technically Sunday! You have to at least give me a little credit, don’t you?

You may or may not know this (depending on how much you read my newsposts) but all the features I initially promised aren’t yet available. It’s not for the fact that I’m lazy. I could have had all the features up and done by now, but they wouldn’t have been exactly how I wanted them to be. After being offline for a little shy of 2 weeks for upgrades, I don’t want to skimp and cheese out on the features. I’d rather just take a little more time and make sure everything works properly with all the available resources. So, just sit tight and you should see the content that was promised in the coming weeks.

A few more items of note. The wallpapers are now running off of an auto-archiving script, which means as long as I don’t screw up on my end, you guys will always get your wallpapers on Sunday and have complete access to the archive in decending chronological order. In other words, no more reasons, other then my laziness, for getting wallpapers on Mondays or Tuesdays. Also, JP and I have finaly started to get a little more serious about our upcoming web comic. We’ve setup the essential ground rules, a list of primary characters, and even came up with a name. Hell, JP even managed to grab us our domain tonight. So, if eveything holds steady and true, we should be seeing the premiere of our comic sometime in April.

Anything else you guys need or want just drop me a line at my usual e-mail address. Other than what’s been said, the site is done, new wallpaper is posted, and it’s snowing like a son of a bitch outside. All in all, not too shabby.

Just so everyone doesn’t think I’m blowing smoke up their respective asses, here’s proof that I’m working on the new site! Here I am, well, there I was about 5 minutes ago, sitting in my computer room, glass of Pepsi Blue in hand, working on the new site. It looks like I’m off 4 out of the next 5 days, so I’m hoping to have the new site up by Sunday. The main page is coming closer to a reality and the rest of the site is simplly a matter of scripting. Well, enough jabberin’ for me. Back to work!

A new week means a new wallpaper. I’d hoped to have the new wallpaper section online by now but I just can find the right archive script yet. All the images are upload and waiting, I just need to find the right script to put them in order and serve them to you on a highly polished silicon platter.

The new site is progressing well. Design for me is one of the hardest stages because it’s so intergral to your whole site. You want to have enough room for everything you have now, but sitll leave room for fufture upgrades. On the other side of the coin, you don’t want your site to be too bare so that it looks like it’s begging for content. You have to find that happy medium, and then format it all together in a nice 750 pixels across enviroment.

But without further ado….

Elizabeth Hurley

Even though the new site won’t be up for a bit, that doesn’t mean I should deprive you fine people of your weekly wallpaper! Enjoy!

Sandra Bullock

JP and I got some new toys the other day. In getting things together to make our web comic, we quickly realized that inking them in PhotoShop is great, but really sucks with a mouse. One of my ex-girlfriends had a nice Wacom pen tablet, and I used it a few times for some rotoscoping. However, the pen tablet only had a 4in x 5in work area. Not very big at all. So we did some research online and found that that nice little pen tablet was $99. The larger tablets we were looking at were bordering on obscene at $700+. Then I happened to come across a nice little company called Aiptek. They make a nice 12in x 9in pen tablet for the oh-so-nice price of $149. SOLD! However, we had to wait for shipping. Well…the one thing you should know about us is that we hate to wait. So, doing a search we found that CompUSA carries them. However, the nearest CompUSA is a little over 2 hours away in New Jersey. (we’re from northeast Pennsylvania) So, taking the bull by the horns we jumped in the car the next morning and off to Jersey we went. Nearly getting lost long the way, we finally arrived and purchased 2 of them. After using it now for a day or two, and having previous experience with the Wacom tablet, I’d have to say that for the non-professional, the Aiptek Hyper Pen 12000U is a great value. I would seriously recommend it to anyone who wants a pen tablet with a rather gracious work area – the same size of normal printer paper – and a gracious price to match. Here are 2 pictures of the nice tablet.

JP testing out his tablet, seeing how well it inks on of our web comic characters in PhtotoShop

My tablet at home. You can see just how big of a tablet it is by comparing to my keyboard and mouse