NealGrosskopf.com - Blog

I'm Homeless!!!

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:32:00 -0600

I'M FINALLY 100% HOME FREE! Today, the couple interested in my house finally signed all the paperwork and "closed" on the house. I've wanted to write more about the process and how things were going but for some superstitious reason, I waited until it was all finally over. Gone are the days of throwing away $1,381.44 a month and the $16,577.28 I wasted over the last year in a futile effort to keep my credit score at a decent level. Foreclosure and credit scores really aren't as bad as society makes them out to be, it's all scare tactics fabricated by the banks.

Putting It Into Perspective

From November 1st of 2008 to November of 2009, I had 26 house showing, 15+ open houses and dropped the price $10,000. Pretty much nothing was happening and it appeared that I was going to be sitting on it over another winter wasting my money and time. Then in late October, a couple looked at it several times and made an offer of $148,000 which was $11,990 less than I had it listed at. At this price 'we' would have lost roughly $19,000 split in half. At this point I was plenty happy with the offer and was glad just to get the heck out of the place

As usual, nothing could go easy. I went to court and a probama judge basically did nothing. At this point I was 100% ready to give up, I was worn down to the point that if all I had to lose was a hundred points on my credit rating, oh well. The first thing I did was go out and get a credit card in an effort to help my score while I stopped making payments. As November wore on I waffled back and forth on whether I would make December's payment.

Thanks Upper Management

Then out of nowhere our entire Marketing department got outsourced to a totally awesome marketing agency with super cool audio effects on their home page and we (as in the majority of us) got laid off. "Well that makes my decision easier" I thought. December's house payment was skipped. Ironically if I had made December's payment this entire process would have been pushed back another month and probably cancelled.

In the meantime, for whatever ridiculous reason the people that made an offer on my house still wanted the place, I hated with ever fiber in my body. It was difficult for me to fathom that somebody could desire something I despised so much but I digress. Ultimately all "parties" agreed on a short sale. My credit score would likely be hurt just as much as a foreclosure but at least I wouldn't have to live in hell for another year.

I ended up finally finding a job (at a company I will keep to myself and at a time I will keep to myself and moved to a location which I will keep to myself). As the months (i.e. 3 of them) wore on I started to panic more and more. Would I come home some night and find the place on fire? What about if I woke up one morning and the basement was filled with water? Then there's the furnace, how much longer will that thing last? It looks like it's as old as the house? I was just waiting for Finagle's law to come into effect...but it never did. For those months nothing ever went wrong. I was shocked. "How could this be?" When everything that could go wrong did for the past year nothing did during the short sale process. The place still stands, the basement is dry, and the furnace works like the day it was installed.

Then I expected some crazy amount of money to be due at closing which I knew would be a huge issue, but it never came. $0 was due and it was all over. So here I sit, in disbelief that I'm finally homeless.

Fin...

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NealGrosskopf.com 2009 Year In Review

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:05:00 -0600

Well here is my stereotypical year in review blog post. You can also view last year's post. Overall, my site had a great year. Traffic was up almost 200% compared to last year. Almost all of this is due to the articles that I wrote. I also found Twitter to be a great help in increasing traffic. Here were a couple tweets by some high profile twitter users regarding my site this year:

Smashing Magazine - 106,556 Followers
Nicholas Patten (NY Designer) - 37,470 Followers
Elijah Manor (Co-host of The Official jQuery Podcast) - 31,569 Followers
Alex Puig (Twittexperts.com) - 30,378 Followers
jQuery (Official Twitter Account) - 16,436 Followers
Chris Coyier (CSS-Tricks.com) - 14,346 Followers

I was also featured on cssglobe.com and 456bereastreet.com.

2009 Statistics for NealGrosskopf.com

Total Visits: 95,830 (32,580) +194.14%
Total Pageviews: 165,086 (61,301) +169.30%
Most Popular Page: CSS Browser Hacks For Firefox, Opera, Safari & Internet Explorer 24,834 (Same, 16,690 pageviews)
Most Visits in a Single Day: May 12th with 1,831 (October 10th with 1,371 visits)

Top Search Phrases:

Compared to last year, most of my top searches on my site were related to articles I wrote. This is due to my SEOing of the articles.

firefox css hack: 661
opera css hack: 556
jquery content slider: 387
css hack for firefox: 313

Visits By Region

My site improved the most internationally while in Wisconsin I had sort of a poor year. I consider most Wisconsin visitors to be people that know me personally.

Wisconsin
3,633 (3,890) -6.42%

US
32,866 (13,733) +139.32%

International
62,964 (18,847) +234.08%

Target Sites

This includes sites such as Digg, Delicious, Twitter etc. These are sites that I market my articles to. As you can see, I improved my targets sites immensely in the last year:

15,856 (2,734) +479.96%

Wrapping It Up

Due to my work situation for the last couple months of 2009, I ran out of ideas to write articles on. Because of this I sort of ran out of momentum towards the end of the year. My goal throughout the year was to break 100,000 visits and I came up 5,000 short. For 2010, I'll set that same goal and hopefully break it this time around.

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Protips: Job Hunting 2.0

Neal Grosskopf — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:51:00 -0600

Well, I've spent approximately one month searching for a job and about 3 weeks without one. I doubt I'm anywhere near a 'pro' yet but there are a few things I've learned along the way that I think might be useful to others without jobs. As an aside, a protip is sort of an internet meme which apparently goes back to a Doom video game guide which gave an overly obvious 'protip' (see picture to the right for the humor).

Protip: Networking

The first place I looked was within my inner circle of friends within the web community. Having worked at a couple different companies in the past few years I first checked there. I also have a couple friends in the area, on Twitter, that I checked with. Here's a great example of a tweet I followed up on. Also, if you let people know that you're looking for a job, often times they'll keep an extra set of eyes open for you, doubling your search effort. I found out about one job due to a co-worker hearing it on the radio and scribbling it on a piece of paper for me.

Protip: RSS Feeds!

I found many, many jobs via RSS feeds. If you're not familiar with RSS feeds yet, they're sort of like being sent an email every time something on a website gets updated. Check out this video which explains them in more detail. Sometimes it requires a little digging, but most big name sites have RSS feeds now. Careerbuilder, Monster, Craigslist, Dice & Jobster all have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to. I've even created a Career Builder RSS Feed Generator on my site if you want to get started. By subscribing to RSS feeds I'm alerted of roughly 80 jobs per day from around Wisconsin.

