Last night, while Kim was busy working on all of this house stuff, I took some time to create a new layout for Phil’s site. I was amazed that I could come up with that in just a couple of hours, especially when I’ve been working on my own redesign for months. I guess I’m just too picky. Kim agreed and called me a perfectionist. That’s not a bad thing, is it? Anyway, I figure this is gonna cost him a couple rounds at Brooksider! :)

The delay in today’s update was due to yesterday’s double post that would not go away (although it is now gone). I didn’t notice that the update from yesterday was posted twice until I got to work this morning. I then spent quite some time trying to delete one of the entries. I’m not sure if it was blogger acting up, or my computer at home, but I cannot wait until the conversion to wordpress is complete.

Last night we hung out with Bianca for a couple of hours. Kim actually made dinner and it was pretty tasty. After we ate, Kim and Bianca did some homework while I worked on a couple of things for Ed Hearn. He wanted to put a new image on the front page, so I created a couple of examples for him and we eventually went with the one that is on there now. Other than that, I’ve been very busy at work trying to meet a deadline at the end of the month. I think I’m actually getting close to completing it, so perhaps I’ll have more free time in the near future.

Kim is taking one of her insurance tests today and has been studying for it all week. This should help to explain the lack of entertaining updates, but that should end today. I hope to have a great weekend to tell you all about on Monday.

Here is a logo idea for my site that I put together last night. I really like the design of it, but I cannot decide if the colors are too bright. I’ve been reading that the colors of web 2.0 are greens, blues and oranges, and that they are mostly bright and cheery. I’m pretty sure that I want to use a blue and green theme, just trying to decide on some final hues.

One of the things I want to include in my re-designed site is an online calendar. Ideally I could use it instead of the paper calendar I carry with me daily, and furthermore you all could view it to see what I’m up to from time to time.

As of right now I’m going to be using wordpress to run the blog section of the site, if not more. I’ve been looking for a good calendar plug-in for wordpress, but so far none of them do everything that I want them to do. The one thing that I love is the simple integration with wordpress, which will be the building blocks of the entire site.

Today, after reading about google’s planned calendar application, CL2, I began looking for existing applications that are similar to it. I found many existing web 2.0 calendar websites: 30 Boxes, Planzo, AirSet, etc. They all seem to offer similar functionality, and even offer someway to display events on your own site using a “badge.” The question now is if I should wait for google’s product or just go ahead and evaluate these others.

In the words of fighty, yawn.

I have a new enemy and its name is Cymphonix. I guess that we’ve had one of their Network Composer devices installed here at work for a week or two now. At first it didn’t cause too many problems for me, but I was told by other employees that their streaming music was no longer working. Luckily the streams that I use via my Sirius subscription are still working to this day (knock on wood).

I soon realized that I was no longer able to download mp3 files, which isn’t that big of a deal since I obviously have other ways of listening to music. Something strange started happening yesterday though. I was not able to get to oarsa.org:

Blocked Content Analysis: Gambling

I then browsed over here to edpaffjr.com:

Blocked Content Analysis: Alcohol and Tobacco

What the hell? It’s obvious to me that they either have a monkey doing their website categorization or they are using some sort of real-time filtering. Perhaps the device can read what’s on a page and then decide to block it or not. Obviously O.A.R.’s song “That Was A Crazy Game Of Poker” could lead to the gambling categorization, and that’s what first led me to this theory.

Regardless, I’m sure this product aims at increasing productivity. I’m not sure if the result is going to be reached though, especially after I just spent the last half hour of my lunch trying to research how the filtering is done. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to view these obviously “safe for work” sites in the future.

Finally a relaxing weekend. After work on Friday we had a few beers at home before heading down to George Brett’s. We met up with Maria and her friend Elizabeth, who was in town for the weekend. Typically we just have drinks at George’s, but this time we sampled a variety of their food as well. I would highly recommend the Turkey BLT Sandwich or the BBQ Chicken Pizza. After a couple of hours there, we headed home for the night.

