2006 Draws to a Close

I want to wish a Happy New Year to all of our friends, family and the extended world at large.

As we close the year, it's important to recall that the music world lost an iconic figure in the legendary person of James Joseph Brown, Jr., The Godfather of Soul on Christmas Day. As an homage and in the best respectful way I can manage, I present the following songs by the legend for your listening pleasure. You should see a small blue arrow to the right of each title that will play the song right here in your browser.

• Christmas In Heaven
• Please Please Please
• I'll Go Crazy (Live @ The Apollo)
• It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World
• Funky Drummer

Most poignant for me was the first one, Christmas in Heaven. Here's my prayer that you really are enjoying Christmas in Heaven, Mr. Brown. And thanks for all the songs.

More Information: James Brown, the 'Godfather of Soul,' dies at 73

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- James Brown, the legendary R&B belter, a singer and songwriter who created a foundation for funk and provided the roots of rap, a man of many nicknames but a talent that can only be described as one of a kind, is dead.

Happy New Year

I want to wish Happy New Year to all my friends and family!

Weather.com for Florissant

Normally, I think that a little local weather icon is too clichéd for most web sites. First off, you are making the assumption that a visitor to your site is local or is interested in the local weather in your city, like Saint Louis. However, I've found one that I thought was semi-decent and wanted to try it out.

del.icio.us / help / tagrolls

As I've mentioned before on one or another occasion, I'm fond of del.icio.us. Here's a good snapshot of the tags I use on the site.

Oh and hey, while I'm at it, why don't I post a tagometer. I'm going to figure out how best to integrate these into my blogs at a later date but for now, I wanted to see what they looked like.

As of right now, no one has bookmarked this page, but that's okay with me. I plan to move it soon (more on this later).

Which File Extension Are You?

Which File Extension are You?

Streetcorner Symphony (Live At Red Rocks) - Rob Thomas

I think that it's a good thing that life travels so fast I can't blog it properly to my satisfaction. There are over 70 blog posts saved as a draft that I started or tagged something while at work or on my cell phone or whatever that I never finished. There are nearly 250 published posts, so I guess that's an accomplishment.

Here's a good example. I had a small theme going in April of 2005 when I talked about my wife and I meeting Rob Thomas. Yet, I never finished it.

Well, I did find a good video for Rob Thomas, Live At Red Rocks, which portrays a good idea of what the show was like.

Someday, I have to get that event fully published. As a technical note, I didn't even actually publish this post until 2007/03/19, so this proves the point in and of itself.

Musical Debutt

A few weeks ago, the family and I went to McDonalds for some burgers, fries and happy meals. On the way home in the van, Reese was reading away at the box for her happy meal and said something that sounded not quite right. The instructions were to poke out a perforated hole in the side of the cardboard and push your straw through and turn it into a musical instrument. Without a lot of explanation, this is what it says, word-for-word.

Punch out the belly and pull a straw through. Hum a tune into the straw and join iZ in making your musical debut!

Now, it is not every day that a seven-year-old comes upon the word "debut" and shame on McDonalds for putting that on their box. What came out of Reese's mouth was ...join iZ in making your musical de-butt?!

Once we understood and the error was explained, we all could not stop laughing at this. In fact, it's still an inside joke we pass around just to keep the smiles going. Thanks McDonalds!

Google Hiccup Gone (For Now)

I had previously posted some comments that my Google Pagerank on some of my sites had taken a bit of a dip. I've posted over-posted about this in the past probably out of vanity, or perhaps curiosity. It's an interesting measurement for me. I remind myself I'm not selling anything, and also that the actual PR number does not guarantee search rankings.

Here is a quote from my last post on the subject.

Today from work, I checked and Arconati.us has a 1 and Arconati.net has a 0. Even Mudhorny.com has dropped to 0. All of these sites previously had a 2.

I'm initially sad for a moment, but then I recall that I'm only really doing these sites for myself and my family. I'm not selling anything. And also, as I need to remind myself and anyone else who obsesses with Google's Badge of Worth that it should not be the accurate measure of the success of a website.

