Welcome to the new site! It’s been a long time in the making, and although everything is not perfect yet I was tired of working on it. I love wordpress so far and I’m sure that love will continue to grow. The one thing I’m not certain of yet is the new photo gallery, which is currently powered by gallery 2. Since gallery 2 now uses a database it tends to run a little slower than the previous version. The features of the updated version are incredible, but it might be overkill for my little website. We’ll see. For now all of my old pictures are there for your viewing pleasure.

I finally got all of my old posts out of blogger and into wordpress. Luckily there is a built in wordpress feature to do this, but I had some problems with it, most likely because of the number of posts I have made. The nice thing is that I am no longer dependent on another site for my publishing. All of wordpress runs on my own server.

Just about everything that was on the old design is here on the new design. Obviously the blog was moved to the front page. I did this because it continues to be the most popular area of the site. The “song of the moment” area was removed, but I am considering adding it back as part of my blog. When I’m out of things to write about, or having a very slow day, I can post about a song and give a link to download. Stay tuned for that, I know some of you want more songs.

I hope you all like this design as much as I do. It took many attempts to come up with something that I could look at all day long, and I think this is the best of them all. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

If you were previously subscribed to my site feed, the url for that has changed. However you may not need to change anything since I setup a permanent redirect from the old feed to the new. If you encounter any problems this is the reason why.

I’ll have to share my stories from the weekend in later posts. Off to work…

About a month ago my buddy Tom posted about Cork’d, a website for rating and cataloging wine. I’ve been using it for just as long and last night I went through and added all of the bottles we currently have to my “wine cellar.” Surprisingly we have about six bottles currently but that’s only because I haven’t had anyone to share one with this week. Kim has been in Cincy all week on a vacation of sorts. Typically we drink wine at a much faster rate than we buy it. I’m going to start reviewing every bottle we drink though and maybe even recommend some to my “drinking buddies.” Sign up for the site now and add me as a buddy. I know I’d like to see Phil and Doni catalog all of their wine online!

Last night I met Phil and Todd out on the deck at the Brooksider. First of all, when the hell did they get a website and why weren’t Phil and I contacted about this? I guess I haven’t really been there in awhile, but they still know Phil’s drink of choice. We should have had first dibs on the site!

Anyway, not much has changed except they supposedly have WI-FI access now. I should have logged into work from the bar instead of leaving early to dial in from home. I’ll have to remember that for the future. It was “taco night” which even includes chicken tacos. I agreed to meet up with the guys for some chicken soft tacos and I was pleasantly surprised. From past experiences I wasn’t expecting the food to be great and truthfully it wasn’t, but I’d still give it a rating of above average. They have some new zesty salsa as well, pretty tasty stuff.

After drilling a big hole in the wall last weekend I thought about adding a picture of it to MyUglyRoom.com. Instead I just spent a couple of nights patching the hole and applying four or five coats of paint. Now it’s no longer ugly, and the office is ready to be organized. I realized that there was no way I stood a chance in winning the contest, just look at some of those disasters.

I did notice that there are two types of rooms on MyUglyRoom.com though. There are the truly ugly rooms with bad paint colors or even worse wallpapering along with the horrible decor. These are the rooms that get my vote. Then there are the sloppy rooms. These rooms aren’t necessarily ugly but they are cluttered up due to a lazy (or maybe very busy) homeowner. Those people just need to find the time to pickup their crap.

Hello? Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?

I thought for sure “Slothlisberger” would have drawn at least one comment. Maybe everyone is a closet Steelers fan. Either way you all are going to be very disappointed by this entry. I thought the beginning of this week was busy, but it definitely does not hold a candle to today. I cannot believe I only have another hour or so of work. Hopefully the weather gets better so I can get out and play a little tennis. Check back tomorrow for a better entry (I hope) but in the meantime check out my buddy Jay‘s latest creation, the Canyard.

After waiting over two weeks, I finally received my Slimmy in the mail! The shipping delay was blamed on the huge demand they received after their products appeared in several blogs. I had multiple reasons for ordering the new wallet. First, I blame the pains that I often have in my back in neck on my old thick wallet. I’m not sure if it’s the real culprit or not, but I guess we’ll find out. Second, the old wallet was wearing out some of the back pockets in my pants. The Slimmy is slim enough to keep in my front pocket and I am planning to keep it that way. This is also a more secure way to carry your belongings, although I doubt I have to worry about that much.