Protip: Optimize Your Resume

I would estimate that Careerbuilder probably has the highest amount of job postings. Because of this, the better you are at using it, the more exposed you can become for future employers. An old co-worker of mine discovered that you can apply search engine optimization techniques to your Careerbuilder resume by sprinkling in a few keywords here and there. This works great for programming languages that you may know or have worked with, but may also apply to other sought after skills in your specific industry.

For me it was essentially tossing in every programming languages I have ever used i.e.: HTML, CSS, ASP, ASP.NET, SQL, PHP, XML, XSL, VBScript, VB.NET, JavaScript, jQuery, Java, C++.

By doing this, HR workers looking for candidates will often search on one of these keywords and my resume will likely show up in the results.

Protip: Bumping Your Resume To The Top

Another trick I learned was Careerbuilder sorts resumes by the last modified date. This means you may have a perfectly relevant resume but if you haven't updated it in a month, other resumes might be showing up before yours. To solve this, try to make a slight modification to your resume each day to keep it fresh. It could be something as simple as moving a sentence around.

I discovered this on accident. Basically I hadn't updated my resume in a long time and I noticed very few people were looking at it. Then when I was told that I lost my job, I made a few changes to it. The next day my 'view counter' had gone up dramatically (see below).

Protip: Develop A Schedule For Each Day

This is something I had good intentions with when I was finally unemployed, but I had a hard time sticking with it. Originally I made a schedule that I could adhere to each day to 'keep me busy'. My original schedule looked something like this:

7:30 - wake up
8:30 - work out
9:30 - look for job
11:00 - free time
12:00 - lunch
1:00 - learn new web technology
2:00 - free time
3:00 - look for job
...

What I found was I was starting to stay up maybe, a half an hour later each night and was starting to wake up later each day. This can turn into a bad habit (especially when you have people calling you at 9:00 in the morning to schedule an interview). To counter-act this, I recommend setting your alarm clock each day and trying to stick to a schedule if you can do it.

Protip: Document Everything & Stay Organized

You might find that you're applying for dozens of jobs. After awhile it gets hard to keep track of everything you've applied to. If you apply for a job, and do not hear back from somebody within a week, I'd recommend emailing them to check on the status of your application. If you keep an excel spreadsheet of all the jobs you've applied for and the date, as well as the contact information, this will help you stay on schedule. I'd also would save a copy of the job posting of each job I applied for. The reason being, is many times jobs will expire and you will no longer be able to view the posting. If that company called you for an interview it'd be pretty hard to prepare for it without the posting.

In Closing...

Well hopefully this blog post was helpful. Losing a job sucks and if there's anytime you need to give it 110% it's now. Thanks for reading!

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On The 'Hunt'

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:13:32 -0600

Well it's that time of the year again...deer hunting season! Although this year brings a different kind of hunting for me than in years past. First I'll start with deer hunting.

This is my second year hunting up at our cabin in Bowler, WI. There typically aren't many deer up in Bowler, but since our cabin has a lot of sentimental value to it, I enjoy hunting there more than anywhere else.

It's sort of interesting to think that I'm the third generation (possibly fourth) to be hunting on our 80 acres in Bowler. Sometimes I have to laugh at our techniques though. For instance rather than walking to our tree stands, all four of us hopped on a 4-wheeler and road out. I'm sure my grandpa would shake his head at us if he were still alive today. Also, rather than dragging a deer a half a mile out of the woods, we drove a truck in there and picked it up.

I was talking to my Dad and apparently when my grandpa hunted up in Bowler they weren't allowed to use tree stands, but were only allowed to hunt standing next to a tree, hence the name 'tree stand'. I can imagine this would be a lot harder as you can't see as far from the ground.

Overall it was a good time and after this last week, it was some much needed R&R time for me.

The Other 'Hunt'

As I mentioned in the opening of this post, I'm also hunting for a different kind of thing now...a job. I found out Friday that our entire department was being out-sourced to a marketing firm in Milwaukee. I was quite shocked when I first heard the news, but in a strange way I'm sort of excited to be out on the market again. I've enjoyed my time at my job and I've developed myself as a web worker 100x since I started there two years ago.

I've also made a great deal of friends while working there and I will miss them immensely. On the flip side of the coin, I've a pretty personable guy and I'm sure I'll make just as many friends at my next job.

I'm quite confident in myself and my ability as a web worker. My website nealgrosskopf.com is a living testament to my abilities. I'm sure it won't be long until I can help another company's website succeed. Until then I'd like to thank everybody I've worked with at my current job, past jobs and of course my family for helping me throughout this last year. You guys rock!

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Mossy's Transformation

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:13:00 -0600

Well, it's been far too long since my last blog post, in fact I've been neglecting my website too much lately. It's partially due to getting an offer on the house in late October and I was pretty busy trying to get things straight for that.

So as of late I've been diversifying my interests. One of them has been playing guitar almost non-stop lately. Another is watching "The Office" on TBS which seems to constantly be on (I've never got into that show until recently). Finally my other new interest is hunting and of course guns. And it only took me 153 words to get to the point of this blog.

For well over a year now, I've been wanting to "mod" my Mossberg 500 ASG shotgun. To do it, it wouldn't cost me a great deal of money, but over the past year it was enough that I decided I would hold off from doing it until the house got sold. I looked at it sort of like a present for finally getting it sold. After realizing that I exhibited great patience over that time period and rather then waiting 2-3 years for the house to sell, I decided to jump the gun so to speak.

Before:

Here's my gun before: a regular old hunting shotgun. My Dad and I (mostly my Dad) took this apart and turned it into a sweet home defense gun. We added what is called a top-folding stock to it. This essentially makes the gun smaller so that it can be shot from the hip. The stock is the part of the gun that is typically made of wood and is pressed against the shooter's shoulder. It also comes with a pistol grip which makes it easier to hold.

The next thing we added was a barrel shroud which wraps around the barrel of the gun. It has small holes in it that allows the barrel to breath while preventing the shooter from touching the hot barrel.

After that we swapped out the wooden forend to a black composite one. The forend is the part of the pump shotgun that you move back and forth to load a new shell. This was pretty much just a cosmetic change as it would look sort of silly with a wooden grip while the rest of the gun is black.

