CUBEsMIND

Well I actually wasn't feeling well the other day so I didn't get much done. Had a headache by the end of the day, and the next morning as the headache slowly wormed it's way out a slight feeling of nausea poured into my trachea. Basically anytime I stood and moved around the house I'd feel slightly dizzy and an uncomfortable lump at the base of my neck, that was just dying to pull bile from my stomach.

It took me like an hour on the couch before I forced myself to quickly get up and make a couple of poached eggs with a dash of tobasco sauce. I wasn't sure if they would sit right or not, but amazingly enough they did the trick and everything started to settle down.

After a bit I got myself up and luckily there was some broth in the cupboard, for real always keep some kind of broth around just for days like this! I took that mixed it with some chopped onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, celery, and broccoli. Seasoned it a bit and let it simmer for like 45 minutes, and then just had a bowl of that like every hour and half. By the end of the night I was feeling good again. I do feel like my body is still fighting something though, and it's kind of annoying.

Anyways, wokeup today and focused on getting everything in the van. I had ordered a bunch of stuff and was going through some things around my parents house, mostly cleaning up and had some items in boxes that I was planning on putting in the van. So I basically put all that in the van and then just sat in there with the doors closed and my heating system going, and started to go through everything. That seems to be the best way for me, is to like have everything in the room I'm in and just start spreading eveyrthing out. I need to see it all so I can figure out what I do and don't need. Then just started to figure out where everything needed to go in the van.

Everything is now stowed and I believe I've got everything taken care of. I had to move some web files from an old laptop to this one, mostly it's stuff for my personal website, so that I can start improving on it again. I think everything is good though. I just need to make one more quick stop at the storage unit to drop off a couple of things and then I'm good to go.

I was planning on leaving tonight, but at this point I'm thinking why not just leave first thing in the morning after a shower, because honestly showering is unfortunately going to turn into a more of a luxury on the road. Don't get me wrong I'm going to look into some things like truck stops or campgrounds, but it's probably going to be more of a once every other or every third day kind of thing. My brother did show me some cool shower ideas that are just built with PVC pipe and are mounted on the roof, but don't really have time for all that right now.

Remember how I said the Side Door was almost fixed, well it lied to me. The next day I went outside to get some things organized and the door stopped working again. Not sure exactly what happened. Everything was still connected, but it just wouldn't open again.

We looked at it again, and were thinking the cables might have got switched around. So we spent maybe thirty minutes on it then just kind of gave up, mostly because we couldn't get the door to just open to work on it, partly because it was colder, maybe also because my brother was going to have a late shift, but most definitely because we just didn't want to work on it again.

Made a few calls and only one place would have time to work on it the next day, as opposed to the other places that didn't have openings for another week or so.

It took them almost all day to get it done, well the door and an oil change, but at least it opens from the inside again. Sadly it only opens from the inside and that alone cost me like 80 bucks, which was only really for the man power since I had bought the parts and fixed the cables. But again it's better than it not being able to open at all, so got to look at the plus side.

I believe someone mentioned that for the outside it might actually be the door handle busted, not just the cable, so if that's true it will take longer and probably cost more to get fixed. So that's definitely not going to get fixed before I go. Once again, the positive side, is that I don't have to worry if I've locked that door or not because not only does the handle not work but the cable isn't connected.

Parts to fix the side door, 13.90$. Time spent with my brother fixing the Side Door, price...a lot! A lot of cold hours outside!!

Nawh, but it wasn't actually that bad. Glad my brother has more determination in fixing things than I do. Whenever he helps me save some money by fixing car stuff I'm thankful. After about two hours, I'm usually to the point of, "How about we just cram it all back in the door and I'll just pay to have them finish it?" My brother won't stand for that, and we continue into all hours of the day until we get it working. Which for me wouldn't be so bad if it was warmer, but I waited too long to get this stuff knocked out, so cold I must endure!!

I do start to understand why it costs so much to fix things that are relatively simple, and it's mostly because manufacturers make it a pain in the butt to get into the spaces where you need to reach. We had to take things off the door, that I don't feel we should have needed to.

We probably spent about three hours working on it, and got a good bit done but we need to finish it up today. So I can at least open the door from the inside now, just have to fix something with the outter handle so that I can open it from the outside. I'm guessing we are about 70% done, but I'm already feeling 100% better about it now!

Hopefully we can get it completely fixed before I have to go, I still got about four days left, so I'm feeling good about the progress.

Not your run-of-the-mill zombie flick. This had more of a psychological cabin fever kind of vibe. You see maybe a half dozen zombies in the whole thing. The movie is more about a couple stuck in their apartment and how they are dealing with the passage of time and their relationship, as they wait to be rescued.

I liked the acting and the drama that was involved, which was pretty much what the movie was about. So if you're looking for scense of people being devoured or zombie skulls being smashed in, then this isn't the zombie film for you. If you are into more of the psychological effect of an outbreak occuring and what it would be like if you stayed indoors trying to wait it out, then you may enjoy this one. It's just showing the other side of the outbreak.

Well I didn't hate the movie, but really it just wasn't close to as strong as the first one. Story, music, comedy, etc. was just kind of okay. I started to get worried at the very beginning, when it was less then 30minutes in and they already had three songs, non of which really stood out. Honestly none of the songs were memorable to me.

Story was just kind of...well standard. It was like they just took a Bending page from Avatar, and went with that. I don't know if her being the "fifth element" was supposed to be a twist, but it was kind of obvious. Where in the first movie that prince being a bad guy was a pretty solid twist, because he never showed his hand. I think my big poo-poo about her being the center of these elements, was that ice is just a property of water...so...yeah, like why would she be at the center of the elements but only control one state of one of the elements. I guess we could say that a new person takes over that central role every, well they are in olden times, so lets be generous and say every 60 years a new "custodian" comes along, and that person randomly gets control of one of the properties of one element. I don't know, maybe I missed something by the time the movie got to that point, because I was just kind of getting bored.

The movie was just to simple, it felt more like a kids movie, whereas the first one had more complexity to the story and felt more mature.

As for comedy, the funniest thing that Olaf did was reinact the first movie. They had him sing a song at one point, and I was just sitting there in a state of confusion as to why the "goofy" character was singing about getting older. Overall the funny parts just made me smile, but not really laugh.

The couple of things I don't want to mention, because they may be spoilers to some people, just didn't really feel like there was any reason for them. Like they didn't really get into exlpanations of things, so there was not much depth to a lot of the scenarios.

So it was Friday(the seventh) of this month that I had planned as my last day at my current job. I feel like I've saved up enough and honestly it just felt it was time to get going with this whole trip thing.

Well I have been busy building and programming, but that is no real excuse to not post anything for this long! Well today seemed like as good a day as any to start working on my posts and this site again, so here we are.

This past week has just been me finishing up a couple of small things with the van and of course cleaning up my parents' house before I set out. It's been an interesting couple of days.

Without a job I just go to sleep when I feel tired, which is always what I wanted. One day it was like nine, another day it was like ten, the other night it was like eight. When I had a job it was stressful to goto sleep, as odd as that sounds. I was always watching the clock, because I knew if I didn't get enough sleep I would be forced to feel crappy all day, and even worse treat people crappy. Now without a job I'm not scrambling to try and utilize the few hours after work, which I always thought I wasted not matter what I did, or even worse laying in bed trying to goto sleep when I'm not actually tired.

I haven't been rushing around or anything, just made a list of things to do and been knocking things off one after another. It just kind of hit me this morning, well not so much the feeling of calm, but that I was being very calm and collected...if that makes any sense.

I think the simple act of not feeling like I'm constantly rushing with the clock ticking on my free time, is well making it easier to relax and just get done what I need to get done. I no longer need to count or track the hours, and so far it's like this huge weight off me that I...well never knew was as heavy as it was.

I'm curious if this feeling will persist and the ability to calmly approach various tasks will continue to increase, or if this is just a temporary effect and the dreaded task list will start to get in my head once again. I hope that you come back to check on my progress, this could be an uplifting experience/experiment.

I've finally come to the conclusion that websites and anything using logins need to just give it a rest. There is no point in forcing users to create complex passwords or having security questions or any of that stuff, because I've found that when people don't want to do something they will just find a way around it.

Case-in-point; my work got a new site to help track employee information, hours, and other such information. After about a month the system makes you change your password, and to do this you have to verify yourself with a bunch of security questions that you setup when you created your account.

I was trying to help someone with their login, and when we got to the security questions...well the first one was something like, "What's the name of your first pet?" his answer, "Max". Okay cool, next question "What's the name of your first grade teacher?" his answer, "Max"...there are something like ten questions and he just used the same thing for all ten.

Don't get me wrong, I understand it, most people can't even remember their passwords. It's even worse when a site forces people that don't want to remember a password to tell them what a password can and can not be, what it should contain, and that you need to makeup a new one each month.

I use password managers, but the average person doesn't even want to go through the hassle of learning another program to keep track of something they don't want in the first place. Then on top of that you are going to dump two handfuls of questions on them too. I mean developers kind of bring this on themselves.

I think that the most a site should do is have one of those password strength bars under the password, with recommendations on how to make a password stronger, but not force the user to do it. If a site is worried about liability, all they need to do is to add a checkbox confirming that the person wants to use a weaker password for the site. If someone wants to use a one character password and they end up getting hacked then that is on them.

I hate whatever generation has just learned about the complexities of data minning. I blame them for this current rash of every site asking for cookie permissions and asking if I read their privacy agreements.

