The start of our “Great Adventure”. We are headed to Gatlinburg, Tennessee; specifically to a cabin between Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. Our ultimate destination is The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The “we” here is KC and I and our good friends Bob and Norma. We left town about 11:30am and started heading east on I-74. We stopped for a quick lunch at Subway in Galesburg, IL that we took with us and continued down the road. We pulled off the road in Bloomington, IL for a quick pit stop (and a Dairy Queen – I had a chocolate malt!) then on east we went. We had dinner at Fillmore’s Dairy Hut in Covington, KY (excellent ice cream, by the way) and then continued to Lexington. After a few “shop around” stops for a hotel room, we ended up at Motel 6. We were all tired from the trip so we unpacked only what we needed to for the night and crashed. We had driven for about 9 hours and had about 4 hours left. It was a good day.

Not exactly like SNL, but hey! I went to downtown Muscatine tonight and listened to the FREE (that’s right – free, zero dollars, nada cents, nil cost) concert. Yeah, I had to listen and watch the Bruce Brown dance troop, but I also got to listen to the Gray Wolf Band. I work with Larry in the Gray Wolf Band – he was my first boss when I started with the company. I’ve seen them before, but in a bar with a cover charge.

Anyway… It all started at 6pm. It was at the west end of downtown on Second Street – they actually closed off the last block so that there were no cars. The Gray Wolf Band played some tunes. Then, after they put down plywood on the street for the dancers. Then the dancers came out and did a tap dance exhibition; it really was pretty cool. There were kids as young as 10 doing some intricate tap steps. After about 20-30 minutes of tap, they cleared the wood off the street and the Gray Wolf Band was back at it. They even played one of my all-time favorite songs “Pride and Joy” by Stevie Ray Vaughn.

It was all over too soon; I was home by 9:10pm. But it was a great time.

Seems like that’s all I do any more is update. WordPress updated to version 2.3. One of the nice things about WP 2.3 is that when you go to the plugins page, it shows any plugins that need to be updated… and I had quite a few of those! So, I updated plugins. Then, I found that the Headline Images plugin by ColdForged no longer worked. I’ve been using his excellent plugin for quite a while to spruce up the entry headlines. When it worked all you had to do was change the “the_title()” WordPress template tag to “the_title(‘-image’)” and it took the text of the title, translated it into a graphic of those letters using any pre-determined font, size, color, shadow color, shadow offset, etc. It was really cool because you could take any font you had on your system and upload it to a folder you designate in WordPress, and it would render the titles in that font. As I said earlier, however, due to some change in WP 2.3, it no longer works.

So… I had to go with “old reliable”. I created a CSS drop shadow for the text. It’s really pretty simple. You first change the CSS of your headline class to have a z-index of 1 so it is displayed on top and its position to be relative. Then you create a new CSS class for the shadow, making the left and top margins slightly more than the headline margins, color it to be a grey of some kind, have a z-index of 0 so it’s displayed underneath, and make its position absolute. Here’s the CSS code from my stylesheet for these two elements (I also included the anchor hover class as well):

.storytitle, .storytitle a, .storytitle a:visited {
  font: italic bold 28px "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
  left: 0px;
  top: 0px;
  width: 500;
  text-decoration: none;
  color: #14220D;
  position: relative;
  z-index: 1;
}
.storytitle a:hover {
  color: #4A7032;
  background: transparent;
  text-decoration: none;
}
.storytitleshadow {
  font: italic bold 28px "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
  left: 4px;
  top: 2px;
  text-decoration: none;
  color: #889988;
  position: absolute;
  z-index: 0;
}

Then, in the “loop” of the WordPress engine, you’ll need to add one line. In the case of my theme, it’s in the file “post.php” and change the code that looks like this (I’m using curly braces instead of < and > to avoid the PHP being rendered):

{div class="storytitle" id="post-{?php the_ID(); ?}"}
  {a href="{?php the_permalink(); ?}" rel="bookmark"}{ ?php the_title(); ?}{/a}
{/div}

To this:

{div class="storytitle" id="post-{?php the_ID(); ?}"}
  {a href="{?php the_permalink(); ?}" rel="bookmark"}{ ?php the_title(); ?}{/a}
  {span class="storytitleshadow"}{?php the_title(); ?}{/span}
{/div}

That’s really all there is to it. I may even stay with this. The only drawback is that I have to use only a few certain fonts that are on everyone’s PC. Anyway, the shadows are better looking in Firefox and Opera on my Windows PC and it looks good in Konqueror on my OpenSuse laptop. It doesn’t look quite as nice in Internet Explorer (even though I grabbed the entire process from an article about drop shadowed text in IE!).

I’m enjoying one of my favorite drinks (the third one in the list!). EVERYONE should be so lucky!!

That’s where KC and I went this weekend. Beautiful Devil’s Lake just outside Baraboo, Wisconsin. ZDog and J went there as well. ZDog did his qualifying dives and is now a certified open water diver. KC and J went on a dive on Saturday but the water was pretty murky – KC said they had to hold hands underwater because they couldn’t see each other. Sunday, the two girls did some hiking in the park while ZDog did the end of his qualifying dives.

