So what if it's only a local holiday invented by a wacky group of college students at the University of Texas. It's the bestest holiday of all, and it takes place next Friday, May 7th. The "Knighthood of Buh" (Maybe they've seen Bah. Radio?) has claimed this as a day where everyone, be they students, respectable businessmen, or cherished community leaders, leave their pants behind.

That's it? Yep.

Am I going to participate? Probably not. But it's nice to know there's a holiday for pantlessness.

At UCF graphic design we were taught that you either choose a job in web-design, in print design, or you go freelance to do your own thing. Being more interested in a steady salary than the "happy in charge" feeling, I went with web. Just when I thought I'd forever pledged my life to web-design however, I found that there are opportunities here and there to use the printcentric side of my education - you just have to take charge of them.

I just got back from approving a proof of a monthly newsletter that we're going to be producing to send out with the billing. Along with that, we're planning on putting together a tri-fold brochure for the company as well. Very Fun!

I don't know how many programmers ever find my blog, but if you are a PHP programmer, you may find this useful. I have been doing most of my programming for this site from within Dreamweaver.

At work I do stuff in Visual Studio though, so I know the environment and features are much more superior. I wanted to do a global find and replace, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back. So I started searching for PHP plugins for Visual Studio .NET 2003.

If you know what I'm talking about, and feel my pain, check out:

• Jcx.Software - They have a plugin that allows you to add and work on PHP projects.
• David Cumps Weblog - There's a registry edit there that allows you to see coloring in Visual Studio for PHP Code.

Ok, for those of you wondering why my site is being funny, I thought I'd do a little Spring Cleaning in the half hour I had before I clocked in to work today. Some links may be kinda b0rked for a while but I wanted to get the main part of my site out of the "crazycreative" folder and into the root.

I'm also doing this because I'm running out of room! This hosting account lasts till late October, and I have to keep all my webjunk squished into 50MB till then. I'm planning on switching at that time to a host with a better price and better features. I defintately need 150+MB of space, php, and MySQL. I would like to have unlimited subdomains, CPanel, and a reseller account - but usually "That ain't cheap!"

So far the best option I've found is All About Hosting, a british company with servers in NJ. With them I'd either go with their Mini Reseller ($40/yr), or Standard Shared Hosting ($30/yr) deal. Either way I get 500MB and much more advanced company than my current host.

On Friday night I found out that Kingsbury, a band from Orlando that a friend of mine plays bass for was going to be playing up here in Gainesville at a little venue called Faces Lounge. I haven't been to many shows like this, but to give you an idea of the atmosphere – the drinks were expensive, the age probably averaged about 19, and the first couple of bands were mediocre at best.

Needless to say, I was about ready to head home by the time Kingsbury was setting up but their very presence in the room radiated a level of seniority and confidence not yet represented by the previous bands. Kingsbury consists of the usual guitar/vocalist, lead guitar, drummer, bassist, and tosses in a keyboard. Their sound is dark and mellow, and the blue up-lighting they brought along further emphasized the mood of the music. It was really a great show and I look forward to seeing them again if they're in town. If you get a chance, check them out at Kingsburymusic.net, download "This Place is Coming Down", and leave a comment to let me know what you think.

It's amusing to me to see the way the creepy/offbeat humor of the internet is making it's way into the corporate marketing arena.

The quizno's we love the subs commercials were a great example of this. Now, Burger King is getting into the action. Check out Subservient Chicken.com! I don't know how watching a chicken do what I tell it to will make me eat at BK, but at least it's not your typical advertising!

Do do do - doo deet do doot. Do, do, do, do, do, do DEE doodoo. Do do do - doo deet do doot. Last weekend, Amy and I sorted out the issues we were having with the wiring and the drivers for our NESDrive. We actually played 2 player Dr. Mario as a test on Sunday and then dismantled the entire thing. Last night Amy went to bed early and I decided to stay up and put some time into the faceplate. Well, 2½ hours later at 1:15 this morning, I completely finished it!