You have to install an adblocker, then I'm sure at some point you'll have to install something that will auto accept cookies to get rid of that pain in the butt. Guess what, everyone has had your information for years. It's too late to stop that now!!

These aren't new things people stop complaining about them. The more you complain about them, the more you're going to have to complain about! People, you're ruining the internet!

All this time and I needed to be coding on a laptop to finally find a use for these key combinations. Just for those that don't know, when you are coding and you are trying to see the rest of your code that is just a bit off screen you can use this to move the page without moving the cursor.

Got some food from the mall today, and realized what I missed the most about the mall. It wasn't the stores, but the pushy little Asian lady that makes me eat samples, and eventually talks me into buying the 3 entree meal before I even realize what is happening.

I was thinking about what a good person really is. Particularly about how religion actually interfers with a person's morality.

If a Catholic believes that they are going to go to Hell for doing bad deeds, so they do good things to avoid that...are they really a good person?

If the only reason they continue to do good is for the promise of a heavenly afterlife, than are they actually good?

I'm not nearly as religous as I once was, but even now, in the back of my mind, I can still feel that concern as part of my decision making process. So how am I actually making my decisions? Am I actually a good person because of my actions? or Is that flicker of eternal damnation swaying the things that I feel I should do?

Am I a bad person because I still have to make that choice to do good things. Is it wrong to convince children that they will go to Hell for an eternity if they don't "act" good. I mean it really is an act for most of the people most of the time. I don't mean people are phony, but it behooves one to be kind and generous...so is that truely who we are or just what we've been trained to be.

You can train a dog with kindness and fear, both methods work, but which is better for the animal. The purpose of the training is to get the animal to do what is against its nature, to make the owners life easier...does that make the dog good and the owner bad?

Are your parent's to blame or is the Church to blame for the training you didn't ask for? Perhaps in one instance the Church is, if the parents also believe that truth, because they also believe they are protecting you, but then what about Santa Clause? Your parents know that is a lie, but they force that belief on you to gain your behavior, even to the extent of threatening that Santa won't come if you're bad.

I watched the first season back in 2015, then lost track of the show for the past four years. I finally heard some friends had been watching it, so I jumped on the band wagon and have been catching up over the past couple of weeks.

I finally finished the 4th season, and I still think the show has held up over time. I was going to give it 4 stars, but they really have some great story plots. Like when I think they really aren't going anywhere, they throw something in their explaining everything that is going on. So I'm still excited for the upcoming season, unfortunately now that I'm caught up I have to wait like five months or so.

Not really one for the classic zombie lover. Zombies were more like "Return of..." instead of "Night of...", but it was still a fun movie to watch. Made me laugh a couple of times, and the production value was way better than I thought it was going to be!

So if you are just looking for something to laugh with friends, I would say go for it!

I realized I haven't put anything in here in a bit, but now that it's been getting into the summer heat, my enthusiasm has once again skyrocketed.

After a couple weeks of stressing about getting the right rack, I finally just bought one and went with it. My good friend and movie partner, Chris, helped me get the roof rack installed. Which I'm glad for because it was harder than I thought it was going to be, definitly a two person job! He also had some great insight into the order of assembly, which at first I was like "what?", then I was like "yeah!".

So we got that sucker on the roof, and it's holding steady. Next he's going to help me get the solar panel mounted, and that is really the only big thing left to do. After that it's just gravy!

In other news, I got bored on the weekend and started to build out a closet in the back. It covers the battery, and will probably mainly be for clothes. I just needed something to help tidy things up, because the several loose plastic beens were easy to get into the first several times, but now are juts kind of annoying.

Still planning on a launch date of this year, hopefully before Fall hits.

Growing up my parents would constantly tell me how I have to plan for things. Not just life, but the shorter 5 or 10 year plans, even just planning for the week.

Of course over years of observing and studying their actions, I've learned why I'm such a bad planner...it's because they really don't plan like they think they do.

My father is notorious for telling my brother and I that he needs help with opening/closing the pool, or some other project that is going to take most of the day, on the day that he wants to do it. It's like Friday night or Saturday morning, and he just springs some project that for some reason has to be done that day. I didn't mind it so much when I was younger, but now I have limited time, so without a heads up I usually can't help. Then he seems to get kind of mopey, like I don't want to spend time with him.

The thing is that even if I do have time, he doesn't really have a plan. Once again, when I was a kid it was no big deal because I was mainly a gofer and I was just trying to watch and learn what he was doing. Now I'm old, my knees don't work as well, and lord forbid I try and pull a zero-to-sprint without...well pulling something. I've learned a lot from him, I can actually do work now, but he has no plan setup that isn't linear. Like most adults I don't have time to just sit there and watch him do things, while I hole a flash light. That's just not a good use of either of our time.

My mother isn't much better. She does the same thing, but with house chores. I've even tried several times to explain, that waiting until the weekend to do all of the house chorse is just more exhausting and not what I want to do on my weekend. I've experimented with making a list of chores and breaking it down into a daily thing. Spending 30 minutes or less each day after work is way easier, and leaves your entire weekend free.

Alas, my mother doesn't want to see that the things are clean and since she didn't do things during the week, she usually just ends up yelling at me for not doing anything on Saturday. She's one of those people that if she is doing something that she doesn't like doing, then everyone else has to be miserable too. She will not hesitate to berate others about how they are sitting around while she is doing all the work...even though she isn't, and by noon she will be napping on the couch.

It's no wonder that when I met my good friends Matt, I spent every minute I could at his house. Looking back I realize that all I was trying to do was to escape. The less time I spent at home, the better my mental stability.

So the more I work on trying to run DnD online, the more I realize it's a lot more work to do it online.

You have to start out by researching different systems, to figure out what capabilities they have and what is easiest for you to get working. You have to take into account things like what can your players use and if they have problems you have to fix them.

Then building maps can be a pain and makes it hard for players to focus on roleplaying because they have a screen in front of them with a map. Once you show the map, they want to see more of the map. I'm trying to figure out an easier way to do this. I've been toying with the idea of hiding the map, when combat ends, but don't think it's going to work well.

Where as in person you have one setup for a fight, then nothing else happens with the board so the players have no choice but to switch their focus to the DM and other players.

Well I've got to attend to some family time, so if I figure out a way to smooth out the bumps I'll put another entry in.

I started to use this for building DnD maps, and I'm liking it so far! It's pretty easy to use and, if you pay for it, you get a lot of textures and assets that work with it.

It looks like they are still rolling out some updates, but as is it works really well. You can even use it as an online or VR tabletop system. I haven't tried this feature yet, but I was watching videos on it and it looks pretty smooth. Right now I've just been exporting the maps and pulling them into Roll20.

It's neat that it's pretty easy to add lighting/shadows to the level, but I do wish there was a way to set it so that everything automatically had it applied. As far as I can tell you can only add it to one object at a time, so if you want things to look really cool it takes some time.

https://www.dungeonfog.com/

I understand this much better, since I've been trying to run a Dungeons & Dragons game. So difficult sometimes, but still having fun so hoping it all smooths out.

I was going to make a fart joke, but I held it in.

I found this a little difficult to use, not enough assets, not enough functionality, and I found something that is better. Also, the issues or questions that I did have and found on the forums, came down to things that the developer wasn't going fix, instead saying to users don't use the tool the way you want to, use it the way we want you to use it.

For example, many people are interested in scaling objects by only the X or Y axis, but the developer replies by just saying you shouldn't need to scale at all because the objects are the size they are supposed to be. And can't even fathom why someone would want to scale by only one verticie since it would distort the image even more.

"In fact, I do not quite understand why do you want to scale objects. First of all, they are the size of which should be, secondly, they are raster objects that lose much in quality being scaled up" -developer

The point being that you don't need to understand why a creative person wants to do something, you just give them the option to do it. That's the whole point of creativity, is going beyond the box!

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

I don't care what anyone says, this song is awesome! I remember back when getting "Rick Rolled" was the big thing online, and it took me a while to figure out that it was a bad thing. I was always like, cool I like this song! The only downside I had about getting Rick Rolled was that then I would sit there and listen to the whole song and froget what I was in the middle of doing.

I mean come on he's a snappy dresser. Great hair, good smile, upbeat tune. Look at that very tastefully done video. Not over the top, but still classy. Even the ladies are sensibly dressed and tastefully dancing. Lets ignore the fact that he's singing to an empty room with one bartender. That's neither here nor there.

SHAZAM!! Damn, this movie was way better than I thought it was going to be. I mean I thought it was going to be pretty good, because the trailer was showing a good mix of action and humor but I really enjoyed the whole thing...well actually I think we ended up missing the first ten minutes or so but nothing that we couldn't figure out during the movie.

Now keep in mind this was one of the heros I didn't know much about growing up. Like I knew the name and I knew he was a kid...well I think at one point it wasn't one kid but it took like seven kids that had to be like in a certain range of one another to change into Shazam, and I remember them all being like foster kids. Like I said it felt like the creators were still trying to work out the details of the superhero, so I never really latched on like I did with XMen and Venom and some others. Getting off track...

Point being if you like humor and superheros I think you're going to like this one! I'm not going to say the ending, but I did like the way the last fight branched out the way it did.

Love it! It's a zombie show, but it's a comedy one, so that made me a little more open to check it out.

Great casting choices in this show. It just feels like everyone fits their character to a T. I've also enjoy their slant on zombies, I don't want to give too many details about it, but it's got some neat little twists that are pretty good and keep you guessing.

