Ahoy all!

Okay, Songbyrd guilted me into writing a Guest Post, but please don't expect witty reparte' or enchanting comical banter. This is more of a stream of consciousness thing...call it "Flotsam - Supersized!"

Anyway, here we are in early February, and it amazes me how far in advance people are planning things these days. Now it's one thing to learn about my 20-year High School Reunion, which is scheduled for the first weekend in October (conflicting w/ my college alma mater's Homecoming weekend--bummer, can't do both!). I mean, that event requires a lot of lead time, for out-of-towners to make travel plans, for people to clear their schedules, for the participants to lose 20 lbs, find an attractive mate, and/or get filthy rich in time for the reunion. It's understandable to schedule something like that well in advance.

Contrast that, however, to the other two schedulings I've had recently: Little League sign-ups and Pre-school registration. The baseball sign-ups for Scott started back in early December and ended a week ago. WHO ON EARTH needs to sign up their kid for April baseball in December? Simply Ridiculous! In this auotmated society, you'd think sign-ups could be done a month ahead of time and the PC's would crank out and print the team rosters, game schedules, parent's work details, etc... in short order. No sirreee! Likewise, Pre-school registration for Chris for NEXT FALL was held a week ago! Now I can see parents needing to know the details for that before the end of the current school year, but it's @#$%&*! February, people! Why the hell do you need 7 months to figure it out! Ugh! What's next, do I start filling out college applications when the boys hit Middle School? /me rolls eyes.

Ding! Next topic. Since it's Winter, my main "leisure time" diversion has been working on my church's website (click here to visit). I use the term "working" loosely, because there's not a lot of apparent progress on the site, other than routine monthly updates. Still, I've got big plans...a new set of pages for the Youth Ministry, re-doing the site using Frames and Cascading Style Sheets, finally adding the Photo Gallery, fixing the Guestbook and Congregational Directory, etc.... The problem is that I keep coming up w/ great ideas for improvements, fixes, new features, and the like, but I never get around to implementing any of them. I seem to have a dozen or more things "in progress", and that's just not productive.

Among the issues I'm dealing w/ for the website are the following:

• Cascading Style Sheets - these would go a LONG way towards making the routine maintenance of the site easier. They should be supported by all browsers at or above version 4 (Netscape or MSIE). But what about folks running older browsers? That brings me to...
• Browser Sniffers - I know there are a bunch of them around, I just need to find one that's decent and can detect even very old versions. Then I can redirect the folks who are using browsers older than version 4 to an upgrade page. But do I really need to worry about this? How many of my visitors are using archaic browsers? It'd help if I could look at my...
• Log Files - my web hosting service only provides the "lite" version of Urchin v2.1, which tracks hits/pages/bytes, but not browsers/versions/platforms, so I have no way of knowing what the applicable stats are. I've tried downloading a couple of free trial versions of different log analyzers, but neither worked for me. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong or what--they seemed intuitive enough to set up. Anyway, even if I get past this hurdle, I'll still need to deal with...
• Polling Scripts - I currently use a service called FreePolls to provide monthly polls for the church website. It's a free service (hence the name) which makes it's money by advertising. Recently we've had a couple questionable ads displayed on the Poll Results page. Nothing overly offensive, but two clicks into the one "Web Personals" ad there was a message board for those interested in "Looking for Sex Only" (probably filled with nothing but guys, LOL!). Definitely NOT the kind of thing to link to from a church website. So unless they can further restrict their advertising, I need to find a good polling script and do it myself (I've checked other services, and they're all pretty similar regarding the ads).

Ding! Next topic - Tallulah. I seem to remember someone named Tallulah who used to hang around here. Whatever happened to her? I wonder how she's liking her new job?

Ding! Girl Scout cookies...have you ordered yours yet? If so, how many boxes did you buy, and from how many different girls? What varieties did you get, and how much are the boxes of cookies in your neck of the woods? We've ordered 6 boxes from a total of 3 different girls (6 total, not 6 per!). Got 2 Thin Mints, 2 Tagalongs, and 2 of the new Aloha Chips. Woo Hoo--can't wait!

Ding! Anniversary Trip. June will be anniversary #10 for the Mrs. & I. Gonna go somewhere nice and tropical, and plop our collective asses on a beach for a few days. Anybody got any recommendations, suggestions, horror stories about Carribbean vacation destinations? And while we're talking about 10th anniversaries, what do you think an appropriate gift would be for one's spouse on such an occasion? (Keep in mind that the vacation trip is gonna be the main expense.)

Well, that's about all for now. Thanks for reading!