I’m in love with the Slimmy thus far. I followed their recommendations and put the little cash that I do carry in the first slot. Continuing on I put two bank cards, one credit card, and my drivers license in the second. The third slot will be used for receipts for my purchases which I actually do keep until they clear the bank. I don’t see the need to carry much more than that and I could probably cut out one of the cards if I needed to. The nice thing with the Slimmy is that it starts off very thin in size but can expand to accommodate many cards. So despite the shipping delays I am very happy with my purchase so far.

I won’t bore you with more details on our move. We ate pizza again, we moved more stuff, etc. We are about 95% done now, thanks to help from Maria last night.

I will bore you with geek talk though. I’ve been waiting to get an invitation to Google Analytics for months now, and yesterday that invitation finally came! “Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.” Basically it’s a site counter and statistics compiler. I’ve used other services in the past, and still use StatCounter quite a bit, but I’m excited to see how Google’s service stacks up against the others. I’ve added analytics code to both edpaffjr.com and oarsa.org but I’m still waiting for data. According to their site it usually takes 24 hours before data will begin to appear. That means I’ve got about three more hours until I’ll get the full experience. Stay tuned for a review…

Update: I was finally able to view some stats from yesterday’s hits. One thing that is disappointing is that Analytics is not real time. You cannot see the results of today’s hits until tomorrow. I also noticed that I could not find a full referral path for people who are hitting the site. It’s easy to find the referring domain, and with some digging you can figure out the referring page, but if there are any query strings tied to the referral you cannot see those, or at least I have not found a way. Those are the two complaints that I have so far. Other than that I’ve really enjoyed digging through the pages of stats. This is much better than my current StatCounter, which will only show the last 100 hits. As Analytics is only currently available by invitation, I hope this means they are still working on more features.

I’ve been spending all of my free time the past couple of days working on the site redesign. Unfortunately I’ve also had to work from home each night, which cut into the little free time that I did have. The good news is that I’m now about 80-90% done with the design. Of course once I get the design done the new site will still not be ready. I’ll have to spend time finishing the export of my old entries from blogger to wordpress along with other updates to make and kinks to work out.

I started the export process a few days ago and it worked pretty well so far. I’ll not only have my old entries, but I’ll also have all of the old comments from folks like you. We wouldn’t want to lose all of those meaningful comments left by individuals such as Sven, Tiger Woods, and Dr. Zargood, would we? One negative thing about the export is that it destroyed the current publishing to blogger. I think I’ve got it fixed up now, but if you see anything funky let me know. I do know that the rss feed was down for a couple of days, and I apologize for that. Hopefully I can avoid any future problems.

Things have started to slow down again, at least back to a somewhat manageable pace. Here’s a list of things that I’ve been doing recently along with some random finds:

• “My son and his girlfriend live in Kansas City. A group of 30 family and friends went out for the game on New Year’s Day. Here is one of the many shots that were taken. The whole city knows the ‘Bengals Growl’ because we sang it where ever we went! Who-Dey!” Check it out, our story is on bengals.com (second one down).
• UMRSigEp.com is now live, although I’m still waiting on content in a few places. As a reminder, I’m always looking for new and exciting website projects! Perhaps I’ll even release edpaffjr.com v2 sometime soon.
• A link to my blog has been spotted on the finance.google.com page for Harris. At least one of my fellow coworkers has already found my site. I guess I better watch what I write. :)
• TrustEdDesigns.com now points to this website. In the future I’m hoping to put up a separate page for all of my web design stuff. For now, welcome to TrustEd Designs!

I started looking for online calendar applications about a month ago knowing that Google Calendar would soon be coming out. Well that day has arrived, Google Calendar has been released as a public beta. It’s simple to sign up, especially if you already have a Gmail account. You only have to answer one question and you are on your way to a better organized life (we hope).

Kim and I started using 30 Boxes after my research a month ago. Overall it works pretty well and we were able to get enough events in our calendars to make our life look like a mess. But now that Google’s product is out I’ll have to re-evaluate my decision.

Thus far I like the fact that with Google multiple people can edit the same calendar. This is a huge advantage when our primary goal is to know what each other are up to. I also like the layout of Google’s much better especially dragging and dropping events. One thing that I liked about 30 Boxes was that it would automatically repeat birthdays every year after they were entered. I have not had any luck getting Google to do this, but it can be added manually by editing the event via a form. I think after only a few minutes of using Google that I will slowly start migrating toward it. Imagine how great it will be when the calendar is fully integrated with Gmail. I can picture simple adding of events that are discussed in your email conversations.