I binged the first three seasons of this, and I'm excited for a fourth one. Now from a quick search it looks like they haven't officially approved season four, at this time, but it seems to be popping up a lot on social media too so hopefully they go for it!

I just had to put these up. These aren't a new candy by any means, but I just love them so much! Best consumed at pocket temperature.

Luckily, I have yet to get a cavity, but I certainly believe that in the end it will be because of these delicous little chocolate caramel candies.

I have to force myself to buy the smallest bag, because I'll just keep eating them. I've easily gone through a bag in a day, which just happened again last Sunday. I woke up and put a couple in my pocket, went downstairs to make some eggs, and while I was waiting for the eggs to cook I snacked on some pocket candy.

I ended up eating more candy, then real food before lunch hit. My stomach was even upset from the large quantities of sugar I was putting in it and I still continued to eat them.

On the plus side, it does make me brush my teeth more...mostly because I want to make sure I have teeth to keep eating them. This is the main reason I hope I don't get dentures. Come on scientist! Figure out how we can regrow our teeth! I'm thinking we should get at least three teeth regrowths a lifetime.

Yes, another zombie show.(notice the period instead of an exclamation point) I have to admit, it's kind of odd that they keep pumping out more and more zombie content.

I mean I know that The Walking Dead is still pulling in viewers...or I guess a better thing to say would be pulling in money, but this over saturation of the market is kind of how things die and we have to wait years for them to re-emerge. It would be great if different concepts would be scattered about the viewing landscape, so that we get more of a sprinkle here and there to wet our appetites. But I digress...

This is actually a pretty cool series. I like the way they set it up, so that each episode is broken up into these mini-glimpses of what is going on for different people/groups over the same span of time. It's like here is what is happening to group A, now here is what was happening to group B during that same time of what you watched happen to group A. Inevitably the groups/people cross paths or reconnect, which is a really cool setup. I know this happens a little bit in other shows, but the scale they do it on in this show is more indepth.

Now just a heads up for the purest. These are your fast change, runner zombies, that have enough thought power to climb and course correct. Just wanted to throw that out there, because I've realized that sometimes I get pulled out of the flick when I have to right my zombie logic during the show. Which is basically me talking out loud to myself something like, "Zombies wouldn't be able to do that...nope calm down Captain Judgy, this is just their take on it, lets just enjoy their world building".

There were maybe two scenes where the shakey came was a bit too much and went on for too long, but all-in-all I enjoyed it!

I was reading some article that said the Earth is like 4.54 billion years old plus/minus 50 million years. That made me remember something about how religion said that it wasn't that old. This led me to start thinking that maybe there was just a miscommunication between the source and the writer of the Bible.

From a couple of quick searches it looks like Moses essentially wrote the Bible, and more-or-less took dictation from God on The Beginning. This of course conjures visions of God laying back on a couch, while Moses feverishly toils at a desk trying not to miss anything, and not wanting to ask God to repeat or slow down.

Taking those bits of information I start to remember when I was younger and a large harddrive was measured in MegaBytes. The thought of anything larger was either not named or just wasn't common enough to be remembered.

This made me start to think would anyone in Moses's generation even know what a billion...or even a million was? I looked at a couple of articles that say that words for these numbers didn't even exist until we needed them. Which to me makes sense, because much like technology we don't really need to even know sizes until it becomes common place. Can you imagine someone back then trying to keep track of a million of something, they would have to hire multiple people just keep count!

Personally I vaguely know that a PetaByte is after TeraByte, but I have to look up the next two after that one. I love technology but like with most things I don't need to memorize something that I have no use for, and when personal computers get to that point it will be no problem adding the next size to my vocabulary.

I'm getting a little off track, but bringing this back around. My point is that maybe as Moses was writing all this stuff down, that God said it took him about six billion to make the Earth before he decided to take a break. Moses basically heard six and some word he didn't know so just wrote down day and kept writing.

Heck I remember growing up and I hated to talk to my parents about houses and cars and time. This was because I was a child trying to learn things, and they would keep short cutting terms. When you tell a child that a house costs 199, a child doesn't understand that you mean 199,000, because a child doesn't learn those shortcuts in school. Shortcuts are not consistent, nor good for children that want to learn!

That's kind of what it comes down to though. God is essentially like a parent in the eyes of Moses. The parent is not only the provider but the one who posses all the knowledge. Moses isn't going to constantly stop and ask him to explain every little detail, so he's probably just going to get the bulk of it and try to make a logical decision about the information he's given.

I guess my whole point is that it always seems that relgion is trying to debunk science on things like this(or vice versa), but what if the reality is that both sides are actually right? It's like two kids arguing over a balloon being dark red or maroon.

Maybe all the arguing is just from a misunderstanding that happened thousands of years ago by one guy not understanding one word. Stop trying to prove each other wrong and instead put that energy into a more productive outlet.

Yes, the book of monsters! Muwhahaha! This was a lower budget movie and sometimes they stayed focus on the monsters too long, which made it easy to see that low budget monster build.

It wasn't a bad one to watch. Not really any new concepts in it, and it had a bit of silliness too.

It blew my mind when I realized Jordan Peele wrote this...which made me look up what else he's wrote, and led me to find out that he also wrote Get Out (2017), which again blew my mind.

I actually figured out the movies while I was watching them, but I still enjoyed the heck out of them. They were just a good time.

When they started to explain more of what was going on, in this movie, it blew my mind because I had the exact same conversation with my friend at work like last year. Now don't get me wrong, he took it a further step in a thriller/horror direction so that was cool.

After seeing this I started to think he's one of the people that I would probably get along with, and from the way he writes I feel like we would be good at fueling each others imaginations. In any event I hope he keeps it up, and I'm excited for the upcoming Twilight Zone series he is working on!

Well I haven't been working much on my site, because I've been putting my free time into building a web programming for work and trying to startup a D&D campaign with some friends.

So just haven't had enough time on my hands to finish the Edit button and try to fix the Spellcheck. Which doing either one of those would essentially be enough to temporarily handle the problems of the other one.

On the plus side, the site for work has got me thinking about general website infrastructure, so that should help me overall. It's nice to work on something that may actually be used by other people as well as help me at my current day job. It just kind of pushes me to keep at it, instead of getting into my normal rut of "why am I doing this? no one cares? I'm the only one that's going to see this? etc.".

These are issues I've always been trying to work out of my psyche, but it's not the easiest thing fix by one's self.

Good movie, but just felt kind of like the standard Marvel format at this point. I wasn't really blown away by it, or anything like that.

I also thought it would be more critical information to get before watching Avengers: Endgame, which I plan to see next, but wasn't anything really critical as far as I could pickup.

About all the movie does is give you a quick background of Captain Marvel, which doesn't really matter, and an idea of how powerful she is. That's cool and all but unless she can remove the infinity gauntlet she still isn't a match for Thanos.

What this all means is that I'm eager to see the new Avengers movie, to see how they play all this out.

Side Note: Kind of a bummer it looks like Marvel's website has been revamped to push the movie stuff. It use to be like looking at the Marvel cards, where it listed their stats, abilities, backgrounds, and was just very straight forward.

This one was hard to get through. It was an anthology, and I didn't necessarily hate it, but I don't think a lot of people will be able to make it through it.

Acting was okay in it, but the quality wasn't the best. I didn't mind the old style filming with the graininess or even the tracking effect they did, but some times the shots were too hand-camy or not framed enough for the details they were trying to get across.

Like in one shot they wanted you to see that a picture on the wall was the picture of a person from one of the other stories, but the shot wasn't framed on the picture it was framed on the wall and there were a lot of things on the wall to take your focus. The shot was also just a couple of seconds so it was hard to figure out what they wanted you to see.

To counter issues like that they would have two hosts, that were watching the film, that would fill in those gaps. So one would ask the other about the picture that you could barely make out. They would also explain the story you just watched, so it kind of took out any discussion...that is if you knew anyone that watched this to talk with it about.

So you're probably wondering why I didn't give it one star? Maybe it was the 80's feel it had going on, or maybe it was that the stories weren't that bad if they had just had more money to improve upon the quality and special effects and flesh out the ending a bit more. Basically it had enough for me to stay interested.

Google Wanted Feedback about The New Gmail, so this is what I sent them.

I have to be straight, I stopped using GMail because the interface wasn't that good. The only reason I started to use my gmail.com email again was because of Inbox. It was a clean interface, easy to use, and quick to run through my emails.

I keep trying to use GMail, but it's just not a good layout. I started to look at it on my phone, and I couldn't even find important emails that I had pinned or were waiting on. I finally started to figure out that things were just being pushed to the Updates tab...and I'm not even sure why a new email is being pushed to that tab.

I guess I just don't get it. Inbox, in my humble opinion, was just a revolutionary jump for email. I seriously saw that design as what all web based email clients would start to copy.

I've talked to everyone one of my friends that use gmail as their primary email address and I haven't heard one of them say anything positive about losing Inbox.

You're really taking a huge step back here, and I don't see any real changes that can justify putting the word "New" before Gmail to get people hyped about this change.

The only other site change that bothered me this much was when Netflix went from a clean 5 star rating system, to their current thumbs up/down debacle. I don't even rate things anymore...but lets not get into that.

A thought occurred to me the other night. If you don't eat off a dirty dish because you could get sick,  but you don't wash all soap off a dish and get get sick...then what does it mean to actually be dirty? 

