The Thief recently posted his answers for the Name Game.  This list required the amount of brain power that I have available (low) and looked like I could finish it in one sitting.  I love my Star Wars name (because you never leave your 8th grade humor behind) and Soap Opera Name.

1.YOUR REAL NAME:
Timothy Paul Sherrill

2.WITNESS PROTECTION NAME:(father and mothers' middle names)
Timothy Julie (Like that doesn’t stick out…)

3.NASCAR NAME:(first name of your mother's dad, father's dad
Arnfinn Marvin (I’d get kicked out of pit lane)

4.STAR WARS NAME:(the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name)
Sheti (Awesome!  I’m either related to the Bantha/Tauntaun or something a one left behind.)

5.DETECTIVE NAME:(favorite color, favorite animal)
Purple Monkey

6.SOAP OPERA NAME:(middle name, town where you were born)
Paul Pipestone (This is good…I can use this one.)

7.SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd fav color, fav drink, add "THE" to the beginning)
The Orange Chai

8.FLY NAME:(first 2 letters of 1st name, last 2 letters of your last name)
Tish (the sh sound stays handy)

9.STREET NAME:(fav ice cream flavor, fav cookie
French Vanilla Loaded Chocolate Chip

10. PORN NAME: (1st pet's name, street you grew up on)
Blackie Maple

11.YOUR GANGSTA NAME:(first 3 letters of last name plus izzle)
Sheizzle

13.YOUR IRAQI NAME:(2nd letter of your first name, 3rd letter of your last name, first two letters of your middle name, last two letters of your first name then last three letters of your last name):
Impaimill (It’s the newest pain reliever)

14.YOUR GOTH NAME:(black, and the name of one of your pets)
Black Newt

15. STRIPPER NAME: (name of your fav perfume/cologne, fav candy)
Polo Butterfinger

This space hasn't seen an update for a while, so I thought I'd post an assortment of things that have been happening.

• This year's Great Circle Tour (for the 2007 version, see Half-Way Point, Arrived in South Dakota, and Return to Indiana), we went through Iowa, saw the Freiwalds in Windom, MN, stayed four days in Watertown, SD (including a side trip to visit the Westerburs in Brookings and the Stormos on their farm), continued to The Cities to see high-school friends in the area, enjoyed family at my Aunt's wedding (see Estee's Wedding), stayed with Jenny's friends in Sheboygan, WI (and met the house rabbit), and returned.  The Van added 2060 miles and it is now officially ready for new tires (it has to earn them, you know...).
• For my birthday, I got (myself) a Logitech Duet wireless music player.  It plays music in our kitchen and has a handy remote that lets you browse different things.  It clued me into Slacker Radio.  Other 'presents' were driving across the states of MN and WI and seeing my Colts beaten up by Green Bay (while I was in Wisconsin, no less).  It made lunch at A&W fun (a 60-year-old passer by to our table said to my Jeff Saturday jersey, "Go Pack."). 
• I've become a fan of Slacker Radio, especially their Christian Rock station.
• For organizing photos, I've upgraded to Picasa 3 (in beta) and it crashes more than it should, but it's a great program.
• I'm working on building a new computer (from on-hand components--they weren't doing me any good just sitting there) for the kitchen.

My meme band (tagged from this post):

Knight Orders presents their first album

How Seldom They Do

Create your own band.

1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

2. Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

3. Go to flickr's "explore the last seven days” http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/

Put it all together, that's your first album

The results are in...and my Dandelion theme won the dasBlog Theme Contest!

I'm very pleased (probably moreso than I should be) as I'm not a designer by training but I'm learning as I go.  One thing that has kept me back is that I want to produce everything myself.  This is good for learning, but not so good for getting things done!  For the Dandelion theme, I took the picture of the dandelion (taken with my Canon Digital Rebel and Sigma macro lens), retouched the picture,  created my own Photoshop website theme layout, and coded the HTML & CSS to lay out the page.  I did borrow CSS styling from a previous theme, but only because I ran out of time before the deadline.

To see the theme, you can look at this blog (at least until I put a new theme up) or see a preview on my previous post.

My next endeavor is entering three images in the Open division for Photography in the Indiana State Fair.

Here are the three images, mounted and in glassine sleeves ready to be taken to the fair.  They've since been dropped off and I'm awaiting August 8th when the fair opens!  Doubly exciting is that my folks will be visiting for Adam's first birthday during the two weeks the fair runs.  We'll not only be able to cruise and eat some fair food, but we can see my exhibits!

For the upcoming release of dasBlog, Ben Scheirman announced a theme contest. I have an entry.  I call it Dandelion.

You can see it active on this site (as of this writing at least, who knows what the future holds).

Download the theme: Dandelion.zip (21.83 KB)

It has been tested on IE 6 & 7, FireFox, and Opera.  Loosely based on the Kubrick theme (Michael Heilemann's design ported to dasBlog by John Forsythe), this theme holds an image on the top above two columns and a footer.  I enjoy themes with a replaceable main image.  When I return to the world of fast internet (I'm currently connected at 26kbaud at my in-laws) I will upload the PhotoShop file. Here is the Photoshop file:

Photoshop file: Dandelion_PSD.zip (271.44 KB)

The theme and accompanying Photoshop file are licensed under the GPL.

The design is based on a fixed-width of 900 pixels.  This allows the main column to provide about 600 pixels of blogging space.  I often wish to post pictures 480 pixels wide and previous themes have made that challenging.

The menu area currently holds just the search widget, but would be a fine place to add links to other pages on your site.

