I can’t help myself. Here’s a hint: “He’s just your dad. He’s as full of shit as anybody.” That’s right. You know it!

Not that I ever left my job… I’m back to work on my calendar. I’ve tentatively dubbed it “My Family Calendar”. The aim of the calendar is to keep track of birthdays and anniversaries. Initially I’ll only have annually occurring events on it. Some of the major features will be:

• Month view ONLY! I’ve seen too many calendars that allow multiple views and it just adds to the confusion to what I want.
• Events will occur ONLY all day. Again, I’ve seen too many calendars that allow intervals of time that are less than a day and it just adds to confusion and event entry headaches. After all, it’s your birthday or your anniversary all day, not just an hour or so.
• The name of the person or persons will show up on the date of their birthday/anniversary. (I know, not original at all). They will be color coded for birthday and anniversary.
• When the name is clicked on, a popup window will appear that will mimic a business card that includes the person’s picture.
• The monthly view will be printable – well at least you’ll be able to create a PDF from the monthly view.
• Password protected admin panel where the admin will be able to add/edit/delete events. Also, the admin will be able to change the calendar title, the skin base color and password.
• The ability to navigate months forward and backward one month at a time only. Since the calendar only does annually recurring events, there’s really no need to jump to some date five years in the future.
• The ability to add holidays by marking a checkbox for each holiday. This will have to be implemented later as I’m not certain how to go about adding the “second Sunday in May” kind of holiday. It will be implemented in the admin panel.
• All events will be stored in a MySQL database, and the program will be written in PHP.

Right now, I’m still working out how the screens will look by designing a logo, laying them out in HTML using CSS to place and describe items. But soon I’ll need to write the PHP code and include the SQL statements within as well. That’s when the work will really start.

But the big question is… do you think I need to add something else?

In case you haven’t noticed (I didn’t until just a few minutes ago) today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day!! Woo Hoo!! That’s why this blog looks…. interesting.

Here it is, my newest theme. The one I’ve been working on for a while. I finally figured out how to style the tag cloud in order to get the tag cloud to fit “inside” the area.

Anyway, there’s a story behind this one. I was looking at my kids’ senior pictures a couple of weeks ago and decided I really like the look of the “centerpiece” frames we got for them. You see, these frames hold one 8″x10″ picture and four of the 4″x6″ proofs. They really look nice with rounded edges on the oak border around the pictures. That’s when it hit me: “Hey, I could make a WordPress theme that looks like that!” So I set about creating such a look. The disaster happened shortly after I began when I lost my USB flash drive with all the preliminary work on it. So much for backups, huh?

So the end result is what you see here. Wooden Picture Frame. If you like it, it is available for download here. The wiki article describing the theme and additional download links is here.

Happy Birthday, T.C.!

Happy Birthday, Carlton!

I was talking to this little girl Catherine, the daughter of some friends, and she said she wanted to be President someday. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats were standing there with us and I asked Catherine, “If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?”

Catherine replied, “I would give houses to all the homeless people.”

“Wow, what a worthy goal you have there, Catherine,” I told her, “but you don’t have to wait until you’re President. You can start now by coming over to my house and cleaning up all the dog poop in my back yard and I will pay you $5. Then we can go over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $5 to use for a new house.”

Catherine (who is about 4) thought that over for a second while her mom looked at me, seething.

Catherine then replied, “Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and clean up the dog poop and you can just pay him the $5?”

Happy Birthday, Randy!

Happy Birthday, Michaela!

Happy Birthday, Geddy!

So I haven’t found my USB flash drive yet. Luckily, when I ordered mine I actually ordered 3 of them: one for me, one for my friend John and one for KC. This was in April; TigerDirect was running a special on PNY 4Gb USB flash drives for $15.99 each. KC hasn’t used hers at all, so I got another 4 Gb USB flash drive!! And now I’m just about to the point where I THINK I have everything on it that I need. I don’t think I’ve got everything on it that I had on the lost one, but it had about 400 Meg free, that means it had 3.6 Gb used.

I still don’t have my Windows Update offline stuff back on it. I have an AutoIt script along with all the updates since WIndows XP Service Pack 2 that updated a machine without actually connecting to Windows Update. I’ll get to that later. Since Microsoft has come out with Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, I’ll have to update that entire script. I also don’t have my own “SuperInstall” which is an AutoIt script that allows me to easily install all kinds of software. It shows me a window with check boxes for a variety of software (freeware and open source) that I install on computers that I work on for others. It then installs all checked software silently and reboots at the end of all installations. It’s nice because all I’ve got to do is update AVG and Spybot — Search & Destroy after the reboot. Both of these scripts made it easy for me to set up computers for friends and family as I could simply launch the script, make some choices and walk away while the script did the work.

I still don’t have all my web backgrounds and my bench pictures, but I’m close. I’ll start in soon on re-creating what I had done for my latest theme idea. And I will back this USB flash drive up regularly!