Let's say I cook a chicken and take it out of the oven, then I drop it on the floor. The people seeing this won't eat it because it's dirty. Now if I take that same chicken out of the oven and pour soap on it, people seeing this won't eat it because it's dirty...or is it clean.

I guess what I'm trying to go for is that I think saying that water cleans things is accurate, but saying that soap cleans isn't, even though that's how it's depicted. 

I keep seeing the phrase "Naturally & Artificially Flavored", and I'm having a hard time with it. It just seems like they should just say "Artificially Flavored".

It's like if I have a pot of water and a pot of salt water and I pour them together into one pot. Do I have a pot of water and salt water, or just salt water?

It's like they are trying to get brownie points for the natural flavoring. Somehow that is going to make it healthier? It's like people that try to pass-off carrot cake as a healthy dessert. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the bad stuff always negates the good stuff.

If you want to continue to put this trivial label on your product then kick it up a notch and add in the percentage/ratio of artificial vs natural flavoring in your product.

I'm just saying that because you have some elderly bonnet wearing Italian lady squeezing the juice from one blueberry into each ten thousand gallon vat of your product, that doesn't count as naturally flavored in my book.

A little sour, a little sweet, a little yum-yum in my tum-tum. I like sour stuff, and even though these weren't like super sour, they still hit the spot.

If you like sour stuff and you like jelly beans, you're probably going to like these, like I do...did I use enough "likes" to get you interested?

I knew it was going to happen. I've got several things going on that are important to me, and all I was thinking was that things were going too smoothly.

First my laptop failed in the middle of a Windows update and it just started to crawl after that. Luckily my friend Brian suggested that I run a chkdsk, because that had fixed a similiar issue with his computer. Sadly it took me like a week to resolve the issue. Whatever had messed up was allowing the computer to boot, but it was running at like a fourth the speed. Just getting to the command prompt took like 20 minutes of waiting for the machine to not only boot, but bring up menu to get to it. Since I could only work on it after work, it was like doing one thing a night.

I got everything running, thanks again for the tip Brian, then I was already to get back on finishing the first version of a program I'm developing for work. I just needed to do a handful of things to start an actual test at work and BAM, I get sick.

Most years I don't get sick, but when I do get sick it hits me hard. The Friday my laptop was ready to go was the day I went down for the count. I was laid out all weekend and had to take off Monday. Started to feel better on Tuesday, well enough to drag myself into work, but I was physically exhausted by the end of the workday.

I don't know how the rest of you are, with getting sick. For me I start to get better incrementally. So like when the initial stuck in bed thing is over, I basically slowly get better over the course of like a week. Like I'll wake up feeling great, and then like four hours into the day I feel horrible again. Then the next day I'll be good for like five or six hours, then feel like crap again. Eventually it gets to the point where I can make it from morning to bedtime feeling fine, and that is when I know I'm better.

Anyways, I'm like two weeks behind on everything I've been working on. Program, website, trying to startup a rpg, and van build. Currently trying to get maybe ten hours put in over this weekend to get back to where I want to be. Keep your fingers crossed people!

This is a hard one to rate. It wasn't really a bad movie...I guess I might have been expecting a lot more from it.

It was kind of like that movie The 33, where the mine workers get trapped in the mine, but it's just three dwarves and there is no real information on what is going on outside of the mine.

There is a lot of information that they talk about to help you form a picture of what has been transpiring over the years and how they got into the situation, but it's one of these movies that eventually just fades to black and leaves you with that frustrating feeling.

There are also a lot of dark scenes in this movie. I get they are trying to give you that sense of how dark a mine is when your light source goes out, but just watching a black or barely illuminated screen with random sounds can easily be overdone.

I think I might have been just really looking for a dwarf movie, with large mines, and expertly crafted stone workings of a vast underground kingdom. All I got was three dwarves trapped in a small cave with very little combat.

This show was really slow to start, but I just stuck with it because I enjoyed all the crazy things that were going on.

At first I was just watching it while I was doing some other work, but it really started to come together as it went along. Eventually I just couldn't do other things while I was watching it, because I didn't want to miss anything.

I'm just about done with season one, but I think there are only two seasons. If the second season is as good as the first, that's going to be a bummer. I can kind of understand why though. As stated before it took me a while to get into the first season, so if you aren't binge watching it, it could feel draggy.

I'm not finished with the first season of this just yet, but this has been are really great series!

I don't know if it's only going to be one season, but as long as they wrap it up nicely I'm not really concerned.

The first two episodes are a little slow, but it really starts to take off after that. It has just about everything I'm looking for in a great show.

My constant battle in life, lack of time. Well this week has been rough. My laptop failed a Windows Update, so it was out of commission for the week. Well it would startup but was going so slow that it was unusable.

It's stressful when you are trying to fix something, but can only work on it after work. My whole work day is me trying to think of ways to fix the laptop, and then having to wait 8 hours to test what I've been thinking about trying.

Also, stressful when it gets me a week behind in a side-project, I'm doing for work. Something that could potentially help me speed up and remove some stress from my daily 7 to 3 job.

I'm excited to be working on the project, even though it's almost like I'm working two-shifts. On the plus side, I'm not being pressured from work to get it done, so aside from my own expectations of completing it, it's kind of a work on it when I feel like it.

On the downside, some days that I feel like it, I have to go into work my normal job. Very confusing, but I'm glad I chose a manual labor job because it is helping me prove one of my previous thoughts. Which is that if I am not in a job programming all day, it pushes me to program more when I'm not at work. My problem before was that after programming all day long, my mental and spinal fatigue made it almost impossible to do work at the end of the day.

My point is more that if I'm right about this, then maybe I'm on the right track with this van-life and traveling around for a bit. Here's to hoping something good comes out of it!

If you don't know me, I've been working on a van conversion. Part of the reason is to just explore the around the country for a couple of months. Maybe I've just watched too many National Lampoon movies, but I think I will enjoy it.

I want to be able to draw a little better than I currently can. I found the video below, where the guy talks about some exercises and techniques. Sounds pretty straight forward and I like the way he draws, so I've started to work on what he is talking about.

https://youtu.be/oPJfS4rHnzY

I don't think food critics should be allowed to drink alcohol, because when you are drinking everything taste awesome!

Got tired of researching and bought a power inverter, it should be here in the next couple of days. Pretty sure it will cover my neads.

I also already have small electric heater that hopefully the inverter can handle. Everything looks good on the details, so fingers crossed.

Oh yeah, and I think I came up with a DIY way to build an electric air cooler. I'm going to just spring for the parts and see if it works out, but basically I'm planning on just using at least one enclosed liquid cooling unit for a computer processor. Essentially it's the same thing I have in my gaming rig. Mostly because every time I try to find like a portable or camping unit, they all require some kind of ventilation. This is something I'm not really interested in setting up. We'll see how it goes!

I'm wondering if I can run an InstaPot off of the small setup I'm going to do, but still not sure about this. Mostly because I would still have no way to store leftovers. Even the small InstaPots are for two to three people...I may just get one and try it out and if it doesn't work out just let my parents keep it.

Great movie! Enjoyed the animation and comedy in it. Don't worry this isn't another reboot of the Spider-man series, they even joke about that in the very beginning.

I feel like this may even be a way to help introduce the multi-verse theory to people that are new to the concept. Which would be really cool if they had planned this to get ready for upcoming live action movies, perhaps even to help with something that may occur in the upcoming Infinity Wars movie.

Although the run time is a little bit long, I would still recommend it. Especially if you, or someone you know, needs a quick brush up on what the multi-verse is.

After noticing that I tend to do several posts at in one day, then no posts for the rest of the week. I wanted to setup a system that would fix this imbalance in content.

I've added in a post-date system. So that setting a future date on a post will hold that post until it is the appropriate date to show it. Hopefully this will allow more consistency in my content.

This was the third movie, in a Godzilla Netflix trilogy. I liked the first two better. This one was just kind of drawn out. When I watch a Godzilla movie, I pretty much just want to see and learn about Godzilla.

This spent more time on the natives and an alien's spiritual concepts. I started to get to the point where I was just fast forwarding through the jibber-jabber.

I don't know it just seems like they just didn't explain the last part. I can only assume that Godzilla was just going to leave them alone as long as they didn't make any technological advances.

These are awesome. I'm not even a gummy bear kind of person, but I really liked these. So as long as they aren't lying about what's in them, they seem like a great candy to me.

A Keto friendly coffee creamer. A little bit easier than making your own Keto creamer. If you don't like coconut than you probably won't like this. Apparently the Keto stuff is supposed to help sustain energy, so that you don't crash.

I'm going to say it worked pretty well. I didn't really feel a huge drop in energy like I usually do, when caffeine wears off. Then again this is one of those things where it's hard to say that it was the cause. There are so many things that effect energy levels through out the day, that it's really hard to measure.

Simply put. I thought it was tasty and I didn't mind substituting the sugary flavored Coffee-Mate that I usually put in my coffee, which I know isn't good for me. So from a health stand point it has to be better for me.

A lot of people think that I don't plan things, but I actually just make very vague plans. Today I think I realized why I do this, which is simply because I hate waiting. When I keep things vague it's more of a way to trick myself. It prevents this switch in my head from flipping to the waiting position.

There are two positions:

The planning position, which is more of an active state of mind. Even though everything is actually worked out and ready, this active state keeps my mind checking and rechecking things. Accomplishments are set on more of a monthly and at most a weekly deadline, but there is always wiggly room.