Finally the last change we made was to add a shell shot holder to the folding stock. This adds another 5 shells to the gun bringing it's capacity to 11 when fully loaded.

After:

Here it is after all the modifications. This photo doesn't really do it justice so I took some really sweet artistic photos with my digital camera. I added these to my Wallpapers section and also on Flickr. Pretty sweet photos, eh? Also, I added some photos to my Photo Gallery showing it being taken apart and also after I shot at some pumpkins leftover at my parents place from Halloween.

Why?

Well first of all it looks totally cool and is much more fun to shoot. Second of all I was tired of waiting. I made myself wait a year and it's true that the longer you wait for something, the more you'll enjoy it. Overally I'm very happy with the gun and look forward to shooting it some more.

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Oh Deer!

Neal Grosskopf — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:38:00 -0500

Well, after shooting a deer last season, tracking it and never finding it I felt a bit let down about hunting. I hate to injure an animal and let it go to waste (I.e not get any meat from it). This year was my year for redemption.

I woke up at 4:45 this morning (on a normal Saturday I'd have another 7-8 hours to go for sleep) and got ready. We were out in a friend's deer stand around 6ish. It was still much too dark to hunt but supposedly you have to get out there early and then stay real quiet before shooting time so they come out from their hiding spots to eat.

After waiting maybe 45 minutes I spotted what I thought was two deer eating out in a field. Then I got out my scope out and looked closer. Sure enough there were two deer out there. One bigger than the other. Dad and I spent about 5 minutes ensuring they were does (since you can't shoot bucks right now) and then I got ready to shoot. Having remembered last year I aimed a bit further in the midsection of the deer to make sure I didn't graze it. I pulled the trigger, then deer fell down and ran off. After that I saw the smaller doe run away and then what I thought was my doe full out sprinting into another field.

Dad and I headed out to the spot we saw it last and then began tracking it. I sort of enjoy tracking deer, it reminds me of a crime scene investigation where you're looking for blood droplets on the ground and following them. Unlike last year this deer was making it easier on us and after about 15 minutes of tracking we found it laying in some tall grass. Yay my first deer!.

Most people that deer hunt want a giant buck with big antlers. I on the other hand just hunt for the food. Hunting deer is a relatively cheap source of food. For a $24 license you can shoot two deer. From my one deer alone today I got 52 packs of meat which one pack is usually enough for supper for me. That means I just nabbed 52 dinners for 50 cents! If I shoot another deer that goes down to 25 cents a meal. That's the price of Ramen Noodles, lol. I'm also having some of it made into hamburger which will raise the price a bit but regardless it's a cheap dinner.

Having just had $600 in car repairs I'm only a medium life problem away from being broke so cheap food is right up my alley.

Overall it was an exciting day and some good quality time with my Dad. I'm happy to have a Dad who will take me out and teach me about these kind of things since I'm pretty much a city slicker. I'll probably go out again during opening weekend up north since that's always a fun time.

Neal 1, Doe 0

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Cars & Calories

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:17:00 -0500

Well I'm happy to say, my car search is over. I'm a car owner again. It's been about 6 months of borrowing my Mom & Dad's car and it was definitely time to give them back their car. Before jumping into what I bought I'd like to talk a bit about my method for finding a new (used) car.

Online Good, Offline Bad

At first I decided to check out some local car dealerships in Oshkosh. That was pretty much a futile effort because I simply couldn't find a car at a dealership that was within my price range (poor). I wasted a night doing that and then decided to turn to the internet(s).

I tried a couple different sites but finally settled on Autotrader.com. The great thing about this site was I could get really really specific with my searches. I already knew the exact types of car I wanted (Ford ZX2, Toyota Camry, Toyota Corolla or Nissan Altima). I liked Autotrader but I was too lazy to check the stupid site everyday.

RSS Feeds For The Win!

I then moved to Craigslist thinking I might get a better deal on there, since Autotrader was mostly dealers. The great thing about Craigslist is every search you do on the website comes with an RSS feed. (Note the auto-discovery RSS feed icon in your browser is a broken link...Craigslist fail!) Here's an example of a feed I subscribed to - ZX2

With RSS feeds every time somebody posted a new car listing, I would be notified immediately in Google Reader.

Car #1

The first car I looked at was a 99 Ford Escort ZX2. It only had 70,000 miles on it with power windows, locks, etc. On paper it sounded like a great, affordable car. When the Cragislist poster replied to my inquiry I happened to get their first and last name. Naturally, I did a Google Search on the person of interest only to discover they were recently in court testifying against a friend who had accidentally killed their boyfriend! Naturally my next step was the totally awesome Wisconsin Circuit Court website where I discovered the seller had a long list of offenses, some even with the car I was looking at!

So I took a half day vacation and my Dad and I headed to Manitowoc to look at the car. It ended up being a huge failure. The car had hail damage all over it, the driver-side mirror was held on with a deck screw, the bumper cover was held on with bailer wire, the windshield wiper switch was snapped off and finally the hot/cold knob was laying on the console with tape on the back of it (the seller was trying to hide the fact that it was broken off). With so much fail in one car we ended up not even making an offer on it and just walked away.

Car #2

Having wasted a half of day of work already I was starting to worry about my car search. Checking my RSS feeds again a few nights later I noticed a car listed as being from New London. This sparked my interest. It was a 1997 Toyota Camry but was a few hundred dollars more than I wanted to spend. Regardless I ended up calling about it and the next day Tyler and I checked it out. Tyler thoroughly looked it over so I made an offer. The guy ended up rejecting my offer so I talked to my parents and they loaned me a couple hundred bucks. (Note I could afford the car, just didn't have enough cash on me at the time).

So I'm now the proud owner of a 1997 Toyota Camry. The car has 99,000 miles on it, power everything and rides really nice! It's also a larger car (which I like) but also gets good gas mileage since it's only a 4-cylinder. It's not perfect though. I'm already taking it in to get the tires balanced and I think a strut might be going bad on it as well. Regardless I think it should be a good car for me. I also posted a few picture in my Photo Gallery so check it out.

Enjoy Saves the Day's Cars & Calories via iMeem.

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My New Home!

