These are some mighty creative people with a lot of extra time on their hands and a whole lotta cardboard! Mike gets a new office

It seems I need to visit this one more time due to a couple of comments and some additional information that has come to my attention. It seems like I was not alone in my time spent thinking about this subject as a little bit of searching turned up hundreds of sites where others had gone there before me. That figures, really, it seems I’m always the last one to the table.

Anyway, I was rather shocked to see that Wikipedia has an entire page on the toilet.

But, even better, to test your knowledge of how the whole bathroom etiquette works, check out this link on drinknation.com.

Okay, I think I’m done with potty stuff.

Tonight I was surfing around and came across a post on Pam’s House Blend.

This was allegedly a reprint from an email that was sent out to a company’s customers which is certainly any business owners right. As an avid gardening household, I certainly would have been shocked to get this from one of my sources. I expect political or religious content emails from friends and family Read the rest of this entry »

Ever reach a point when you know you just need to get away from it all for a little while? When you feel like one more little thing might set you off just due to the day to day stress of things? I feel like that right now. This summer has been a mixed bag. It started out pretty great and we had friends come visit for a few days. We fixed up somethings around the house that had been neglected and things were looking pretty good. Then a very important project, as I’ll call it, came up at work and everything has been non-stop stress since then.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind some stress and for the most part I enjoy my job, but there does need to be some balance in there somewhere. I’m not sure exactly why we let it get to this point, but I don’t think I’m alone in this. In a case like this, it’s just part of doing what needs to be done. In addition, we’ve got several trips planned between now and when we get more vacation time, so I’m trying to conserve what I have left. It’s always nice to have a few extra days left over when the holidays roll around.

So, I need to get away, plain and simple. Next trip, New Orleans, the Big Easy, home of great Jazz and even better food. It’s been three years since I’ve been there and I’m anxious to get back for some authentic Cajun and Creole food. Yum! Now that I think about it, it seems like a lot of my vacations and trips are planned around food. Oh well, there are worse things to live for!

Yesterday I was pleased to see that NOAA downgraded their 2006 hurricane season outlook, albeit by one storm in each category, so not much, but at least it is down.

NOAA News Online Story 2678

Living in my previous homes in Colorado and Oklahoma, I never really gave much thought to hurricanes and their impact. I certainly didn’t have any idea what they are like to live through. Actually when I moved here, I didn’t really think there would be much of a threat from hurricanes as we are in the Orlando area, after all, and it had been decades since anything of significance had threatened here.

Well, in 2004 that all changed with four hurricanes hitting Florida and three coming right through our neck of the woods. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently saw this in someones tag-line in a forum.

“Never argue with an idiot, they’ll bring you down to their level and beat you on experience.”

There is some serious wisdom in there. But why then, do we let ourselves get caught up in these arguments? Is it because we don’t realize they are idiots before we engage? Nah, that’s not it. Oftentimes I already knew they were idiots Read the rest of this entry »

Today I read a blog that somehow I thought needed my observations.

(read it here) jonsonblog » Blog Archive » Male workplace restroom etiquette leads to scientific breakthrough

While I realize that some of his post may have been slightly embellished to make the post have more entertainment value, it does bring up a subject that is rather awkward–what is proper mens room etiquette?

For instance, when you walk into a mens room, there are normally a row of urinals on one side and a row of stalls on the other. The length of the rows can vary wildly from one of each to places like stadiums that may have 20 or more of these porcelain wall decorations lined up side by side.

Let’s say you walk into an empty restroom with three urinals. Which do you chose? Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if this happens to everyone or if it’s just me, but you know what it’s like when you are trying to do something that you really want to do, but it just won’t work? It becomes a challenge and I get more driven to make it work, particularly if I know that others have done it before me.

Well, www.arnieholder.com has been that challenge lately. You see, I put the page up about a year ago using a site builder tool that my hosting company provided, and it was okay, but limited by what the tool creates. It didn’t let me learn any layout, design, much of anything. Well, I really wanted to do some different things, but not anything that the dozen or so templates provided, so I have been thinking about doing something myself and starting from scratch. Now the big problem here is that I’m not much of a designer. I think I’m too left brained. I can figure out the technical parts, but making it pretty isn’t really my cup of tea. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I just can’t come up with any ideas on my own. But, that’s not been the challenging part…yet.

The challenge has been in trying to import everything over to my own pages, add new pages and content, and make them all link and run, and not break. I also have several things that are PHP now. If you haven’t messed with PHP, it’s definitely different than HTML. I can see that it is going to be incredibly powerful, but there are so many little things to watch out for that it’s not just like drawing a table and shoving some content into it. Once I get started on something like this, I find it hard to stop and sleep becomes less and less important until I solve the current problem. Well, the last two nights have been that way and I’ve been awake too long trying to figure out dumb, dumb things. The sick thing is that today I just happened to click around on some setting pages and found a couple of things that I had spent hours playing around with the code to change. C’est la vie.

Speaking of challenges, do other people actually find graphics editing programs like Photoshop and Fireworks, easy? I’m embarrassed to say that I spent hours building the damn buttons on my home page and adding them as rollovers. Of course, the third time I did them I realized that saving them as a template would mean that I didn’t have to repeat my effort every time. Who says you can’t teach an old dog…?

I have to say, for the past few years I have been watching all of the people with their blogs and wondering what is the appeal? I certainly have opinions on everything under the sun, but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily want to share them with the whole world. Fortunately, my page doesn’t get that many hits so the world shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Fact of the matter is that I doubt I’ll stick with it…but time will tell.