Well, it would seem that all three sites; Arconati.us, Arconati.net and Mudhorny.com; have all come back with PR of 2. Most likely, Google's index was just updating and they temporarily appeared low.

As an interesting tangent specifically about Google, Blake Ross --the creator of Firefox-- posted something interesting about Trust and how Google had lost his. Anyway, it caught my eye.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. I don't have lot's of time to type right now, but I wanted to remind everyone what Christmas is really all about.

Keep the reason in your heart as you celebrate this year. And have a safe and Happy New Year!

New Blogger Version

I've just had all of my blogs upgraded to the latest version of blogger. It took a few minutes to complete, but was mostly painless. One immediate change I noted was that the dashboard lists all unmoderated comments and has a decent interface for viewing them. I noted immediately that this blog had five comments I didn't even know about. I'm wondering if they were there and I just never went to the "Moderate Comments" section, or if some bug had kept them hidden even on that menu.

I thought nobody read my blog and here were several different comments from people other than my close family. There were two comments from J.D., one on my post about Ferguson-Florissant School District and another post about Olivia's adventure in the supermarket late one night. I also had a comment on my post from last summer when I created the website for Ferguson Christian Church from our former Youth Minister, Nikomas Perez. I also got a comment on one of my posts from a coworker from MonsterCommerce, Janet Lackey thanking me for linking to her site, which I was all too thrilled to do.

Most exciting to me was a comment from an old best friend, Jeff Kirchhofer, who I've been thinking of getting back in touch with for the longest time. What bugs me most about this comment thing is that he posted a comment way back in January of this year and I am only finding out about it now. Don't I look like a jerk? Oh well, I'm emailing him now.

Thundersnow!

I posted back in July about a Massive Thunderstorm that hit the St. Louis area on July 19^th and knocked out power to about half a million homes. Well, this last Thursday, November 30^th (which is also my Olivia's birthday) there was an equally massive snow storm. By the end of the night, nearly a quarter million homes were without power -- including once again my family, Heather and Ryan and Aunt Ruby.

What was happening earlier in the day made it even more interesting. As it turns out, my dog, Lucy has fleas. The cold weather drives them inside of course, and how I knew that she had them was that they started biting me! My ankles had been irritated and swollen for the last few days and after a visit to the doctor, he was pretty sure that they were flea bites that I'd scratched too much. Yuch.

So, I flea-bombed the house and took Lucy to Heather and Ryan's house for a flea bath. Lisa met me over there after work and we had dinner with the VanMeters and then watched Superman Returns on DVD. It had been sleeting almost all day by this point.

Very near the end of the movie, the power in the house flickered briefly, but stayed on. When we got home, there was a lot of cleaning up to do from the bug bombs and we had the girls lay on the couch while I went to wash their bed sheets and stuff. The sleet outside was freezing to really hard ice and getting ready to switch to snow. Two minutes after I had started the first load of laundry, the power went out.

The girls went to sleep in the living room while I did the best I could looking for sheets and blankets that were bagged up away from the bug spray. I went to bed assuming the power would be on Friday morning and...

Survey says?!... Yeah, it wasn't. And it was getting semi-cold in the house. With Olivia's birthday party approaching on Saturday (today), we were in a bind. So we packed up the car and went to my Dad and Linda's house for the day and night. We did a few maintenance things, like I shoveled the driveway and sidewalk a bit. Then we drove over, picked up Aunt Ruby and headed on over to my folks who had power.

We went sledding a bit, which was a first time for Reese. We ate dinner and went to bed. Then the next day, we called the house and the answering machine picked up, meaning we had power. Lisa left early with Heather to get the party going the best way possible. After a bit more sledding, this time with Olivia too, Ryan and I packed up all three girls and left Dad and Linda's, picked up Katie and headed to the party.

My wife did it again (with Heather's help, thanks Heather)! She pulled off a great party in a short time frame. I tell you, she has missed her calling. Anyway, congratulations to Lisa and Happy Birthday to Olivia.