Neal Grosskopf — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:50:34 -0500

I'm happy to announce that I have a new home. Before you get excited (thinking that I sold my house, which I assure you I haven't) I'm actually referring to the new home of my website nealgrosskopf.com. After almost 4 years with the hosting company 1&1, I've finally switched. For the entire month of July my site was going down left and right. After contacting my old company 1&1 over 7 times with them doing nothing to fix my problem, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I also determined that it wasn't just my site going down by using a service that checks other sites in my shared hosting environment. With this I could tell if it was a server-wide issue or something specific to my script.

On July 15th I started tinkering with PHP via Portable XAMPP on my computer. After that I started converting my old site over from Classic ASP to PHP. Then on July 22nd I signed up with the hosting company FatCow.com and bought the domain name HtmlB.org (a combination of HTML and Borg...from Star Trek). It was also a very short domain name and a domain hack so I figured I could do something with it someday.

I finished converting the site this Friday the 14th, after about 3 weeks of stressful nights at home programming non-stop. Then, on Saturday I started changing all my 1&1 DNS settings. For whatever reason, 1&1 sticking with their usual lousy customer service, decided to take two days to update my DNS settings which I finally got notice tonight (Sunday, August 16th) at 6:23pm that the DNS switchover was finished!

1&1 Fail

Like I mentioned 1&1 was failing me majorly. I even completely ceased writing articles and promoting my site, which usually results in only getting less than 200 visits a day, yet the site still went down. If you still don't believe me take a look at a graph from Google's Webmaster Tools showing how Google's crawl of the site came to a screeching halt in the beginning of June/July:

AreMySitesUp.com

Next I started using a service called AreMySitesUp.com which will basically check your website once every hour to see if its up. What I found is that my site was going down every hour and often times for 10-15 minutes at a time. If the service found that your site was down, it would then do a couple follow-up pings to see when it comes back up again. By finding out that my site was going down (even more than I was aware of), I started converting it to PHP at an even faster rate.

FatCow

So far my I have a high opinion of FatCow as a host. A week after I signed up with them, they actually bothered to call me to see how things were going. I was pretty impressed with this. I also feel that their online control panel is quite robust with features allowing me to customize my site however I want.

PHP

I also feel pretty comfortable with PHP+MySQL now. There will still probably be some issues popping up on my site from time to time, but I'm tracking all the errors that occur and trying to address them as they come up.

If you run into any problems let me know.

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Summerfest 2009

Neal Grosskopf — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:52:06 -0500

Well, my 4th of July weekend is over so I thought I'd write a blog about it. Sunday (the 5th) I went to Summerfest with my friend Mike. Looking back through my records, I haven't been to a single Summerfest since 2004, which is quite sad. Now that I'm single again, I've found myself able to go to more things than I had in the past, and I think Summerfest was a causality for the past three years.

I primarily went to Summerfest to see Reel Big Fish, a Ska band that I've liked since 9th grade. The only other band I was semi-interested in wasRelient K. I originally saw Reel Big Fish in Oshkosh way back in the day at Waterfest (June 29th, 2004 to be exact). I don't think Waterfest has had a single Punk/Ska band since then so it was exciting to go to a show again.

Relient K

I have seen Relient K once before at Lifest in Oshkosh (July 9th, 2006) which was a pretty good show back then. The Relient K show this time around was sort of sucky. Probably the worst thing about it was we were stuck up against the bleachers and people were walking in and out past us the entire time. There was barely any standing room available so it was sort of annoying with people nudging by us. The other thing that probably made the Relient K show less fun for me was they played a lot of their new songs that I didn't recognize.

Reel Big Fish

After that show we headed over to the Reel Big Fish stage. By the time we got there all the bleachers were filled so we got as close as we could in the standing room only area. Little did I know, the area Mike and I were standing at would be the main mosh pit area.

Once RBF started playing, our area immediately went crazy and people were jumping and moshing like crazy. I was a bit startled at first because I wasn't expecting it so I got pushed up against the fence that was the edge of the summerfest grounds. I stayed in that spot for a song or two and then got into the pit with everyone else when RBF played a couple old songs that I really liked. Some other moments from the show was Mike losing his cell phone twice. The first time someone picked it up and 10 minutes later he got it back, and the other time, he dropped it, I noticed a kid picking a phone up and grabbed it myself.

It was probably my first full-blown mosh pit I've been in with people crowd surfing, skanking and thrashing around. People fell down several times, but it never got too out of hand because almost immediately after falling, somebody else would throw down their hand and help them up, and others around them would try to slow down if possible although it usually wasn't.

The RBF show was awesome, and the best show I've been to by far. Below is a set list of songs they played at Summerfest if you're interested. Also I found a guy on YouTube who recorded much of the show so I created a YouTube playlist for Reel Big Fish @ Summerfest 2009.

Turn the Radio Off

Why Do They Rock So Hard?

Cheer Up!

We're Not Happy 'Til You're Not Happy

Don't Start a Band - [LIVE]
The Bad Guy - [LIVE]

Monkeys For Nothin' And The Chimps For Free

I'm Her Man - [LIVE]
Another F.U. Song - [LIVE]

Fame, Fortune, And Fornication

Other

Take On Me - [LIVE]

Overall it was a great time and hopefully I'll get the chance to go again next year. Below is a picture I found on Wikipedia of RBF, and ironically Aaron is wearing the same white suit and the stage looks pretty much the same as the show I was at in Summerfest so I thought I'd include that on here:

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Soundtrack of a Divorce

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:58:57 -0500

Well, it's over (although not really since I've pre-written this blog post). Throughout my entire divorce I've been tracking the music I've been listening to just out of curiosity, via Facebook's iLike application. The app allows me to choose the songs I'm listening to which I've done for the past 7 months now. And now on to this glorious 7 month in the making blog post -

November - The Beginning

It all started November 1st, 2008, the day we went our separate ways. The soundtrack, literally, to this brief moment in time was hands down the CD "Class of 98 by 98 Mute"

The song I listened to on repeat was "Short Fuse" because that's more or less how I felt for that hour or so. I also listened to "Election Year" a lot because, it was after all election time, and that song captured much of the same energy and anger that "Short Fuse" also had. 98 Mute is a 90's hardcore punk band and I usually only listen to them when in a terrible mood.

November - Second Half

After a more hardcore styled start to my 7 month journey I moved on to some of Blink-182's more emo-ish songs and also started listening to Creed for the first time in my life. Most of the Creed songs were quite depressing and I've always felt, that to get over depression, you need to "fully go through it" i.e get it all out of your system usually by crying it out. The Creed songs pretty much sucked it right out of me especially "One Last Breath". I also listened to "One" & "My Own Prison" quite a bit.

