You Learn Something New Every Day

Today I learned that in North Texas you can edge your lawn during Spring at 9 PM because it’s still bright out. I also learned that battery powered edgers work! Since I don’t have a cordless electric blower yet I’m going to see if the wind blows the clippings away overnight. There’s pretty much been a constant stream of 20 MPH wind all Spring. Eat your heart out Chicago.

2 comments

Introducing MyPersonality.info

Our latest site is called MyPersonality.info. I coded and designed it while SudiRoo did most of the content and test questions. This site offers:

• Three Tests: Personality, Multiple Intelligences, Spiritual Gifts
• Information about each personality type, intelligence, gift, etc.
• Badges - lets you create a graphic with your test results for your blog, web site, signatures, etc.
• Profile Pages - a subdomain for every test taker that allows them to share their results in full

Here’s what a badge looks like. You get to choose the size, tests/order, colors, font, picture, etc. Click it to view my profile page.

Please, if you will, give the site a try and let me know of any issues.

2 comments

Sudi on Christian Examiner Cover

I picked up a copy of the Christian Examiner newspaper at church… and Sudi is on the cover!

Add comment

Bed & Breakfast Browser

Bed & Breakfast Browser is a new site I just finished. It’s a directory of bed & breakfast inns across the US and Canada. It has about 9,000 B&B’s and 18,000 photos for launch. WikiTravel tidbits and integrated Google Maps (API) supplement the accommodation details. The site is fairly basic in it’s current form (I want to build some rank in the search engines while I develop). The ultimate goal is to provide the most decked out B&B directory online. There are about 50 other B&B directories, most of which charge $50 - $500 per year for listings. The idea here (when done) will be to provide 100% FREE listings for innkeepers. Instead of charging for “top spots” in the results, I’ll list the “biggest” listings first. This will encourage the innkeepers to provide more info and photos for the travelers, making our site bigger and more useful than other sites. And that, being that this is a free / context ad-supported site, is how we’ll bring home the bacon.

6 comments

Dad’s Retirement

Dad retired from 41 years of work at BF Goodrich today! We went to a party at his work then went out for lunch. It was a lot of fun. It was good to see how much his coworkers respect him and how much they learned from him over the years. We had cake, Dad gave a great speech, and they all cheered as Dad drove us out in a little golf cart.

It makes me very happy that Dad is now retired. He worked very long and very hard. Through his work he provided our family with everything we needed and more. I know that I enjoy the job I do now with computers from the comfort of my home because of my Dad’s hard work. Dad introduced Dan and I to the world of computers.

Enjoy the retired life, Dad. Enjoy “long lunches” and great travels!

3 comments

A Job in the UK

Starting next week I’m going semi-full-time for Swift Solutions Ltd in Coventry, United Kingdom. Swift provides IT support, web hosting and web design services. I’ll be heading up what Steve (owner) sometimes calls his “San Diego Offices.” In other words, I’ll be doing web development for him three days a week (reserving two for my DreamDolphin Media stuff) from home sweet home. A portion of the work involves developing sites for local business while the bulk of it is for ‘Swift Solutions Group’ projects such as the CitySitesUK Network.

We’ve been working together for a couple years. He’s had so much work for me lately that the next step obviously was to make this more of a permanent arrangement. I’m glad to be doing this work. It’s fun and Steve is a cool guy.

3 comments

SysAdmins are like Auto Mechanics

I feel like an auto mechanic working on a lemon. I’ve never encountered so many problems with my server. All within 12 hours:

- MySQL’s user table corrupted, MySQL crashed, /tmp/mysql.sock link vanished, MySQL wouldn’t start
(this ruined our plan to feed some ducks at Mission Bay)
- Apache crashed for no good reason, but restarted on second try
- My apache error log reached 2 GB and started overflowing
- I found that my HTTPS service was dead all night long!
- My datacenter decided they won’t do kernel upgrades anymore, so I did it myself, borked it and then had to learn to fix grub.conf

I usually don’t have this many problems in a month! I’ve learned a few things though and that’s good.

4 comments

The Charity Million

I’ve been working on a charity site with one of my clients and friend in the UK called The Charity Million. The goal is to raise £1 Million ($1.7 million) every year for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. You might have seen pixel ad sites before, but as far as I know we’re the first to set one up in partnership with a major charity. The idea is for companies and families to make donations in exchange for an ad on the homepage. If we get enough press coverage the homepage ad space will be worth quite a bit and companies will be running in with their donations and pledges.

March 10, 2006 Press Release

Add comment

Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

Last September 27th I hosted a Ribbon Cutting Ceremony to inaugurate my new office. When I first started working in August I walked into a disaster zone, the furniture was ages old and every thing was disorganized and cluttered. I got rid of the clutter in about a day, most things went to the trash. Then my boss told me “new furniture” was on the way. When it finally arrived I was thrilled, it is mostly black, my favorite color for decoration and light maple. I love it! My favorite part is all the pictures of my baby love. Lotsa pictures, flowers, candles, a teddy bear named “Granola” …ah! and an ocean view.

“Post- its and more post-its”	Sweet “Granola”
Steven took this picture	The Ryan Library Family

3 comments

New Business Name

I took our move to La Mesa as an opportunity to change the name of my business to DreamDolphin Media (formerly Dream Dolphin Enterprise). The name is more compact and better reflects the nature of my business (web site development).

We’ll have pics of our moving day and our new place shortly!

Add comment