Blogs

So, my copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition arrived today, and it's huge! A bock packed with all sorts of things, and I haven't had time to really look at it yet.

But Jingoro has figured out what to do with it...

Haven't blogged in a while - keep meaning to do deep meaningful posts, and then forget to actually do them. Sigh.

Feeling pretty sick right now - got some kind of headache and crud and cold feet thing. Not sure what it is, but I'm already really tired of it.

Firehouse.com, the last major project I worked on with pingVision, has now been officially launched! I worked as lead developer on this project with the able assistance of Matthew Saunders & Elizabeth Hause on the web producing side; and Ben Jeavons, Matt Tucker, Al Stephen, Kevin Bridges and Zach Meyer on the development and theming side.

Firehouse is a large site which includes articles of fires and fire-handling topics, pages for each fire station who wants to be hosted there, photographs of stations and fire equipment submitted by users, editorial cartoons on the firefighting life, Webinars, an online store for buying subscriptions to the magazine, and even A digital copy of their magazine, month by month, and probably some other stuff I'm not even remembering. Oh, and some blogging, too.

I'll probably work up more of a 'this is how we done it' post later, right now I'm basking in the glow of success.

So, this is Denver: Three days ago I stayed home from work because of a blizzard dropping a foot or two of snow on the city. Today I have the doors open to air out the house, and am happily doing a little work outside. The snow is happily melting away, and will be gone by mid-week, except for those mountains of snow created by the supermarkets pushing all of the snow in their parking lots into one pile of dirty snow, which will last for weeks.

The new bookshelves are great, but it was a bit of a job carving up the boxes they came into into small enough pieces for recycling... but I've managed to do that. This being the weekend after MileHiCon, there's a bunch of minor household chores that didn't get done last weekend and still need to get done now. Tammy's off having fun with a friend, and later on I get to show off the registration system I knocked together for Magnacon. Yay me!

Windows 7 has arrived, and I'm looking forward to installing it on my desktop this weekend...

But that reminds me. I had cause to look at a breakdown of data collected for advertisers on a random website, where one of the bits of information gathered was operating system. For that month, Windows XP showed 45,000 hits, where Vista showed merely 7,000. It was a bit of a surprise.

Coming up this weekend is MileHiCon 41, the convention that not only am I attending, not only am I attending some panels, but I am also hosting my tenth anniversary party with my darling wife Tammy.

We originally got married on October 23rd, 1999, and every year we're happy to celebrate our marriage with our friends, surrounded by geeky wonderfulness. Five years ago we celebrated that anniversary with a party, and this year, on Saturday, we're celebrating our tenth. If you know either of us, feel free to drop by if you're at the con, and help us drink this alcohol we scored for the party. We've even picked up Crystal Skull Vodka.

As I said, I've also got a few events on the schedule:

Today was spent enjoying the Developer Day Boulder, held at Techstars' offices. It was totally worth the $75 I laid down for the ticket.

The location was really cool - nicely sized for the crowd, and everyone, I think, had a good view of the screen. The only downside was that the heaters were roaring inside that room, and with all the folks packed in it was sauna-like at times. But it was worth braving the heat for the info.

A little over three weeks ago i set into motion my big gamble - stepping away from pingVision, and starting life as a freelance consultant. I'm not really able to go into all of the reasons, but partially it's a test - can I go out on my own and find my own way, without a company supporting what I do?

And, so far it's launched very nicely. My first client has been SpireMedia, here in downtown Denver, where I've been assisting them with an ubercart site with a large number of customizations, starting with working in three currencies and custom shipping costs, moving all the way to some interesting ways of presenting and offering discounts... which have already lead to one patch for uc_discounts_alt, and probably leading to more later.

Today is my wife Tammy's 40th birthday! Feel free to drop her a line at beadinglady @ gmail dot com and wish her a happy birthday.

I am reminded particularly today how lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful woman.

And yet, somehow I ended up with the day off...

You know, for a city of eternal grandeur, Paris is pretty nerdy.

For one thing, the French have these magnificent comic books. They're sold in hardback volumes, with fantastic art, all sorts of genres, and you can find them in bookstores, for cripes sakes. It makes me want to learn French just so I can read them. About half-way through my stay I found out there was a French comic shop (bulles de salon) within a few blocks of the apartment, which had a fantastic layout with a round room with featured items on display, and a long back room with older books, some American comics on their own shelf, and little figurines and posters. I got my wife a fantastic poster of a fairy queen in a long dress, which she was ecstatic about.