December

After much of that very depressing music for some reason I moved on to something a bit more upbeat with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones (MMB) & Bob Marley. My MMB CD I was listening to was a CD I owned for a long time but never bothered to listen to. I found that many of the songs on it were really good and this cheered me up briefly.

Then there was my "One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley & the Wailers" CD which I had got from my brother in-law Nick. This would be a reoccurring CD throughout the entire divorce. Whenever life got hard I turned to my Bob Marley CD. "Three Little Birds", was my theme song and the song Will Smith listens to throughout the movie "I Am Legend". The song also had great, reassuring lyrics such as:

Don't worry, about a thing. Cause every little thing, gonna be alright

Bob Marley calmed me down and kept me straight lined throughout the whole process. This was a CD I listened to pretty much the entire 7 months.

December - January

I next moved on to another CD I owned but didn't listen to frequently which was "The Swiss Army Romance by Dashboard Confessional". This is an all acoustic CD which is something I usually don't listen to but the lyrics on this CD are just awesome and the acoustic guitars play in an unusual way. One song that really stuck out was "Turpentine Chaser". At this time I let my guard down and started noticing girls again, which was a huge mistake for me at this juncture. I think the lyrics below explain how I was feeling, essentially just wanting to being with someone just for the sake of it but at the same time, really just wanting to be left alone.

All I want, is not to need you now / All I want are vows of silence now

Another great song was "Again I Go Unnoticed" which ties into what I was talking about above. After my stint with Dashboard Confessional I realized that being single is really the best and only choice for me.

January - February

Now it was January, which was below zero almost the entire month! (Most people seem to forget that now in June and feel like complaining about 60 degree weather). The car I was driving at the time sucked really really bad at playing CDs when it was cold out. For some reason the only CD I was able to get to play was "Full Collapse by Thursday". Thursday is an emo band or more like the emo band. Their music is very depressing, but at the same time I think that accurately describe me during those cold months.

The song I listened to over and over again on this CD was hands down "Standing On The Edge Of Summer". Just the title alone, described me, i.e. waiting for my divorce to be final in summer. This first set of lyrics reminded me how fast the years leading up to my marriage went, and then how quickly it seemed to end:

Driving in your car, Miss the stop sign, fall in love...Just to get knocked down

The next set of lyrics alludes to how fragile my relationship was and the fact that we had recently bought a house:

In this house of cards we're all holding hearts and spades. (One breath, one step could knock it all down)

And more alliterations to "a deck of cards" and the demise of our relationship:

When the people you love get lost in the shuffle, (When you leave, you leave nothing but broken hearts)

I also listened to "Stay What You Are by Saves the Day" a lot during this period. Their lyrics are a bit more angry and less elegant than Thursday's but still a good listen.

March & April

For the months of March and April I started listening to some more positive upbeat music in the form of pop-punk. I discovered a great Blink-182-esque CD from Britain called "Welcome to Loserville by Son of Dork". I also started listening to my "Mmhmm CD by Relient K" and later my "A Hangover You Don't Deserve by Bowling for Soup". All of these are really poppy upbeat CDs. I think I was doing this to try to counteract my less than optimistic outlook on my job because it seemed certain that our company was going to go through another set of layoffs. By April the layoffs didn't come but I stuck with the pop-punk music.

May

For the month of May I continued to listen to pop-punk but for this month it was some of my faster, more technical guitar laden music. This was due to the fact that I started playing guitar again, for the first time since early November. Two of my all-time favorite speed pop-punk CDs are "Cheshire Cat by Blink-182" & "Perhaps, I Suppose by Rufio". I admire Tom Delonge's work on Cheshire Cat and still feel that it's the best Blink-182 CD despite some of the more mainstream CDs they have released.

The Month of May was a relatively exciting month because I was getting a lot of movement on my house and the divorce appeared to be moving along smoothly without any problems.

June - The Final Month

The countdown to June 15th began but almost as quickly as I started the timer, a giant roadblock appeared. Despite the problems I was facing, unlike earlier in the year when I would have turned to some angrier music I kept my cool and turned to Ska, which is like really fast reggae with horns and is generally very upbeat and happy. I turned to my CDs "Throwing The Game by Lucky Boys Confusion" & "Why Do They Rock So Hard by Reel Big Fish". "Why do they Rock so Hard?" was the first ska CD I ever bought and I still consider it the best. It is also the most upbeat CD I own and it's almost impossible to feel sad or depressed when listening to it. The "Throwing The Game" CD is also very upbeat.

Today

And so that brings me to today, 7 months later. Looking back I can see a trend with the style of music I listened to through the 7 months. In the beginning it was angry, hardcore punk. Then depressing emo during the winter months moving on to happier pop-punk during spring and finally upbeat, happy ska once summer hit. The style of music I listened to had less to do with the season and more with me healing from the breakup.

The Soundtrack to My Divorce

Well I hope you enjoyed my little research experiment and I applaud you for caring enough to read this far! Perhaps you've even bothered to click-through on a few CDs to get inside my musical psyche. Thanks for reading!

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Uncle Neal

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:30:34 -0500

Well, I am officially an uncle. My sister Kate, gave birth to a baby boy June 6th (D-Day) at 3:30am named Liam Daniel Hurst. He weighed 7lb 11oz. He came about two weeks early so I was a bit surprised when my mom called to say Kate was in the hospital. For some reason I always hear about false alarms with child berthing so I wrote it off as that at first. She ended up giving berth to him overnight and she seemed to have handled it pretty darn well. Way to go sis!

Believe it or not I've never actually held a baby before (that I can remember) so I decided that he would be the first, being an immediate family member. I just try to be overly cautious with babies, so I held him on a pillow sitting down, and he was all wrapped up good and tight in a blanket.

I posted some pictures of him in my Photo Gallery section and I also posted a video in my Open Videos section. The video may not be too exciting but it does give a good representation of him which is all I was interested in.

The thought just occurred to me, maybe someday when he's older, he'll read this exact blog post online. How cool! Hello from 2009 dude!

Well that's all for now.

Fin.