The waiting position, on the other hand, is a passive state. It's like I've put down the pencil and gone over everything with a sharpie. Now the only thing that has to be done is to wait it out, which is usually because I'm just waiting for the pile of money to get large enough to complete the end goal.

This is where the problem comes in, during this waiting position. At this point I know that where I currently am isn't permenant. That soon I'll be free of this mundane repetitve daily minutiae, whether it's for a week or longer I just won't have to be forced to deal with it. So when I'm in this state of mind, all that I have to think about is that I'm just waiting for the money to accumulate. With nothing to organize or figure out, it just hits me that I'm just waiting and there is nothing I can do to speed that up. 

The bad thing is that since I can see an end to my current situation, I kind of become a jerk. I just don't really care to be cordial anymore. Being cordial is actually pretty exhausting. I mean trying to stay positive, especially when you keep dealing with the same problems everyday and no one you tell seems to care. I just get to this point where I'm like, why the hell should I care, if no one else does? Why should I continue to stress myself out about these things that I won't have to continue to deal with? Why do I always put too much effort into these things?

...I don't know if I got off topic there or not, but it's late and I need to get some sleep.

The Scraper

These are the ones that put a fork in their mouth and for some unthinkable reason use their teeth to pull the food off the fork. The sound of metal scrapping against enamel can be heard, like finger nails on chalkboards, as they don't seem to know how to use their lips for pulling and teeth for chewing.

The Breather

The person that doesn't seem to know how to manage breathing and eating at the same time. These individuals sound as if they are being drowned, as they desperatly gasp for air after swallowing each mouth full, before plunging another bite into their still gasping mouths.

The Smacker

One of the lips many purposes is to create a seal that keeps food in your mouth, but for some reason not everyone understands this. With every bite chewed they need to part their lips, releasing a smacking sound of saliva and partially mashed food. Perhaps this is to alert others around them that they are feasting, perhaps it's so their teeth gain more momentum for mastication, or perhaps it's just to drive the perople around them slowly insane.

Working a bit slow today, so I just ran my site through a SEO analyzer to get an idea of where I currently stand with that. Not too bad so far. I did notice that the favicon wasn't up to snuff, so decided to mess around with that a bit.

Apparently I had to add some more "options" to cover all the different and magical devices out there now a days. I think I have everything in there now. Had to put in a couple of different sizes, some XML, and add some header links in.

I know the regular viewer of the site won't see what the New Post form looks like, so I put a before and after picture of how I cleaned up the form view.

Changed the topics and the rating from radio buttons to dropdowns. Was trying to figure out if I could put the New Topic field into the dropdown, but have yet to figure out how or if this is possible. I'll look into it again later.

The date field now keeps the format shown in the input box's placeholder and I moved the current date into the append part of the field. Although I won't forget how I format dates, I like to see it displayed and even though the current date is as hard to find as looking at the corner of my screen I like just having it sit to the side. I kind of want to add one of those dropdown calendars, but just seems like a little more research than I feel like doing at the moment.

I finally took the time to put in TinyMCE and the plugin to insert images. This adds a bunch of convience when typing up posts, giving me the ability to easily format without the need to insert html tags.

This will also make things like paragraph seperation easier, instead of just dumping a large block of text into the user's lap.

I haven't used the image plugin before, so I may need to tweak it a bit. Reading through the documentation it appears that some more features can be activated with it, allowing me to edit images. As for now I can just insert them, which is well enough because that will help me with adding reviews and ratings.

Was looking at my notes and remembered I wanted to put a rating system in for posts that have to do with reviewing various things. At first it was just going to be for movies and shows, but figured I can rate other things too. Well I say other things, but mostly the other thing would probably just be food and drink products. I'm going to go with a 5 star system, because I always liked Netflix's original rating system. Basically 1 is hate it and 5 is love it.

Just had to add in a breakpoint and a pull option on the post headings to get it to layout the way wanted on small screens. The edit button is going to be a little tricky but I think I came up with an easy way to handle it. Still want to implement tinymce, so I can format the posts. Need to see if that will also implement a way to add images, if not I have a simple idea for that...I think it's simple...yeah should be fine.

As with most things in life I'm backwards in this whole Mondays being the most difficult. For me Mondays are my best workdays! I've got three great nights of sleep, so I come in energetic, alert, and ready to get things done. In contrast Friday is my worst day. I'm exhausted, both physically and mentally. Haven't had a good night of sleep in a week, so just getting up in the morning is a challenge. All I want to do is get through the day so I can relax and not be under pressure to get anything done...I guess that's why people see me as indecisive when I'm hanging out. It's more that I relax by knowing I don't have to rush to get anything done. I get to just let everyone else make decisions and go with the flow.

Finally pulled the trigger on getting a solar panel kit for my van. I was just getting tired of being stuck in a research hole about it. Just putting so much time into looking things up and comparing what others had done, and since I'm no electrician I was just second guessing and worrying too much. Since it really is the next big step in what I needed to do I just got home from a rough day at work and decided I would just go with my gut and figure it out or make it work. It really wasn't that expensive, and hopefully it is as easy to setup as the diagrams are showing me. Most of my concerns about watts and all that I had to just use what I knew about building computers and figure out what I would exactly be using power for. Finally deciding that heating and cooling would be the biggest power drains, and in particular heating is a bigger concern then cooling. I found a small heater for an outlet that uses about 350W of power. The inverter I'm looking at pushes something like 1000W, so that should be fine. It's really more about figuring out how long until the battery is drained, that I'm not 100% about, but the good thing is that I do know I can create a battery array if I need more juice. So far my handful of tests with sleeping in the van have resulted in me learning that I'm fine until the temperature drops below roughly 45 degrees(F). That seems to be when my body wakes me up to alert me that I'm getting too cold. That's good to know because it means I can set the heater as low as 50. Got to hold off on installing the solar panels until I get the battery and inverter. Mostly because the power regulator says it needs to be connected to the battery before the panels, but hopefully I should have those within the next month. I think the biggest challenge of it all is going to be attaching the panel to the roof. That's the only thing I'm the most worried about. Just looks like I might have to drill into the roof to secure the panel, and I'm never 100% on anything that is going to permanently modify the body of the vehicle.

Took some time today to finish up the new post code. So now I can just add posts using the interface instead of doing a direct database entry. Much more convenient and will allow me to add posts from my phone while I'm out and about. Also added an input option to create new topics with the post. I like this option better instead of creating a whole new dialog to do this. Just have to do the edit/update code and that should be the main bulk of what I need for the site at this point.

Life can be difficult when you lose someone special. The easiest decisions are the ones that are black and white, where the most difficult are the ones that lay within that grey zone. The grey decisions are the ones that end up hurting the most. No matter how much you weigh the possibilities, the scales just never tip far enough in one direction or the other. I was forced to go against my feelings on this most recent one, and even though it saddens me when I think about the great person I may never get to see again...I have to believe it was the best decision for both of us at this point in my life. I hope some day we can make amends and share our stories and adventures once again.

I just sat down and hooked up login panel real quick. So now when the form is submitted it checks the submission against the database to verify if the user is valid or not. Now I just have to add in visibility options for valid users. I'll try to do that tomorrow, but not sure if I'll be up to it so may just do it on the weekend...kind of want to hammer out the new and edit posts abilities this weekend too.

Started to add in the login forms and controllers. Kind of going a bit slow, mostly because I've built logins and such before and it's just a little tedious. Kind of been a bit blah these past couple of weeks. Luckily I just pushed myself today and started to work on it, so now the progress should pickup.

Was going to setup the Date menu to be expandable but decided to just set it up in years for now. So changed the name from Dates to Years and have it display those accordingly. Just felt like a much simpler fix for right now. I implemented the Topic Menu too, so posts can be filtered out using either Years or Topics now. As an extra I also added the active class to the menu item that had been clicked on. So if someone clicks to filter and goes back to the menu, they will see what they had clicked as a reminder that the posts are being filtered. Later I'm going to add that active class to the Topic and Year title of the menu so they won't have to use the dropdown to see it. That will just mean I need to move some of the HTML into the function, so didn't want to mess around with that now, because I'm hoping to implement the create new and edit post functionality tonight...since I've been putting that off for so long.

Hid the edit button for now, but it should be making an appearance again shortly. Got the Dates menu generating correctly, just have to wire up the links to actually do something when clicked on. I'll also need to go back and fix how the menu works on a phone, which I think I can do with media queries. The plan is to switch it to a collapsible menu when viewing on a phone. Started to work on adding in the topics to the post and adding the topics into the menu system too. So that should be the next thing I get done. I'll have to remember to add the topics column into the database too, before pushing the code live.

So looks like there are some differences in the new Bootstrap, so had to learn a couple of new things. Also, had a couple of hiccups in the documentation. It was my fault because I kept doing searches through google and was getting linked to different versions of the documentation. That's all worked out now and now I know what to look for. Looks like they also deprecated a couple of classes that I was using and added in some new things, that actually make columns easier to implement. Well got all the basics worked out, which also fixed some display errors in IE.

I'm just going back to what I know and like to do. Instead of trying to learn some indepth CMS, I'm just going to do what I like doing and code the pages from scratch. It does mean that at some point I'll have to check CSS compatibility with IE, which is something I hate doing, but guess thems the breaks.