Me? I pretty much went along for the ride. Saturday I dropped off the three to dive and checked in to the hotel. It was the Thunderbird Motor Inn and I’d recommend it – inexpensive and clean, plus you get a discount at the restaurant that is just across the parking lot. Once checked in, I unloaded all of our (KC and I) stuff into the room and started working on a laptop that I had brought along. The next thing I knew, three hours had passed and I was awakened by my cell phone. It was KC telling me to get to the park to pick them up.

Saturday night we watched the Hawkeyes lose to the Badgers 17-13 and in the process get beat up enough to lose players to injury for at least the game. Sunday morning I slept in while ZDog and the gals went out to the park. I ended up going to a local grocery store to get more soda and ice and found Sprecher’s soda!! I picked up a bunch of Root Beer, Ravin’ Red and Creme Soda. ZDog was done about 11am, so we piled into the cars and headed home. It was nice (as always) to see ZDog and J, and the scenery around Baraboo was very nice. It ended up being a very nice weekend.

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Now playing: Lynn Allen – Last Night
via FoxyTunes

That’s right! Today is “Talk Like A Pirate” Day. Enjoy it, ya swab!

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Now playing: Head East – Never Been Any Reason
via FoxyTunes

I use a signature at work. Nearly all of us do. It has vital information about contacting us and many times it has a cutesy little tag line saying something “profound”. Also, more and more signatures have a confidentiality statement at the end. Some have every voice method of contact in their signature: phone number, extension, cell phone, IM, Skype, etc. I personally have my phone number on my official signature at work (not by choice, mind you, but by decree).

We can debate the usefulness of having all this stuff in our email until we are blue in the face and get absolutely nowhere. The thing is, when I send a 10 word email and I’ve got my name, company, title, address, phone number, fax number, cell number, tag line and confidentiality paragraph…. my signature is longer than my email. Much longer. How much space in my mailbox (that we are limited to 100 megabytes) is actually being taken up by all this signature clutter? And then there’s the graphics included in some signatures. Yeah, they look nice but are they really necessary? Many are scaled TIFFs that are HUGE and take up a lot of space in my mailbox (and the sender doesn’t even realize what they have done, they just like the look of the graphic).

And here’s the kicker: WHY do people include their email address in their signature? When you get an email from someone don’t you already HAVE their email address just by receiving the freakin’ email!? What, are you going to add someone’s email address to your personal address book (Contacts in Outlook lingo) that didn’t actually send you an email but you saw their email address in the chain of forwards and replies and thought it was a good idea to add it? Are we THAT hard up for email addresses or do we just want to seem important by having more entries?

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Now playing: Romeo Void – Never Say Never
via FoxyTunes

Happy birthday, TC!

Here’s the new theme. I call it “Lazy River”. I finished it up earlier this evening and have been fine-tuning it for the unveiling. So let me know what you think!

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Now playing: Silvertide – Heartstrong
via FoxyTunes

Happy Birthday, Carlton!

I’m working on my next theme right now. Hopefully I’ll get it done some time this weekend and post it on my wiki. Also, I’m playing with the latest Foxy Tunes add-on for Firefox. Man, it’s sweet! You can see what I’m listening to right now. I may be including this as a regular for my posts.

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Now playing: Dada – Dizz Knee Land
via FoxyTunes

That’s right, it was exhausting. I took a PADI Open Water certification class. We spent about eight hours in the pool over two days. The classroom stuff I had no problems with. Most of it is common sense and the ability to read and interpret tables. Alas, what did me in is something I’ve known for quite a while. I can’t float and/or tread water for 10 minutes; not only that I’m not in good swimmer’s shape and I can’t swim 200 meters. There was a time when I was good enough athletically to “gut it out” and just get these two tasks done. Those days are far behind me, however. So while I missed only three questions on the final exam, I didn’t pass the course because I didn’t finish the pool work. The good news is that if I get myself into better shape I can re-take the second pool-day part of the course (the swimming, treading water and 2 simple skills) in the next six months to a year, then I can get to the point where all I need is the open water dives to finish the certification. The open water dives are to be in two weeks at Devil’s Lake in Baraboo, WI. Unfortunately, I will not be going.

Another thing I had problems with was my mask. It kept filling with water. Now I understand that there is always going to be a bit of water, but I shouldn’t have to clear the water (which had almost reached my eye level) out of the mask every other breath I take, should I? None of the other divers had anywhere near as much trouble with water in the mask as I did. The instructor watched this morning while I was in the pool and told me that it was entering around my mustache; he suggested I shave it. Well, I’ve had this mustache for over 25 years and I’m not all that partial to shaving it. There’s a guy at work who has a “mountain man” beard who also dives; I’ll check out what he does when he dives to see if I can do the same. I have the same problem snorkeling, so maybe this will help with that as well.

ZDog took the course with me. He did well on the written test also. And, he’s a good enough athlete to just “gut it out” and get the swimming and treading water part done. Congratulations, ZDog! In two weeks he will be going on the Devil’s Lake trip. KC has signed up for that trip as well, so he won’t be going alone (she has been a certified diver for three years now). AND he’ll be certified for open water dives after that. J (his wife) has been a certified diver for many years, so once he gets the dives out of the way they will have a great hobby to share!