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Off The Grid

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:17:44 -0500

Well, my three day weekend is over and it's back to work again. For Memorial Day weekend I went up north with my family to our cabin in Bowler, WI. It's nice to finally be able to go up to the cabin again. For the past several years I probably made it up there less, than I have in the past couple months, so I'm making up for lost time.

I rode our four-wheeler around quite a bit, even running it through some big mud puddles and such. I also got the chance to take a bunch of photos and shoot some videos of the cabin and natural surroundings. To check out some photos from this weekend take a look at my photo gallery section. I also added some new photos to my wallpaper section of my website.

I finally got to do some shooting up at the cabin and we also did a 21 gun salute for my Grandpa, whose ashes were spread up north, and for other veterans. Overall it was a great weekend.

In other news, I saw the new Star Trek movie the other weekend and it was pretty awesome. I'd recommend anybody remotely interested in Star Trek go and check it out. Even if you don't like Star Trek I think there's a chance you could still like the movie as it was made to appeal to more people than previous work. I wrote up a review on it if you want to know more.

In house news, I had three separate people look at my house last week. I'm not really sure why I had so many at once but I don't think much will come out of them. Only one showing looked promising, which the people said they were interested in the house but just put their house on the market.

Live Long and Prosper

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10% Fired

Neal Grosskopf — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:09:54 -0500

I usually shy away from writing too much about work happenings on my blog, mainly because I used to switch jobs so often in the past that I tried not to expose too much to future employers, but I've more or less settled down now and would like to continue working at my current job for as long as they'll permit me to.

With that said, we found out Friday that they are cutting everyone's salaries by 10% for the next 3 months, and possibly further if sales don't improve. Our company seemed to be doing ok, at least from what limited knowledge I had. We had two layoffs back last November & December but no further layoffs since then. I was a bit surprised, and disheartened when I found out my paycheck would be 10% less each month.

I suppose the alternative would have been laying off another 30 or so people and our staff, at least in my department, is already bare bones with each of us very specialized in our job duties. This leads me to wonder who we could have possibly even let go had that been the route taken.

Mint.com To The Rescue...Sort Of

The 10% less is going to be really hard on me to make my monthly payments. In April, I made a major effort trying to scrape up some more money using my favorite budget tool Mint.com. Mint.com imports your debit card transactions and groups them into categories. You can then trend these categories from month to month seeing where your money went. I highly recommend the site for someone keeping a tight budget as it helps you identify where all your money is going. By doing this you can then make the necessary adjustments in the following months to spend less in that particular category. It also allows tagging, which I use to identify excess or wasteful spending. For the month of April I managed to get my excess spending down to $6. In past months it was much, much higher than that. This is what depresses me the most, I spent $6 in excess spending in April only to get my pay cut by 10%.

Car Swap

In April, I also proposed swapping cars with Emily, a deal that benefited both of us. The car I was driving had her name on the title and I was paying her Mom for it. The car she was driving had a higher monthly payment and had both our names on the title. We swapped cars and I sold my car to my Uncle Harry (Thanks Harry!). Since I was carless my parents decided to borrow me their car until I could save up some money for my own. This was to save me $100 a month by not having a car payment anymore.

Who Needs Retirement

The other cost saving measure I took was zeroing out my 401k deduction from my paychecks. I had it at a reasonable amount but in order to save more money a month I bottomed it out.

A Futile Effort

Unfortunately all of this was a futile effort, because I've now taken one step forward and two steps back. I'm probably being melodramatic, but it's my blog so let me whine! I think, with the paycut I'm going to end up being worse off than where I started. It's to bad I could forfeit my health insurance or some other useless benefit that I don't use in order to gain my 10% back, but I guess I'll just have to be even tighter with my money from now on. Heck maybe I can save that $6 in excess spending next month.

Really, the bain of my existence is my house, my life's second biggest mistake. If I could just sell my house, life would be dramatically different. While I really like my house, and being in it, it isn't helping me paying 2x the amount I could pay for a lush apartment.

Well, I think I'm finished complaining for now. Thanks for reading the whole thing.

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Content Is King

Neal Grosskopf — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:46:03 -0500

Well, It's been a full month now since my last blog post so I apologize for not posting something sooner. Frankly, I would post more blog posts, more often, but I don't have a lot to talk about, well I don't have a lot I can talk about.

I thought I would write a blog about my website over the past year now. A little over a year ago it was really just a place for family and friends to chat with one another but that all changed in March of 2008 when I started writing my Geek Speak Articles. Now my website is 10% family and friends (and that's probably even lower now that I lost a family member that posted quite frequently) and 90% Geek Speak Articles.

Content Is King

Take a look at my visits graph from January 2008 to March of 2009. I started writing articles in March of 2008 and we can see what a big difference that made in my traffic:

Then in October of 2008 it all changed with my CSS Browser Hacks article which basically shot my website into a whole nother' echelon. I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you want to have a successful website, you need to give people a reason to visit it, and I've found that content is king. The articles that I wrote are the primary reason people visited my site and continue to be.

Search Engine Optimization

Another big contributor to my site's success has been the search engine optimization (SEO) that I've applied to it. Basically what this is, is using certain words and phases in my articles to try to rank higher in the search engines such as Google. If a user searches for the same or a similar phrase that I've used then my website will show up higher.

The graph below shows that people who visit my website and used a search engine has been rising steadily, especially after I started writing articles:

The Future?

The future of my website will probably entail having to switch my hosting options. Currently I have the cheapest hosting through 1and1 which costs me about $4 a month. At the rate my website is growing I'll have to upgrade or switch to another provider in the next year or so. Another headache will that, I will eventually need to stop using Microsoft Access as my database backend and use something more scalable (and works with classic asp, mind you).

And remember...content is king.

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Kind Words & Website Launches

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:10:34 -0500

I was checking my recent comments RSS feed today and noticed two new comments, which is how I am able to so quickly respond to people on my website when they post something. What set these comments apart from others is they were very considerate ones compared to most. I figured I'd post them in my blog as a form of thanking the commenter's for giving me a self esteem boost and a good laugh. I also need an example of "quotations" in my blog/article posts because I felt like styling those with my fancy dancy blockquote styling technique.

The first comment comes from Pierre Loubert. (Oh I also forgot this also gives me the chance to show off my new comment styling as well as the ability to link directly to a specific comment).