It's been about four weeks that I've been doing the Saskatoon Paleo diet. It was fun, but I have to save up some money now so I'm going to be putting that on pause and just using the crockpot for a bit. I've probably lost about 10 pounds total, that's without any exercise, but it has been rough overall. I have yet to feel this magical burst of energy that people always talk about, if anything I've been more tired since starting it. The problem is that it's hard to know if energy issues were from the change in diet or because I've been under other stressful pressures right now. The number one thing that's been on my mind this month is getting moved out of my apartment. As for Saskatoon's plan, I enjoyed the food that was provided and it was great not having to prepare, cook, or clean up after meals. It was also great to get something that I new was healthy and not loaded with sodium or sugar, but I kind of wish there was a place that did this same kind of deal but for just regular old omnivors. I don't think the problem is so much completely cutting things like carbs out of your diet is the way to go, I mean people need to definitly cut back on carbs, sugar, and red meat, but at the end of the day our current society is pretty demanding. I think our bodies need some level of those "bad" things to get through the day. I know coffee is great for a burst, but at the same time I would rather rely on some carbs to get me a little extra energy during the day instead of more and more caffeine.

I think what I need to is either move the Blog to the main page, or make the homepage show the newest three blogs, like how I had my original site laid out. I'm still not 100% on if I want to keep using/learning Concrete5 or just redo my site from scratch. If I redo my site, I think I'll focus on using Bootstrap and AngularJS...on the downside that means I'll have to take time to learn AngularJS. Although that would probalby be a good thing to learn, that would take away from my main goal of trying to put more time into learning Unity3D. As for the voting system, I want some feedback on my posts, but I always don't want negative. My ego feels a little fragile at the moment, so I don't want to go all in with a comment system. That was actually what I left out of the Blog when I was following the instructions to build it, mostly I'm not looking for a discussion, just a place to get my thoughts out. So I found a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down voting, but I'll have to mess with it some because I just want the thumbs-up part of it. :D

I finally got the navigation menu to go horizontally! After hours of looking into it trying to find some button that would do it I just added in custom CSS to make it happen...and apparently that is the way to do it. See this is what I don't get about CMS's in general! They boast about front-end website building, but when it comes down to it you either have to register and download a ton of addons to get things working or just edit the backend code to actually get what you want. They make it seem like it's just like editing a Word document, but it's not...it never is. So when it comes down to it, you either need a degree in the CMS to know what it can and can't do natively or you just start hacking the CSS and JavaScript to force it to do what you want. At the end of the day you have a site that loads slower than clean code and really takes just about as long to develop because of all the researching and fumbling around you do to figure out what is the right and wrong approach to something simple you are trying to do. Hopefully it gets easier the more I play around with it, but I'm already kind of looking around for something more straight forward. I guess I'm going to have to signup on the site so I can try and use the addons, see if those make it easier.

I've been trying this Saskatoon Paleo Meal Plan, but don't be confused I'm not doing it because I'm going to be a paleo person or anything like that. I'm really just doing it because I'm tired of grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning. These things consume a good bit of time and it's hard to find recipes for one serving...and the math to make a recipe one serving gets annoying when you have to deal with fractions of a teaspoon. Basically their meal plan is I give them money and they give me meals, shakes, deserts, and supplements all portioned and packaged out. Which means I just have to heat and eat. Clean-up is as easy as getting takeout. I'm about at the end of the first week, this time I only paid for one week which was about 160$. At first glance that may sound high but with everything you get and not having to spend time cooking, cleaning, or shopping I feel it's worth it. At the moment I've paused my workouts, while my body is adjusting to the lower calorie and carb intake. The first maybe...three days I had a very slight headache, nothing bad enough that I had to take anything for. It was more like that feeling right before you get a headache, where things are a little more annoying but nothing that makes you want to crawl into bed or bite someone's head off. For those of you that are interested in the weightloss aspects of this, it looks like I've lost about 5 lbs. this week. This is without exercise, but don't be fooled the past four days I have been hungry inbetween meals. That hungry seems to be a bit less each day. I also realized that if hunger was a bigger issue for an individual it would be easy to head to the store and just get more of what they give you for snacks. Which this week was carrots, celery, and assorted nuts. I've just been powering through those urges though, and everything seems to be fine.

Well that was a royal pain in the butt! I'm testing out this CMS, which are supposed to make creating a site faster and easier, but I still don't see it. I was following a guide on how to build a Blog in this CMS. The guide was maybe a 3 out of 5, but it took me like three hours to get through it! Just so many settings to setup! When I built my site from scratch it just seemed like it was much easier. I just made a form with three fields, made a database to match, and bam! That was it, everything worked fine. Don't get me wrong I picked up a couple things from going through the tutorial, but overall there is no way I could just sit down and setup it up again without going back through the tutorial. I mean really the only thing that is has is the ability to format my entries, but honestly I could have built that into my custom one. Well I guess the reality is that I'm trying to use a CMS for overall speed when building, so hopefully when I get the basics built I won't have to spend time coding this and I can focus on learning other things.

I think it's an October thing. I usually start to become a bit unsettled around this time, wanting a change, wanting to be better than what I am. I'm doing contract work at the moment. Dealing a lot with various technologies that I haven't had the pleasure of using before. This stuff is amazing, but it's also a lot to take in all at once. I'm definitely off my game at the moment, which is just making everything more difficult. I've got a lot on my mind this year and I need to start sorting things out to feel whole again.

Currently taking a SharePoint2013 Designer class. This is the second class that my company has me taking. The first one wasn't too bad, hopefully this one will be as good. So what's going on? Well the company I've been working at split so I've been busy learning new system and migrating systems. On the plus side I've been working on rebuilding one of the web applications, because a lot of the code was depricated. The plus side to this is that I decided to rebuild it in CodeIgnitor, so I'm happily getting to finally learn that. I would like to rebuild this site in it, but whether I decide to continue with CodeIgnitor or not after this project is done remains to be seen. Regardless I feel like learning this has already gave me a great understanding of Model View Control(MVC), which I had more of a hazy understanding of before. I feel much more clear on it now, and the more I play around with it the more I seem to be refining what is what. I mention sticking with CodeIgnitor and the only reason I say that is because my buddy Rob in CT told me about another framework called Gumby which I'm interested in taking a look at. Really comes down to time. Ah yes time! Always against me. There are several things I wanted to start on this year and life has interrupted me!! Trying to re-organize and focus. Want to play with CodeIgnitor, Gumby, SASS, Unity, and investing. I think I'm going to have to eliminate TV or VideoGames to accomplish this...maybe even both if I'm able. Oh it's going to suck! LOL

Well it has been a long a$$ while since...holy crow like 2 years since I just put a comment on here, let alone done any kind of work to it! That makes me depressed. Well I have learned a lot since then. Heck I've learned enough to the point where when I inadvertently tell someone I have a website, I don't want them to go to it because I don't feel like it is anywhere close to representing my site building abilities. On the plus side, I've met a lot of cool intelligent people at jobs, who I hope I can maintain as friends. Some are programmers, artists, entrepreneurs, etc. Just a lot of cool, intelligent, creative people! Who I hope that I can maintain communications and friendships with, which is going to be hard because a lot of them are scattered across the country and I'm terrible at keeping up with people if I don't have some kind of regular interaction.(If you are one of the cool people I have had the privilege of interacting with feel free to contact me whenever, doesn't matter if you haven't heard from me, if you just want random conversation or some chit-chat send me a message!) Anyways, I've been working with getting Bitbucket setup and reading/testing out GIT. I think it will be a smooth transition from SVN to GIT. Started to take some notes on CodeIgnitor, I'm still pretty curious about learning that one. Maybe it's just the name, I don't know but sounds cool to me for some reason. I believe I have a much better understanding of MVC, had to read a bunch of stuff and talk to like three people about it, because it just wasn't clicking for me. Now I've compiled that information into a simple model/drawing that I can understand, pretty sure it's right. At the very least it makes sense to me.lol One of those cool friends I met was talking to me about a couple of other technologies that his company uses, so I think I will start looking at those after I get more familiar with CodeIgnitor. So probably not this year but at some point I will start looking into AngularJS, Laravel, and ExpressionEngine. Sadly, this year has been slow. My current company is breaking up, half being sold and I will be owned by the new owners...that sounds weird when you think about it...it's kind of like I'm no different then a printer being changed hands.lol Anyways, hopefully that will work out for the best. For the past quarter of this year all my free time has been going to watching my brother's dog and trying to maintain his house as he was out of town training for a new job. He's back now, and I wish him the best on his new venture but at the same time the past 3 months have drained me(mentally and physically). On the plus side that's done now and I'm almost finished moving into a new apartment. I'm looking forward to having a place by myself for at least some of my life, hopefully not all of it though.lol It should be good though, not having to be concerned about roommates or just "other people interruptions". I know that sounds very anti-social, but I've always felt I needed to give it a shot and this may be the only chance in life I get to. If it works, then I can enjoy it and plan for some kind of "pool house business office" kind of thing when I eventually buy a house. If it doesn't, then at least I won't go through the rest of my life wondering about. See when you think about it that way it's much more positive! In general, no matter how negative the things I say may come across, I am actually a positive person. Well my 15 minute break is up so back to work! Hoping to start uploading some site changes before the end of next month.

Been jotting down some ideas and now I have almost got an old laptop to the point where I can work whenever or where ever I want, so I should start to be re-coding this site in a couple of days.

Well I jumped the gun on my ankle it's still healing after all this time. Ankles apparently take much longer to heal then I knew.

