During the course of the long Thanksgiving weekend, Ames and I managed to meet my employers for the first time in person, attend 3 Thanksgiving parties, do some Christmas shopping, assemble our Christmas tree (for the first time in our new house) and rearrange the home office. While Amy worked on the perfect configuration for our 2 desks, bookcase, futon, filing cabinet, and office accessories, I decided to work out the kinks in our home network.

Before:

Previously, I had the cable modem (top left) conntected to the uplink port on the Vonage router. I then used 3 of the 4 wired ports to connect the iMac, the PC, and the Printer/All-in-one. The 4th port was connected to the wall jack that I installed which runs under the house to the living room where it connects to our wireless router. The wireless router is connected to “The Box” (our little server/media center which is connected to the TV) and provides wireless access to Amy’s laptop.

I set this up before we picked up Amy’s laptop and the wireless router. It worked great at the time because The Box was in the same workgroup as the rest of the computers even though it was out in the living room. After we added the wireless router, getting into the box from the computers in the office became a major pain. I tried disabling DHCP on the router and setting The Box in the DMZ, but I still couldn’t get file and print sharing to work from the computers in the office.

After:

By moving the wireless router into the office and connecting everything to the network through it (rather than the vonage router) file and print sharing is now so much smoother. We’ve had a wireless PCI adapter in the PC for a while, and since it’s now on the opposite side of the office, we decided to utilize that rather than running a long cat5 around the room.

New Furniture Layout:

Amy used Better Homes and Gardens’ Arrange-a-Room tool to create the new furniture layout. No, we don’t have pink office chairs, a blue futon, or white “server-room” tile in the office, but the little online tool saved us a lot of time.

So yea, even with the pretty Omni Graffle charts, and Amy’s furniture layout this is still quite possibly the most boring thing I’ve ever posted here. I don’t expect anybody to read this far into it or even find it useful. It’s really for posterity that I’m writing about our home network. You see, in a few months this network configuration will probably all change. In a few years I won’t even remember how I had things setup, and at some point I won’t even remember which computers we had when. I hope at that point that we will at least have flying cars or teleportation. Perhaps we’ll even have salmon flavored soda, USB beverage chillers or disappearing colored bubbles.

It’s hard to look back on the last year of my life and NOT be thankful. My wife and I are healthy and happy, we bought our first house together, she was accepted to grad school at USC, I have an amazing job that I can do from home, and I’ve recently started volunteering as an assistant wrestling coach at the local high school (which has been both tiring and rewarding at the same time). With all these positive changes though, it’s been my wife, family, friends, and beliefs that have gotten me through the hard times.

With all that in mind, I think I’ll have a little fun and expand on last years list with a few things you probably didn’t know I was thankful for.

1. 1
2. 2
3. 3
4. 4
5. 5
6. Apple - As much as I resisted the temptations of joining what I thought all through college was the “dark side”, I’ve grown to love working on my iMac and in OSX. Sorry Bill, Steve won me over…and I don’t think Vista is going to make me anymore likely to upgrade the PC.
7. My Vans - In high school, all I ever used to wear was Airwalks, Vans, and Soapshoes. Yes, I was quite the oxymoron back in the day. I was a varsity wrestler, an aspiring webdesigner, and I dressed like a skater. Amy likes to tell the story about how I took her out for Coffee Coolatas at Dunkin Donuts and told her I would offer to pay, but that I was saving up for a pair of Soapshoes. In my defense…I didn’t earn much bagging groceries at Publix. To give a little more nerdy detail, I was driving a 1971 SuperBeetle at the time.
8. Our Kitty - She’s a little white fluffball named Abby. Our neighbors had been taking care of her since the other neighbors abandoned her. They call her “Sally-Jane” since they already have a cat named Abby (what are the odds?). I like to call her “Kitty LaLa” since she seems to be in some other place half the time and Amy calls her FluffyButt for obvious reasons. She has slowly made her way into our house and hearts and even has her own food and water here.
9. The Internet - Ahh, the internet. If it weren’t for that 486 Packard Bell Computer, 2400 baud modem, and IRENE, who knows what I would have done with my life. Without the web, I probably would have become an architect or an engineer. I’m glad I left the engineering classes up to Amy. I <3 Teh Intarweb!
10. Rita’s Gelatis - I managed to get BReese hooked on Rita’s when he came to Vero for the wedding and it’s a guaranteed stop anytime Amy and I go back home. I personally like Mango with Vanilla custard. Amy’s favorite is Strawberry with Vanilla.

There ya go. A perfectly random list of 5 things I’m thankful for…of which only 2 are technology related. In retrospect, those two are probably things anybody out there would have guessed. Oh well, I hope I threw you off with the other 3. Happy Turkey Day!

I have to admit that I’ve been quietly addicted to the complete and udder waste of time that is ytmnd.com for several years now. Although I’ve only been voting on and contributing to the community for the last few months, it’s always been entertaining to see how creative people can be when armed with only a sound file, an animated gif (or even a still image), and a tagline.

What is YTMND?: If you’ve visited the site and still have no idea what it’s all about, try reading the Wikipedia Definition or the The Wall Street Journal Online Article. If you still don’t get it, you probably never will…and don’t even think about Googling “ytmnd”

“A carnival of internet culture and meme humor.” is about the best set of words I can come up with to describe YTMND. Anything that anyone considers cool, funny, weird, ironic, twisted, or trite might become the next most popular ytmnd. Then…when a YTMND site becomes popular, you can bet that it will inspire others to make variation YTMND sites to make fun of, pay homage to, or improve on those sites. If you follow the top viewed YTMNDs for any length of time, you’ll pick up on these memes, which makes the entire site more enjoyable.