I managed to detail out the holes in the faceplate for the power/reset/led, sand off the rough edges, and cut off the bit of aluminum on the power/reset/led panel that stuck out too far. Then I painted the faceplate (3 coats of Nintendo gray), and glued in the controller ports. I almost went to bed then, but I was so close to being done. So I re-stripped the wires, twisted-soldered-electrical taped all of the connections to the parallel port and my molex (power) adapter, wrapped all the wires together, and mounted the whole thing in the drive bay.

Again, I almost went to bed...but I was done and had to enjoy my work. So I started up the emulator, plugged an NES controller into the front of my computer, and played some kung-fu! Woo-hoo!

I feel like a new dad! This project has been my baby for so long and now it's finally here. Speaking of babies, I'd like to wish a preemptive congratulations to ALMOST parents - Kevin & Kristy Currier!

Out of the billions of personal sites out there, I have randomly googled my way to komar.org twice now.

The first time was a few weeks ago when I was looking for generic pictures of swimming pools to use for an aquatics website I was working on. When I saw a picture of a larger-than-life incredible hulk in pool on google image search, I had to check it out. We got lots of laughs here at the office over all the hulk pictures but had to get back to work and didn't explore the rest of the site.

Then today, I was working on a site about conserving bats and in my frustration searched for "bat hunting" and: www.komar.org/faq/hunting_bats/ came up as number 6 in Google.

That's not all. Be sure to read on for more than you ever wanted to know about BBQ Modding, Growing Grass, Hunting Squirrels, and his 1972 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Convertible.

It may have been the smallest concert I've ever been to, but a great time was had by all. When I said that BackBooth was a little place, I really had no idea how small. And even though it was small, the place was empty! Whoever promoted that show should be fired. There were maybe 75 people there - including the three bands.

Jhon, Brian, and I showed up about the same time. The opening band was "Still Nieve". They were a little obnoxious in my opinion, but the second band really rocked. I had heard someone say that Big Dismal sounds a lot like Creed, but I really didn't think that was the case. The only similarity I noticed was the use of a harmonic microphone now and then for voice distortion.

After they got off stage, we got to hang out with Eric Durrance (vocals/guitar) for a while. He seemed like a very down-to-earth character. We all talked about music, where we were from, and the music industry in general. Since I told him I was in Gainesville, he even offered to put us on the guest list for their show tonight in Jacksonville. It would have been a much bigger show (with Grits, Pillar, and Skillet), but I left Gainesville at 3pm yesterday and I have to get some hours in at work sometime. I picked up their album though, and after listening to it 2½ times through on the ride home, I still think I'll listen to it at work.

The crowd (if you could call them that) got much more into 12 stones at the end, and they really put on a good show. Some drunk guys in their 40s decided to start moshing and pushing people around toward the end, but other than that, it was an awesome night.

Update: I saw that my review was linked from bigdismalonline.com, so I thought I'd add the old site's pagename to the post so that those people don't get a 404 error - archive.php?month=04&year=2004

I personally agree with Russ that there's no such thing as being too dependant on CSS, but perhaps I should get a second opinion. Today, I needed a dashed line to use in a website design I was working on in Photoshop. There are a few ways I could have done this within Photoshop using pattern fills. Instead, I opened a webpage in notepad, created a div with the appropriate dashed border, tossed it into Firefox, made a screenshot and used that as my line... Perhaps I need therapy.

I'm headed to Orlando this Wednesday evening to see 12Stones with my friend Jhon at little place called Backbooth. I know the area pretty well, but it's been a while since I've been in downtown Orlando, so I decided to check a map.

After noticing that YahooMaps didn't have the directions for the one way streets in downtown Orlando, I decided to plan my route using MapQuest. I'm the type of person who likes to blow the map up as large as possible, and then pick a route myself rather than relying on the computed driving directions. Sadly though, MapQuest seems to have dropped its "Enlarge Map" button.

I could not find any information as to why or when this occurred. But I did manage to find out the query string value that changes the size of the map. So...next time you want to get an enlarged MapQuest map, all you need to do is toss this: size=big& right after the ? that follows map.adp

Example:

• Normal Size Map


• Larger Map

Happy Mapping!

I need to get a job with the Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering.