Geek Habitat

I’ve been on a Starburst Fruit Chews kick lately. Every time I do a food shopping, I’ve picked up a fresh bag of Starburst to refill our candy bowl.

You know you’re over-indulging in something when you start to form opinions about it that you feel compelled to share with others… Which is how I found myself this evening Googling “starburst” and visiting their heavily Flashified Starburst.com. (Turn your speakers down before visiting, as with most consumer product Flash sites out there.)

I missed it by fifteen minutes, but yesterday (July 20, 2004) marked the 35th anniversary of the first lunar landing. I’m thirty years old, so it’s not something I have a memory of, though through the miracle of television, radio and the Internet I’ve seen and heard it probably as many times as anyone who “witnessed” it live on that day thirty-five years ago.

Yesterday was a good day. I’m being appropriately vague, but it was a good day.

I have been using a trackball mouse at home for the past year and a half, after recurring and painful bouts of tenosynovitis in my right hand. Switching to a trackball mouse was one of the many steps I took, and has improved my situation immensely. I use a trackball mouse for everything except gaming, which means I use it about 99.98% of the time. (Gaming is hell on wrists, anyway.)

Should’ve been in bed a half hour ago, but got up to check a post on one of my sites (WildTexas.com), and got sidetracked. Then got further sidetracked into blog-reading, and then said, “What the hell…” and decided to post in my own blog, too.

After the past couple day’s insanity with the server and email outages, today was a truly wonderful, productive day.

Our OutdoorPhoto.com website, relaunched on Memorial Day, now features all the trappings required to market our portrait photography services — you know, family portraits, pet portraits, that sort of thing.

“It’s Guuuuuuud! It’s Guuuuuuuuuuuuuuud!”
(Sorry, that’s probably only grin-worthy if you’ve seen the movie “Bruce Almighty”.)

I’m particularly happy with the way this turned out (click the “Submit” button — it won’t send anything if left blank.) The u.i. was inspired directly by Kalsey Consulting Group’s “Form Errors. Simplified.” article.

Remember when I was ranting about my web server downtime the other day? Well, I have now been punished for my hubris by the Net Gods.

My punishment? I was without any web (HTTP), FTP or email connectivity to half of my websites from 7 AM CST on Saturday until Monday at midnight CST. Two of the primary websites affected? Of course, it was GeekHabitat.com and WildTexas.com.