I’m a bit obsessive when it comes to the things I love. When I first discovered and subsequently fell in love with podcasting, I started a few podcasts and joined a few others until I was recording multiple shows a week. When I fall in love with television shows like Lost or Breaking Bad or Parks and Recreation, I’ll binge watch episode after episode and season after season until I’ve consumed the entire pie — quite possibly while consuming an entire pie. When I decided to collect arcade cabinets, I bought 30 of them. I’ve watched five Harry Potter films… (read more)

I’m a big believer in preventative maintenance on cars. I rarely do it, but I believe in it. We paid off my 2006 Chevy Avalanche in 2009, so I’ve been driving a payment-free truck for six years. My Avalanche currently has 130,000 miles (which is amazing considering how many states it has visited) and I plan on driving a payment-free truck for many more years. Of course payment-free doesn’t mean cost-free. I drove right past the 100,000 mile tune up and scheduled both the 100,000 and 120,000 mile checkups at the same time. Back when I had one my truck… (read more)

And, we’re back to blue. An errant php call to an apparently depreciated function (looks like they dropped the reference to e-links/blog roll) was causing WordPress to hang. After commenting out one line at a time 500 times, I finally found the offending line. Long story short, after days of work, I finally have everything back to where we started. Good? Good.

Things certainly look… orange. With my old web server (running Windows Server 2003) beginning to show its age, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I built a new Windows Server 2012 virtual server (using Hyper-V instead of VMWare for the first time) and spent the past few days migrating my sites over. For WordPress sites this includes migrating databases, locking down permissions, and all kinds of boring tasks. Unfortunately I didn’t have a good way to test how things were working without doing a few quick “live” tests and so that’s what I did. After everything was moved… (read more)

I got my first Lego set back in 1977 and things were different back then. Prior to 1978, most Lego sets didn’t come with many specialized pieces — mostly you got bricks, wheels, fences, arches, and little sloping pieces that were good for building ramps and roofs. Bricks came in black, white, red, yellow, and blue and you had green plates and trees and that was that. In 1978 Lego released the Lego minifigure (aka the “minifig”). Before that we had weird bubble-headed people with interlocking pieces for arms and no body or legs (you had to build those yourself),… (read more)

High speed internet gives me the ability to select and watch movies without having to put on pants. It offers more than that, of course — I use it to check my email, to browse the internet, and perform other online activities — but I did all of those things years ago when I had dial-up internet. I can rent movies from Red Box or Family Video, but those places require pants. If I were to draw a Venn Diagram of the two (“Things high speed internet allows me to do without putting on pants” and “Places to rent movies”),… (read more)

Sometimes it seems we spend months or years doing the same things and going through the same motions only to suddenly have lots of change happen all at once. That definitely seems to be the case in my life. Having your wedding anniversary three days away from your birthday makes for a hectic week, but I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way. The three day span usually manifests as multiple small celebrations — a meal here, a movie there, another meal the next day, and so on. This year for our anniversary Susan and I ate at Vast, the… (read more)

When I arrived in Weatherford at Southwestern Oklahoma State University (SWOSU) in the fall of 1993, I immediately enrolled in the college’s newspaper class because I had already taken “newspaper class” four times at Redlands Community College and thought that if you were pursuing a degree in journalism and wanted to work on the school’s newspaper that’s what you did. It turns out you don’t get credit for taking the same class over and over again (even if you really like it), and I had simply been paying to work on the newspaper at Redlands. (My professor and friend Kelly… (read more)