OK, this has nothing to do with what I am looking for, but I thought I'd tell you how amazing your site design is! Wow, incredible, beautiful and it works in Google Chrome! I like the colors and the transparent "fx"s. Bravo!

I then got a second comment on my "Someone Ripped off My Website's Design! Now What?" article from "Scorned Designer" which if you follow the link he provided, is a pretty comical letter to a competitor that stole their web design.

Neal, You've already handled it pretty professionally, with a much cooler head than most people would probably approach this situation with. I've only seen one more unique way to handle the same situation, when BustedTees, put up a dedication to nerdy shirts, when they borrowed their design.

In website news you may notice, when you hover over this post (on my home page) you will see a "read more" box pop up at the bottom of the post. I added this in with a little JQuery juice. One complaint I've had about my past three renditions of nealgrosskopf.com was that my home page required a lot of vertical scrolling. I tried to fix this with my latest design by doing a two column layout for the home page. I checked my version 2 nealgrosskopf.com design and discovered that it's home page actually required less scrolling than my current one. This angered me as I thought the design would have fixed the problem (which is may, my current content may have just been longer). Anyway, to fix this shortcoming I added a "read more" box to the bottom of my blog posts and reviews, since those are usually my longest blocks of text. If you click on them it should slide down and show the rest of the post. Pretty neat, eh?

Website Launches

Finally, I launched two new websites at work last Friday which I am very excited about. They were both for our consumer line of product, whereas we are primarily a commercial washer & dryer company.

The first website is our Speed Queen Home Laundry website:

The second website is our Huebsch Home Laundry website:

I've been working on both these websites with my co-worker Brian, for several months now, and it feels great to finally get them up there. When we launched both sites last Friday, it was very stressful and things didn't go like we planned. It also seemed like people were more interested in telling me what was wrong with the site rather than what they liked about them, but I've gotten past that and am now proud of them once again.

I should point out that both sites should have the same or simliar content between them simply because one site is marketed towards Canada while the other is for the U.S. Both of these sites were also where I first learned JQuery so I'll always have a few memories with them regarding that.

Check them out and let me know if you like them.

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Neal is... Status Update

Neal Grosskopf — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:19:39 -0600

Ok, it's been awhile since I wrote a blog last (almost a whole month it appears). Life has been crazy, lately, especially at work and I've been pretty stressed out. For the past week or so I've been listening to my "Bob Marley - Greatest Hits" CD alot. Reggae is really slow and relaxing music and it has helped me be less stressed out, I think on some level.

At work we're launching several new websites (many which I'm extremely proud of) and they are all on deadlines. I have two going up next Friday, the 13th (ironic date eh?) and I will post a link to those immediately for all to see. Both sites are where I got started on JQuery with and since then I have been using it alot in different capacities.

Speaking of JQuery I had a hit article last week when I wrote about - CSS Horizontal And Vertical Align JQuery Plugin. Because of that article I ended up nabbing 790 visits last thursday on my site which was really exciting.

Then earlier this week I was checking my Google Analytics stats and noticed some strange URLs in the page report. I then discovered somebody ripped off my site's web design and were going to use it for a client of their's. I then proceeded to call the company up and had a talk with them. Ultimately what happened, is the company ditched the design, lost the client and fired a developer consultant. On the flip side I wrote an article about my experience which then brought in another 758 visits this tuesday so my website has been really really busy lately, even to the point of going down more than normal.

Also, a friend and former co-worker of mine; Eric Lightbody just launched his new website ericlightbody.com. The site runs off of WordPress, but Eric did the majority of the coding himself. I've been pestering him for the last several months to finish his website and now it's finally up. He did a really great job so everyone check him out, and if you like it, subscribe to his RSS feed.

Switching over to personal life, this weekend I was really busy as well. On saturday I went to a gun show in Oshkosh with my dad. I got a picture of a FN-P90 which is basically the RC-P90 from Goldeneye/Perfect Dark. Then after that I went to the Parade of Homes with my parents which I've posted some pictures of those in my photo gallery as well. Then if I hadn't done enough Tyler called me up and wanted to know if I wanted to go see Friday the 13th with him in Madison. I wasn't too keen on driving down there and back in one night so I ended up staying the night down there in his sweet new apartment.

All my running around this weekend was fun, but depressing at the same time because money is getting really tight for me. I changed my withholding allowances at work and it has pretty brought me to $0 leftover per month now. There is also alot of chatter at work that could ultimately lead to me making less money a month which would then put me in the red. Hopefully it doesn't come to that so let's keep our fingers crossed.

On house news, I've had numerous showings. Almost every weekend I get kicked out of my house at least one day either for an open house or a showing. So far I haven't received an offer on it but it does appear that things are picking up a bit. I really don't want to live in my house anymore. For the first week after things hit the fan I was considering it, but at that point I really hadn't looked over my financial situation yet. After realizing that having no money with a nice house or having money with a typical apartment, the choice seemed pretty obvious that I had to sell my house....well our house since it's only 50% my house, I'm just the caretaker, and the dude making the payments right now. I'll miss it but it is really just a giant burden and is stressing me out alot! My house + work + divorce is definitely taking a toll on me and I hope the madness will be over soon.

Wow, I managed to ramble on alot there, until next time...

Fin.

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Website Updates

Neal Grosskopf — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:58:55 -0600

I made a few changes to my website so I figured I'd blog about it. Maybe while I'm rambling on about it I'll find something else to write about as well.

Anyway(s) I recently started tinkering with a JavaScript framework at work called JQuery. I'm not completely sure why I picked JQuery, perhaps to be different than Eric who did most of our current JavaScript (which I have no idea what's going on in most the code he wrote) or it could be because I've been a RSS subscriber of John Resig for a long time and inadvertently found out, he is the creator of JQuery. I think my main reason is that JQuery seems tailored for CSS people like myself, and I like how small the framework can be (about 50K).

While I'm no expert at it yet, I have figured out how to do a few tricks here and there. I added some nice effects to my toolbar, navigation, and actions dropdown menus. I personally like the toolbar effect the most which you can demo at the top of my screen (it's a little green & white star). Some the other effects I had to pull from IE6 & IE7 since they were choking on the transparent pngs (yes I know there are fixes out there for this but this is a different situation).