Sometimes, sorting through the vulgar and graphic to find genuinely interesting or funny YTMNDs can be annoying. Recently though, some effort has been made to move the most offensive and obnoxious YTMNDs off the main site to a sister site - YTMNSFW. There has been some criticism of this move in the forums, but overall, I think it was for the best.

“What’s so funny about YTMND?” You tell me. Here is a list (in no particular order) of some of my favorite YTMND sites.

• Knight Low-Rider
• Ninja works it.
• Butt Racing Grand Prix
• Yoda Remembers the 80s
• Boil ‘em
• What is Love!?
• Batman: ualuaeluealeuale
• DEW!!!!!
• Owen Wilson’s Guns
• Tom Cruise Kills Oprah
• spread my stapler and fly away
• Michael Moore is too easy to make fun of
• It’s a Shoreline!
• I love bell peppers!
• YUO CAN DO IT
• Indian Jones Can’t Stop the Rock
• It’s an Arnold Rave
• Wonka is…MICHAEL JACKSON
• IT’S A MULLET
• BANANA PHONE

Ames and I are looking forward to this weekend’s match-up of Steve Spurrier’s Gamecocks and Urban Meyer’s Gators this weekend here in Columbia. The tension has been building, tickets are hard to come by, and we have several friends from Gainesville coming up for this momentous occasion. No matter what the outcome, it will be one heck of game to be at. This is the kind of excitement that makes college football so fun to watch…unless you come from my Alma Mater.

The University of Central Florida is an amazing school with great classes, a beautiful campus, and a unique atmosphere. In 1968, UCF (formerly Florida Technilogial University) began classes with an enrollment of 1,948 students. Today, the school boasts over 40,000 students, and competes with most major universities in all but one arena - school spirit. For the 4 years I attended UCF, I loved going to the athletic events and cheering on the Knights…but having to drive about 20 miles to and from the Citrus Bowl for football games really takes away from the “hometeam advantage”.

In the last couple years, the University has been (Finally!) working on incorporating an on campus stadium to it’s master plan. I’ve enjoyed reading about the stadium plans in Pegasus (UCF’s Alumni Magazine) and online at http://stadium.ucf.edu/. Seeing renderings of the proposed stadium, like the one above, have really fueled my enthusiasm for the project and I’d really like to go to a few games once it’s built.

Sounds great, right? Well, not to the contemptuous coalition behind the so-called UCF Community Watch. In following the progress of the stadium plans, a friend and fellow UCF alum came across their site and sent me the link a few months ago. The information propaganda on this site is a biased, demeaning (to the actual “UCF Community”), and downright desperate attempt to derail the plans for any on-campus stadium. I’ve attempted in the past to share my opinion’s through the blog comments, only to see them deleted, or that they’ve disabled comments on posts that have enough intelligent information to bother writing a counter argument to. I’ve since reserved my opinions on the topic to conversations with friends and fellow alums, but after seeing the images in this post, and this one, I can no longer contain my opinions.

The residents living around the UCF campus are reaping the financial rewards of having one of the best Universities in the state in their backyard, yet they don’t want that university to succeed. Although the football team is doing much better this year, they went 0 for 11 last year. That’s right, they didn’t win a single game! I want to see my Alma Mater excel, not just academically, but in sports as well. I’d like to see UCF win a conference title, go to bowl games, and give the big teams a run for their money. They can’t do this without fan support, and I know from the games I attended at the Swamp that being at home in a packed house sure helps intimidate opponents and spur on the home team to victory. So with that said, I fully support the university’s plan for an on-campus stadium and proudly say Go Knights!

Update: After a final public meeting on November 9^th the UCF Board of Trustees Approve Construction of On-Campus Stadium pending final approval of financing. By amending the campus master plan to include the stadium, construction could begin within the next few months and be completed before the 2007 football season.

I had a few people say they liked the animated logo rollover in the upper right corner of my new design. How did I do it? Well I’m glad you asked. It’s a Non-Preloading CSS Rollover Transparent Animated Gif Background Image Link. What? Too many adjectives? No way! The more the better, so…Yea! It’s bound to be at least as popular as Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper.

Let me first say that designing a new css theme for an existing XHTML site (especially when I’ve learned a lot since I wrote the original XHTML) is a pain in the butt. I would much rather start from scratch with a new XHTML template and all new css…but in this case, I just wanted a new theme and I avoided the temptation to re-write all the XHTML. Well, when I was creating this new theme for the site, I noticed that I had a link with my logo in it as part of the xhtml. In the 1900s theme, I was hiding that link, since I only wanted it to serve as a header/home-button for the non-styled version of the site. For the new theme however, I planned on putting in some css to hide the img tag inside of it and use it as an absolutely positioned design element for the site. When I made my Photoshop mockup, I planned for this with the “Making this place feel like home.” starburst logo thingy you see to your upper right.

In my typical “that’s just not good enough” fashion, I decided that… it wasn’t good enough. I decided to make the image into a rollover and that I was going to use the tried and true non-preloading method of doing css rollovers that involves creating a background image with the hover and non-hover states adjacent to one another, and toggling the background position in the CSS in the :hover state for my link. I would explain this here, but it has been well documented here, here, here, here, and here.

OK, So that’s the Non-Preloading CSS Rollover Background Image Link. What about the Transparent and Animated part? In short, Animated came first and Transparent was a necessary evil. I made this nice little 3 frame gif animation of the starburst rotating and incorporated it into the rollover image and realized once I got it in place that it covered up part of my ceiling beams. So I decided to take advantage of the full power of the mighty GIF format to make it Transparent AND Animated. After all that explanation, I give you the final image, the Transparent, Animated part of my Non-Preloading CSS Rollover Transparent Animated Gif Background Image Link:

Weighing in at only 20kb, I think it’s an impressive little 3 frame transparent animated gif. I could sit and watch it spin all day long.