Seems like my ankle is 99% healed at this point. Was able to walk around all day today without any swelling or discomfort. Work is going to be a little busy over the next two weeks, and then I have a vacation lined up so going to be an interesting couple of weeks. In other news I've had time to working on a laptop that I salvaged from my Aunt. Not the a top notch piece of equipment but doing what I can with it. The battery is worthless so just removed it for now. Going to have to replace it for about 100$. The vent where the cooling fan is seems like it gets excessively hot, I've never really had a laptop before but seems like I might have to replace the cooling fan, looks like it may run about 12$. The Toshiba modified WinXP OS had some issues with it, so I replaced with Ubuntu. First time actually using the OS, aside from some playing around with LiveCD's in the past. So far, so good! Still learning how to fully use it, but pretty cool so far. I need to find my old Linux book to start remembering what the console commands are, some sites are just like "type this in to fix it" and even though it works so far, I don't like entering commands that I don't have a 100% understanding of. Really hope I can fiddle around enough to get at least an average understanding of the OS.

Well I sprained my ankle Tuesday playing soccer, so I'm just kind of limping around, trying to lay down as much as possible when not at work. Took some more notes on how I want to revamp certain sections of the website. Started looking at MVC for PHP on last weekend, going to have to take another look at. On the plus side I've been starting to use MVC for ASP.NET at work so that should help me a bit in the learning. Wondering if I should get second web host that supports ASP.NET, it would be nice to have the option to code my site in whatever I'm doing my job in. Kind of like a double work whammy! Ah well, anyways I'm going to get back to icing and resting my ankle.

Can't really decide how I want to approach this. I've just started to read up on MVC, wondering if I want to try to implement that within my rebuild. I definitely have learned a lot and want to implement some ideas I've come up with from projects I've worked on.

Okay, I'm currently sick thanks to the Holiday run around, but I've been thinking a lot about updates to do to the site. First off I want to split this updates page up. This was just supposed to be updates to the site and I'm using it more like a blog. So I'm going to divide this up into a blog section and site updates section. Maybe do something to the site update section so it's a little more informal. I should think of ways to make a link between the two sections too, so I can reference updates from the blog. I also need to implement some kind of formatting, seeing as how all these entries are just one block of text.

Enjoying the job so far. Lots of cool people and more information then I can retain, it's great! Been taking what afternoons and weekends I can to try and come up with some kind of "gamey" web idea. Have a handful of ideas, some are too grand and a couple just aren't panning out. Just haven't got to something that feels right for me at this point in time. Was actually thinking today that I should just start coding something, to see if that would help spark some ideas. Possible on the weekend.

Well got a job programming, thank you lord! Anyways, I am still straightening financials out but I am planning on spending some of my free time working on my site again. Not sure if I am going to try and rewrite it in ASP.NET or not. I am thinking about it to get some extra practice in. I do not know so far the ratio of PHP to ASP.net I am using is more in favor of the latter, so that is the main thing swaying my decision. On another note I just noticed that it looks like my web host reactivated magic quotes for some reason. Dag nab it!

Well I'm getting a bit annoyed. I am starting to learn cakePHP, but very slowly...not because I'm slow. Just been crazy at work lately, I've literally been able to sit down once and do a little bit of work/research with cake. The most annoying part is that I have the whole project laid out I just need to learn the framework so I can put it together. I was just thinking the other day that I should of just started to code the project and not worry about the framework, but I do feel I need to learn this. Even if for no other reason then to get a better hold on the MVC approach. I've already decided I'm going to start looking for a new temporary job with regular hours and holidays off. This job is sucking up way to much of my life for something that is just supposed to pay the bills until I find a full time programming gig. I thought this job was gonna give me more free time to work on code, but instead it's doing the opposite and the late hours and physical exhaustion are eating in to the few hours I have before work to get work done(I know that sounds weird).

I'm still trying to figure out how I want to handle this. I don't know if I want to just start building a project with cakePHP framework or if I want to first remodel my site using the framework to get a bit of a hands on approach with something I already know how to use. Going from scratch might be a little difficult because I'll have to be doing more then one thing at a time and making sure everything is working correctly, where as if I remodel my site with it first I will already know how it is supposed to work and look so I can focus more on properly setting up the framework and keeping things organized. Redoing the site might be a better approach it's just that I know I'm not going to have a lot of free time this month which is frustrating. I wish I didn't have to sleep, that would make things much easier(don't get me wrong I still want the option to sleep, because it's fun, just that it wasn't a necessity).

Wow, I have to say frameworks are an amazing way to handle web pages. I've been digging into the cakePHP framework for two days now and I'm really impressed. It's an amazing use of PHP to create pages, I'm still not 100% on a couple of the things but hopefully I will have enough of it down to start working with it within a couple of days. This kind of brings me back to when I first started learning PHP a couple of years ago, a friend and I were looking over it and were coming up with...well basically how the framework is doing it. A more dynamic way to manipulate and produce the html code by just building the HTML strings with code instead of having to actually full around with the HTML itself. I don't know how to explain it, just feels like my brain is getting a jump start. Man I love working on this stuff, it's invigorating!

I uploaded the changes I did to the site using jQuery today. Seems to be working well in Chrome, I am noticing though that transitions don't seem to be as fluid when viewed through Internet Explorer (surprise surprise), so I guess I'm going to have to look into a way that I can hopefully fix that(I think I remember a work around for it, although I'm not big on kludges). I also notice that there seems to be a delay between pages where jQuery attributes haven't been applied to the page, so for a split second everything is unformatted and then is snapped into it's proper layout. Maybe a way to delay the display so that when it is shown everything is already loaded. Well anyways I'll have to put that on the side burner, because I need to start looking into the cakePHP framework.

Well after fighting with Apache for a couple of days, trying to get it installed and setup manually with php mysql and all that garbage I finally was about to give up, and then I came across this site www.wampserver.com/en which is basically a package deal setting up everything for you quickly and easily. It also makes option settings a breeze, because all you have to do is use a context menu to turn settings/options on and off. You can even activate specific versions of php and/or mysql with no hassle, making it easy to match your live web server. Now I just have to see if I can get cakePHP up and running. I think that if it takes me too long to get that going I'm just going to start on my project and just adopt the framework later, yes it will be more work but I need to get going on this stuff.

Blah, okay I'm also trying to learn how to use cakePHP before I start working on my web scheduling program. I just figured out that I'm going to have to switch my web server from Abyss to Apache, something about mod_rewrites I just spent like an hour reading over it and decided it's gonna take me too long to figure out how to setup Abyss to work with the mod_rewrite functionality, especially when there is documentation to get it to work with Apache(if there are indeed problems after installing it). Since I'm trying to get more stuff done I sadly don't have the time to invest on learning the information necessary to get Abyss working properly with cake, so I'm gonna do it the easy way and just use a different web server on my development box. This in no way means that I have any ill feelings towards Aprelium, I've been using their web server on my local box for a long time and I think it is great. Lets just chalk this up to my own lack of time and effort. If in the future I learn how to set it up to handle things I will start to use it again and probably edit this post so no one will ever know!

No worries I haven't stopped working, I've just been caught up with jQuery (some times it's a little frustrating cause right before I feel like I'm going to have a break through in understanding a piece of it I have to stop to head to work, but no worries I keep pressing on and usually by the next day I get it down). I've made some visual changes with it and am playing around with how to display error messages. I'm deciding if I want to wait until after I do some file renames and organization to upload. In any case it will have to wait until I get a solid day off, which won't be for a couple of weeks. I'm a little eager to get the changes up because it just feels more gratifying when it's out there in the world.

Well now that I have been able to spend a day off looking at jQuery I'm starting to see the usefulness of it. I'm mostly learning it through the UI part of it, and hoping to progress more into it as I go along. I haven't uploaded my changes to this live site yet, just want to make sure about a couple more things. I'll probably just backup everything before I make the switch. It does seem to help speed up development some what. I'm really hoping to get a stronger grasp on it as I go along, already thinking of ways to rewrite my javascript function to work with it. Well that's about it for now, hope to have the changes up within a week or two whenever I get another couple of days off to work on it and time to make the switch.

Started looking at the jQuery documentation last night. I'm still a little iffy on it, looks like it might take me a bit to convert my site to utilize it. So far it is interesting but I don't know if I'm grasping the full usefulness of it, it might just be cause I have just started looking at it I'm not sure. For now it seems like I'm going to have to make some large scale changes to implement it. I'll try to do updates on my progress but until I can convert the site locally and still have the functionality of what I built so far it might be a bit before I get anything up on the live site. I actually wanted to get my resume up, but now I don't know if I want to spend time doing that then have to redo it with jQuery. Well I've got to head to work for now, lets hope it doesn't take me too long to get this tool down.

Okay I added in a delete confirmation popup, so in case I accidentally click on the delete button I will be given a choice to not delete something. I also have the popup display the information of the record that is going to be deleted. The other thing I got done was the edit button, so if I mess up on a post or need to add more to a post that I already posted I can hit that and go back in to change whatever I need to. I'm gonna check again but I think those were the two things I wanted to finish up for now before I start messing around with the web side project I mentioned on the 15th. I was at work today thinking about it and decided that I'm going to attempt to use jQuery when building that project. I have only really played around a very little bit with jQuery but I noticed that more people are starting to ask for it on job requests, and heck if it turns out that I like using it maybe I can apply it to my main site and get things moving along a little quicker. I already know from reviewing their examples and documentation on it that some of the pre-built things they offer are things that I either need or have already built, so the potential to cut down on the amount of work should help a lot and keep me focused on more important things. Well anyways it's like one in the morning and I'm fading fast..and I should be getting some new computer parts later today!