Saturday was spent mostly in the apartment. Kim took care of some studying while I worked on the next version of edpaffjr.com. After hours and hours of that, we decided to put together homemade lasagna. The rest of the night was spent eating, drinking some wine, and watching a couple of movies. First up was Kim’s choice, Must Love Dogs. I’ll make my review of this movie short, it was terrible. I don’t think Kim liked it either. We then watched March Of The Penguins, a film that I’ve been wanting to see. I was obviously expecting big things because of the hype that surrounded it last year. Honestly, I was a little let down. It was a good movie but it was far from amazing, after all it is still a documentary. It was made to be shown on omnimax screens across the country.

We started off Sunday exactly like Saturday. Luckily we made it out of the apartment later in the day for more than an hour. We started off with a long game of tennis at the gym. We had planned on doing an inside workout, but the nice weather changed our minds. When we ran out of time, the score was tied one set to one. I was trying to conserve my energy for my hockey game later in the day. I guess I didn’t save enough though, we ended up losing our game and are no longer undefeated. We still hold a one game lead over the team that just beat us.

Everyone’s favorite summer time party is back! Pig-Fest XIII will be held this year on July 8th, so mark your calendars now. If you have any ideas for logos let me know. I could just use this year’s bonnaroo logo, like I did last year. I just got confirmation that Greenstreet will be back again this year.* I’m also talking with another band’s manager who is also interested in joining in the festivities this year.

Last night I spent an hour or two finalizing the layout for the Sig Ep site that I’ve been designing for the past few weeks. Feel free to critique it using comments to this post. Now I just need to get the content that they want to be displayed on each page. From there I headed out to Charlie Hooper’s for the infamous import night. I met up with a couple of guys from work and friends of theirs. It was nice to get out of the apartment for a bit, while Kim is in Minneapolis wondering around the Mall of America.

In exciting work news, I got another raise yesterday. Go me!

* Greenstreet goes from confirmed to unconfirmed in one day. The 8th is the same day as the singers mom’s 50th birthday. I guess that means they are out, and it’s probably too late to consider alternate days for the party. Hopefully I have better luck with another band.

Well I must have spoken too early about volleyball. I thought that we had a chance to at least be co-champions, but after last night I don’t know if it’s possible. Going in to the match, I thought we were pretty even with the opposition, but that was quickly proven untrue. They took a quick lead on us in the first game and never looked back. We tried a few other strategies against them, but I don’t think we ever had a lead in any of the three games. In the end, we lost all of the games to ‘Kinky Sets’ and they are now in first place, one game ahead of us. We are currently tied for second with two other teams. Hopefully we can redeem ourselves next week against the worst team in the league…

I have been trying to stay up to date with the Olympics, but have fallen a day or two behind. I setup the ReplayTV box to record every appearance on NBC that would not conflict with an already existing recording. I believe that right now I have nine hours saved that I have not watched. Of course it will take me much less time to watch all of that, with the skipping of commercials, any talk of Michelle Kwan, and sometimes figure skating in general. :) While browsing the web this morning for Olympics coverage I found a few interesting sites related to google maps or earth. First I found a mashup featuring daily schedules and results. I then found another mashup showing all of the Olympic venues. And finally a placemark file for google earth (the link works only if earth is installed) that again will show the venues. More on this at the Google Blog.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been working on a website for the Sigma Phi Epsilon Missouri Gamma Chapter. Last night I finally got a header that I liked enough to start actually working on a site layout. You can view what I have done here, and if you want you can click the header numbers to see how the design progressed from an original idea into what it is now. The other links on the site do not work and I’m sure I’ll be making some changes to the header and layout, so feel free to leave some comments and feedback.

My day of work is almost over. I’ll be leaving in about a half hour, which will start our vacation to Killington, Vermont. I’m sure it will be a blast. I’ll give you my review when we are back in KC on Monday. Have a nice weekend…

See what happens when my fantasy football leagues are over? I have nothing to write about. Actually what I did do last night was try to learn a little extra money by creating a webpage for the Missouri Gamma Chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon at the University of Missouri-Rolla. It’s intimidating to be creating a page for a group at a technical school. I would have guessed that they could have done it themselves. Regardless, I’ve been trying to get something together for them and I finally sat down last night and put some ideas onto paper (actually my computer screen). Hopefully I can come up with an entire layout in the next couple days. If so, I’ll link to it so I can get some extra comments on the design. I should have time to do so since Kim is taking a business trip tomorrow.