I’ve finally gotten a much-needed CMS upgrade! I’m now using WordPress! This site will look a little bare-bones while I move into the new digs, but it needed some TLC anyway.  More to come!

I have updated the twitter widget to their new version; you should be able to see it at the bottom of the main portion of the site.

To those of you who follow my tweets through this site: I’ve had to change to private mode. Too many tweet spammers have followed me in the past. I reached the breaking point just now when I checked my account and saw a spammer who had used an offensive picture as their icon. I’m not going to keep allowing that.

Unfortunately, this means that the widget below the menu will no longer work. I’ll remove it later when I have a little more time (I’m on my lunch break right now). From now on, if you want to follow me, you’ll have to have a Twitter account and request to do so (an easy way to do that is to click the link below the widget and then follow the directions on the page). I’m sorry it had to come to this.

It was bound to happen, wasn’t it?

Okay, so I missed a day. But I’ve posted twice on other days, and I’ll probably post again this evening too, so it works out, right? Right?

(crickets chirp)

Okay, it doesn’t. I got wrapped up playing a game and before I knew it, it was midnight, which means that not only did I not write a post yesterday, I didn’t get as much sleep as I should. TGIF, indeed.

It took me over an hour to clear the site of all its comment spam. There were over 4,000 messages to delete, and unfortunately I had to click on a check box beside every single one of them in order to get rid of them all. So it was an undertaking to say the least.

Given that I’m trying to put something out on the site daily now, I’ve got to come up with a means of limiting spam. Unfortunately, the software that powers this blog is pretty old, and I don’t want to pay the fees to update it right now. That means that I’m basically stuck with what I have, for now. Because the software is old, spammers have figured out the ways that they can spam on the site pretty well unless I close entries to comments.

So here’s the plan. I’m adding at least one entry a day. Each entry will be open for comments for three days. On the fourth day, I close that entry off for comments. If I get a spam on the entry before the fourth day, I close that entry immediately.

We’ll see how it goes. I know that right now there probably aren’t many of you actually checking up on the site, so there might be quite a few entries that go without comment, but that’s okay. Hopefully soon I’ll hear from some of you again…

Check out the wedding site — I’ve added some new information to it.

And here are a couple of random thoughts for you, too…

• One of the more fun words to say in the English language, in my opinion, is devour.
• The number one sign that I’m getting old: the fact that I’m posting this around 10:45, or about an hour after I normally go to bed now.
• From the department of things that really rock: the apartment I’ll move to in April will be 1.2 miles away from work. This means an extra 30 minutes of sleep every day. This is A Good Thing. (R)
• If I had to list the things I miss about being a teenager, the list wouldn’t be all that long, but my metabolism would definitely be the first thing on it.

The 1122 site and my personal bio have been updated a little bit to reflect some changes in my life over the past six months. Nothing really big…but an update nonetheless.

The first edition of the wedding site is now live. There’s a lot left to go, but at least it’s a start. Now that the content management system is set up, both of us can start posting, and I can add other content too. So look there for wedding updates!

These two things aren’t nearly as cool as having gotten engaged, but they’re pretty nifty nonetheless.

The first is the addition of a new Java solitaire game! That’s right, kids, I’ve done it again. I call this game Sequence; it doesn’t have a common name that I know of. I learned it from a book a long time ago, but I’m not sure it’s a very common solitaire game. Nevertheless, I think you’ll find it entertaining, and a little more skill-oriented than the first Java solitaire. It was done pretty quickly after my updates to the original Java solitaire game and uses very similar code in a lot of places. Give it a try, and see what you think!

The second, geekier thing, is that pressing on… now has a live RSS feed. This may mean absolutely nothing to you, and if it doesn’t, that’s okay. Think of it as something akin to a crawler on Fox News or CNN or ESPN or whatever. Essentially, it provides a link to my most recent postings.

The really nifty thing about this is that in 1.0pr and later, you have the opportunity to create what’s called a Live Bookmark for this site. When you do this, clicking on the bookmark brings up a list of the last 10 or so entries that you can click on and go directly to the entry, instead of just taking you to the home page. It’s pretty cool because it allows you to look at just the entries you’re interested in (but you’re interested in all of my entries, right? Uh…right?). Anyway, it wasn’t that hard to add to the site; one line of HTML did the trick. And now, everyone who comes to this site who uses Firefox 1.0pr or greater (hi, me!) can use it.

I obviously haven’t written anything in a while, and if you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance that you know why. If you don’t, that’s okay. Just know that right now is a pretty rough time for me, but it’s a lot rougher for someone that I love very much. Maybe one of these days I’ll write more about it on this space, but this is too much of a public forum for it right now.

So, because I have needed something to keep my mind semi-occupied when I’m not at work, I decided to write a major revision of Java solitaire. The game itself hasn’t changed a whole lot, but the look and feel definitely has. If you haven’t played it in a while, give it a spin. I’d appreciate any feedback.

What follows is a list of changes that I made, if you’re interested.

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