Enjoy the theme and let me know what you think!

I got a Google hit for "interpreting mood rings" (where this blog lands in the #1 search position) on last Friday's post quoting lyrics from Relient K

Hope my visitor left with a smile!

After the last post, I thought the picture looked familiar.  I went into the photo archives and found...

versus

Same park, same clothes, nearly the same age.  Mark trades his hat for Adam's bib (and a mobile phone can't compete with the image quality of the Canon Digital Rebel), but otherwise...

Here's Adam's on a park swing.  He doesn't swing much...more of a sway for now.

And Mark likes to keep things lively!

I've finally gotten a number of pictures off my mobile phone.  It's time to upload them a bit at a time.

March, 2006: Mark in his element.

The past two weeks I've been fighting computer troubles.  The troubles began when a fan in the computer case started making a ruckus.  Kicking computer equipment may not remedy each and every problem, but it did quiet the fan.  In a perhaps unrelated event, the hard drive started misbehaving.  Not to be intimidated by a situation that encourages me to buy a new, bigger, faster hard drive (we wouldn't want to suffer data corruption, would we?), I did so and made a full backup of the troublesome drive.

Today I type this on a computer with a new hard drive, new processor, new motherboard, but with most of the files recovered from the failed drive and the corrupted backup.  I think I'll make a new rule--never touch your backup!  The tale of woe is one I'll save for those patient enough to listen to me spout about mbr's, Linux live CD's, MFT's, backup MFT's, corrupt MFT's, etc.

The good news is that I'm up-and-running again, TheWife didn't lose any of her important files, and I have yet another new hard drive.

Here's an obligatory cute picture.

Here he is: Cinco de Marko

Adam keeps getting bigger and bigger!  Mom & Mark went shopping this evening so Adam & I could take some pictures in peace.  I'll try to post some of the video when I have a chance.

John Forsythe has been good enough to take the default WordPress theme (Kubrick) and port it to this blogging software (dasBlog).  I've been impressed by this theme from the first time I saw it at the Snapstream site (maker of my Tivo-like TV recording software).  I'm excited to see it for dasBlog and to use it here.  The WordPress Kubrick theme has been released under an OpenSource license which puts John in a good place porting it over.

Are you familiar with Turducken? 

A turducken is a de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken.

-- Wikipedia

Well, this year my wife's side of the family celebrated Thanksmasgiving.

Sorry, there were no exact matches to your query.

-- Wikipedia

No, that's not a mistake, Wikipedia has not yet found this obscure blending of holidays.  Google only returns a single result (not quite a Google Whack as Answers.com doesn't recognize Thanksmasgiving either) which this post will probably ruin.

Using the pattern of Turducken, Thanksmasgiving must be:

Thanksmasgiving is a holiday in the United States where a Thanksgiving contains a Christmas which in turns contains a Thanksgiving.

-- me

Thank goodness that the 'inner' Thanksgiving does not contain a Thanksmasgiving (or does it?)!!

When writing in a text window on the web, I'd really like to know when I misspell something.  Usually I remember to click the spell check button  but sometimes I forget.  Someone is working on the problem, though, and for that I'm grateful.  Emil A Eklund is working on LiteSpellChecker which will give you a red squiggly under misspelled words without having to click a spell check button.

  Cool!

Apprently I do not excell in either loser or cool.

I was hoping to distinguish myself in some manner....I guess I'm not cool enough to be a nerd.

(link from http://brianvinson10.blogspot.com/)

While this site hasn't been plagued by unwanted comments and trackbacks, other sites have.  To prevent this from starting, dasBlog author Ormar Shahine has added a new feature to this blogging software.  These contributions create clutter at a minimum and certainly cause concern for anyone looking for a clean, creative site.  While these features are not yet on this site, they will come and I rest easier knowing that folks like Omar are looking out for us.

Following the lead of Cliff Atkinson's Blog at Beyond Bullets, Illustrating your Blog with an eye-catching graphic can be straightforward with the right tools--tools you may already have on your desktop.

For myself, I've been working on streamlining this process.  I'll blog about how I captured the image to the left (which includes resizing and a drop shadow).

This site uses dasBlog to organzie blogs.  Follow the instructions below to add a post with an image:

1. Log into your blog and click Add Entry
2. Begin typing your entry.  When you get to the point you wish to insert an image, move to step 3.
3. In the editor, click the button which looks like this  to bring up a dialog showing a gallery of images on your site.
4. At the bottom of the gallery you'll see some controls similar to the image to the right.  Click the browse button to select the image to upload. 
5. Find an image to upload.  It should already be the size you want to use in your blog.
6. Click Upload (for me, I had to repeat steps 4 & 5 to make this happen--this seemed consistent and shows that there's a problem somewhere--I'll try to track down the problem)
7. Change the 'Align' drop-down to indicate where you'd like your image to 'float.'  Left and Right are the most often used.  Set VSpace and HSpace to 3 (the number of pixels of space (padding) between the image and the text).  The text you put in 'Title' will show as a tool-tip when you hover the mouse over the image.  Don't change anything in the Dimensions area as I haven't found my changes are applied.
8. Now you can click Insert.  You should see an entry similar to what's on the right.  If you click and drag the image, you can reposition it.
9. To adjust an images properties, click on the image then click on the button that looks like this .

Looking over what I just wrote, it doesn't appear to be a simple process, but believe me, it is much better than anything that existed a year ago.  A year from now this will all be much easier.  :-)

Enjoy.