Wired up the delete button, so that any of the updates can be deleted from the database using the website. Just have to be logged in as an admin. Need to add a popup that confirms if the user wants to delete the entry, but not a priority at the moment. Also, wrote down some notes and keep thinking of ways to organize the pages better. I think I might try and do that next before the site gets larger, it's already going to be a bit of a challenge to make sure that everything is going to work once moved and renamed.

I hate when I do something wrong in SVN, always takes me too long to get it back on track. Lesson for the future! Okay, I'm starting to work on a side project for my "Projects" section. Just something I can bounce to when I get tired of just doing random site improvements. Also, if it works out it will help me keep my sanity at my job, giving me something to focus on during those days of blah as I drag tables and push carts around what sometimes feels like an endless day at work.

I'm afraid I didn't get much done tonight. My mind is a little scattered...had too many little things on it. I edited the login text boxes to accept an enter button to change the fields and start the login. So there is no need to tab between them or manually click on the login button. After that I was just looking through some of the classes again, trying to remember why I did something. I think I can combine two of the objects I created. I don't know I keep getting annoyed working on a website, it always feels like I'm just mashing together multiple languages that weren't meant to be together.

Alrighty, I looked around and then did a couple of tests and found out that the live site was using PHP Magic Quotes so I sent the hosting site a message and they disabled that for me. That makes it easier for me so I didn't have to add in a function to do a check for the state of MQ every time I wanted to post something. Lets see what else...oh yeah I fixed the logout out button so that instead of just jumping back to the main page it grabs the current url and returns the user to the same page they were at. I also cleaned up some code so that the script that handles the login/logout is handled by one PHP page instead of two different ones. So I effective was able to remove an entire page, and not lose any functionality. Dang I was cleaning up a couple of things on my TODO list so I forgot a couple of other things I fixed, I think it was mostly just cleaning up some of the objects. I just threw in some placement for Edit and Delete buttons on the Updates section, this will make it so that when an admin posts an update they can go back and either Delete the update or Edit something they already posted.

Okay just fixed the login so it is functional, can't make mew users at this time but now I can login so I can do my updates through the website instead of through the database. I did notice a problem when I was copying my updates from my local test site to the live site. It seems like for some reason it's leaving the slashes in on the live site. That is going to be annoying to figure out since I don't have that issue locally. I'll take a look at it tonight, gotta get ready for work. Well it looks like there must me a different setting on the server DB then on my local DB, because locally I have to use the addslashes function or else the database won't except the data. Because the apostrophes break up the text, but they must have some kind of setting on the server that automatically handles that. I'm going to have to find out so I can match mySQL to theirs, so that is what I will be looking for tonight.

Put the checks in for the updates, so that if the subject and/or description fields are blank it won't allow a post...oh yeah let me through one in for the date too. At the moment it just doesn't react so need to build an error handler to display why nothing is happening, should be able to get it done tonight, I've built one before on another project so shouldn't be a problem. Probably going to make it as dynamic as I can so it can easily be called on any page.

Okay well I already typed in this update, but I forgot to tweak the function to handle the adding of slashes so I lost my original description...I knew I was forgetting something when I did it. lol Anyways I set it up so that I can add updates through a website interface now instead of having to manually enter them in the database. Aside from that convenience the interface does a couple more things for me: keeps track of the max characters I can type in for the subject and description of the update, automatically adds the current date in, automatically fills in the user's id(of whoever is logged in), as well as automatically generating a uid for the post itself. So far it works great, need to add a couple of blank field checks in and fix the login before I put the changes online but should be able to get that done before the end of the week. ...copy...now I will press submit. lol

Finally got some time away from my temp job. Okay I just took out the little background image I had, because it really wasn't that great just something I threw together when I was bored. And I'm no artist. Aside from that all I really got done today was fixed some placement issues I was having with the login stuff, and testing to see if I should use tables or not for placement. I don't think I need to, just need to test a couple of instances in IE and Chrome to find out if it works better or not.

Well it was inevitable, I had to preemptively get a hourly job to cover my bills. So that means things are going to slow down on my site development. I'm still trying to get the swing of my work schedule down, hopefully I will be a bit more in tune this week. It looks like I've got a couple hours in the morning to get some work done, if I have no other errands to get done in that time. Hopefully this will just encourage me to work faster, optimistically giving my overall abilities a performance boost! Well here's to hoping.

Fixed the login box, mostly spacing and attached it to the actual bottom bar instead of having it attached to the top and moving it down there. Also fixed the part of the login JS methods, mostly cause I already had it built just had to tweak it a bit. Aside from that I tweaked the coloring of some of the buttons on top so that it's more clear which ones are disabled or "coming soon" instead of just having a dead link floating around up there.

Well I had a bug in the daily first that took me a bit to workout. After trying several tests on it I finally started typing in random thoughts until it bugged again and realized it only bugged when I had apostrophes in the text. I guess I was just more awake this time, so I put in preventive measures by running a check before hand and adding slashes when needed. I also put in checks for begin white spaces, to prevent a blank entry from being put in. While testing I also noticed that leaving word wrap on would make the DF output display cleaner so threw that in too. I removed the login from the main menu and placed it at the bottom of the page, since there was room down there and it felt crammed in at the top. Also put labels into the login text boxes that are removed when information is typed in.

Well that took me three days longer then I wanted. Two days I didn't have enough time because I had to keep running down to my dad's place of business to try and help figure out what was wrong with his digitizer and had to drop off some applications at various stores for a job...any job. And today I was just out of it so it took me longer I wanted. Anyways, I think I got the Daily First completed now(aside from a couple of extra safe guards I will put in later). The first person each day can post whatever they want and it will be a part of the site. For the most part I will let whatever people post stay up. I also set it up so that it displays how many characters you have left to type for the post and stops typing from going over that number. I don't want to be the first one to post on it, cause that doesn't seem fair. Hopefully their won't be any issues on the live site and it works like on the test site. Oh yeah, I also had an issue because I was using an out-of-date DateTime object in PHP. That was a pain in the butt. On the plus side it is a good thing I found out about that, because I wasn't even taking my PHP version into account while writing any of this and I've come to find out that my webserver is using an older version then I am. Good stuff to know!

Almost done setting up The Daily First section on the main page. Built to main structure for it and have it displaying on the page correctly. Now just have to finish wiring up the button and a couple checks so users can anonymously post to the page. Also think I'm going to setup a secondary page like the updates one so that there will be a history of what has been "firsted". Should be able to finish it up tomorrow.

Started putting together the login fields. At first I'm only going to have it setup for an admin login, until I get a couple more things done. Also started laying out "The Daily First" section on the front page, just some random idea I thought I would put up when I was trying to think of things to actually have on the site.

Replaced the CSS hover command on the table highlighting with JavaScript. Works better and is compatible with internet explorer. Also messed around a little with Gimp and just made a quick patterned background, not sure if I want to keep it or not just wanted a little more behind the site. The complete black background just looked a little off.

Added in the updates page, which will give a full list of the site updates. Also, broke up the CSS files trying to keep a specific style sheet for each page. I figure why load a CSS file if the user isn't even going to the page. I mean it will probably be a trivial amount of information, so we'll see how it goes. Also created an extra CSS for the updates page mostly just allows the description to stretch out and adds a hover that increases the text size. Thinking about replacing this with Javascript so it doesn't matter what part of the table row the mouse is on, also I just checked and IE doesn't like the CSS hover unless it's a link so it doesn't even work in there.

After stopping at a friend's house and seeing the compatibility issues from Chrome to Opera to Firefox I decided to remove the animated drop down main menu and replace it with a stagnant one. I think the most I'm going to have are the button hover effects, until someone actually comes up with a standard for CSS3 and follows it. I'm leaving rounded corners in since it doesn't really matter if the browser can support them or not. Also resized the width of the page to make it a little more user friendly to the majority of people. Last but not least I added a bottom icon bar to show the things that I use and built the site on.

Finished transferring and setting up site to SuperGreen. Exported database, uploaded pages, fixed a couple of pathing errors, and tweaked the connection information. Looks like everything is working so far, just hoping that SuperGreen has all the stuff I'm looking for in a hosting site. I'm always concerned that when I make some kind of large change that I'll over look something. Here's crossing my fingers!

Finished the short update display on the main page to list the 5 latest updates. Adjusted the basic styles too and wrote them down because the color scheme was clashing really bad and I kept forgetting what colors I was using. So going to try to use less colors and stick to a standard.

Added in the dbconnection stuff and built a class to handle the retrieval and display of the update information...actually going to need to set this class up so that it can do two different retrievals. The short one for the main frame and then the extended one for the update page.

Redesigned the main menu and applied a style format to it to have it drop down and do rollovers. Pretty sure I want it like this so that it is out of the users way when not needed. Using CSS3, so doesn't work at all in the current IE version but I'm not even going to worry about that until the site is actually up and getting traffic.

Well this is the third reincarnation of my website. I'm hoping I can keep enough going on it for it to become the one that sticks to the internet. Just need to keep thinking up things to do, add to, or improve on and I should be able to keep it going. This also serves as a note to the visitors, there might be random things up on the site as I make various attempts to expand the site and keep my interest going.