I also have implemented my new code block styling technique which I have been working on and off for a few months now. This is another one of those things that won't work in IE6 or IE7 but I have reverted the old styling to those browsers as a fallback. For people with browsers that don't suck you will now get line numbers for code blocks. This is accomplished with some unordingary CSS via css counters and css generated content.

I'm also pretty excited about my CSS Diagnostics article. It got picked up by a pretty well known web designer by the name of Roger Johansson at the website 456bereastreet.com. I've been an avid reader of his blog and mentioned to him awhile back about my CSS Diagnostics article. A few months later I was checking my RSS feeds and noticed he mentioned me!

Last Thursday my site got 407 visits and on Friday I got 458 visits. This weekend I have enjoyed higher visits than normal as well. I also saw my RSS subscription counter go up to 35 subscribers. Due to this I quickly pumped out another article hoping to keep the subscribers happy. This is probably the second biggest event my website has seen since I've started writing articles and I'm very excited about it.

Writing articles on cascading style sheets is one of those areas in life that makes me proud and I would someday like to have some sort of impact on the CSS community. Having had a few of my articles get picked up on larger sites is a good start for me to achieve that goal.

As far as site content updates go, I finally added a new review after months of letting that go, and I added a new video of the monster truck show we went to this weekend in Green Bay.

The show was fun. Tyler had car troubles and we had to pick him up on the way there and ended up getting there 30 minutes late. I was impressed this year with the motocross bikes as they seemed to pull of some more risky stunts than they have in the past years.

Well that's all for now.

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Relationship Ramblings

Neal Grosskopf — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:00:10 -0600

Well it's been about a month since I've posted a new blog which is a really long time for me. I probably would have posted one earlier but I didn't have much to write about. Probably the only life-related news I have to talk about is 1. my sister is having a boy and 2. I will be a single man again June 15th @ 3pm.

It's been a roller coaster ride on the relationship side of things. For the first few weeks I was getting over the shock of coming home and being the only person there (and eventually the only life form there.) My first reaction was "crap, I need wife 2.0.1.4" (the third and fourth digits are a security update). That wore off shortly and I started whole heartedly embracing the single life, which minus a few bumps towards the end of January, is still my opinion. I find that if you surround yourself with other people's failed relationships, you enjoy being single a lot more. Ironically most people aren't even aware that their relationship will eventually fail, but from the outside you can usually tell. After all only 50% of marriages are going to work out.

It's all those little things I hear people in relationships complaining about that get to me. You know "X doesn't let me watch that TV show on Thursdays" or "sorry I can't hang out with you because I'm stuck doing __ with X" or "I'm in a bad mood today because I got in a fight with X last night and slept on the couch. "

One way to look at it is I work 40 hours a week which if you tack on driving time its actually 45 hours a week. That means that I really only have 25 hours during the week and 24 hours on the weekends of time to do what I want with so 49 hours in all. I'm automatically going to want half of that time to do what Neal wants and not what some other person wants me to do, so really there's only 25 hours a week that I need to keep myself entertained to be happy and lead a fulfilling life. That's only 3.5 hours a day which isn't that difficult for me to occupy with something to do. It could be as easy as doing side website jobs or calling up my friends or family and seeing what they're doing.

The moral of my story is when you're in a relationship, you have no free time to do what you want, and when you're single you have too much free time to do what you want. Take your pick.

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NealGrosskopf.com 2008 Year In Review

Neal Grosskopf — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:58:45 -0600

Intro: I was originally going post a crap load of statistics for this post but as of late, I can't movtivate myself enough to gather them all up since pretty much all of my free time has gone to Grand Theft Auto IV now. Regardless here is the unfinished post.

Well another year has passed by for NealGrosskopf.com. This year saw another redesign of my website back in June and I've been staying on track of a redesign every year now. I thought since I have a full year's worth of analytics from Google Analytics, I'd list off a few statistics from 2008 regarding my website. Maybe some of these will surprise and maybe they won't, we'll see.

2008 Statistics for NealGrosskopf.com

Total Visits: 32,580
Total Pageviews: 61,301
Most Popular Page: CSS Browser Hacks For Firefox, Opera, Safari & Internet Explorer with 16,690 pageviews
Most Visits in a Single Day: October 10th with 1,371 visits

Top Search Phrases:

jack handey quotes: 507
jack handy quotes: 352
nealgrosskopf: 73
firefox css hack: 68

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Website Updates

Neal Grosskopf — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:28:03 -0600

I thought I'd write up a blog regarding website updates that I've made recently. I have a great deal of time that I didn't have 2 months ago so I can start making some improvements to my site again and I have been browsing around it a lot lately looking for things to improve.

One example is I have brought back the ability to edit Message Board posts again. It was a page/process that I was too lazy to convert over, back in June when I re-designed my site. A couple weeks ago I converted that feature over. One thing I changed, is I completely threw out the stupid, separate page that people would have to use to edit posts. Instead I created a new, shiny, inline method of editing message board posts. Simply login, and browse to a thread reply and click the "edit" button, this will convert your comment into a textarea inline. After that just hit submit and it will update the comment. I stole this idea from Facebook, and I'm surprised more websites don't do something similar to this.

Also in my designs section, I re-did/deleted several pages. I noticed that a lot of my Geek Speak traffic was heading to my designs section after reading an article, and that section was done very lousy and more or less as an after-thought. Now when you visit the section, it will do a flashy popup box and the page actually contains screenshots of websites I've done rather than just a link to them.

Next, I made the videos in my Open Videos section widescreen. I noticed that YouTube has changed the size of all their video boxes on their site so I figured I would as well. I sort of like it, simply because it fills up my content space better and it looks a bit different than the normal YouTube embeded video box. Make sure to check out some of the new videos I've posted, most which are of me playing guitar (yes, I have a lot of free time, and I like it). On a side note, I've been trying to create some new music lately, and have also been revisiting a lot of songs I wrote in the pre-2005 days.

Another section I looked at on NealGrosskopf.com was my Photo Gallery section. I've noticed a lot of people that come to my website, visit that section. It's probably the second most used section. Depending on what browser you're using, you may see a totally cool hover box show up when you hover over a thumbnail image. I think I spent an entire night creating and tweaking this feature. It uses only CSS and originally I wanted to do it in an even more "CSS" way but the browser support isn't there yet.

Another thing I updated is, I completely ditched the "my photos" pages that were buried in the files section. Most of the photos were from 2005 or 2004 and were of my friends and I or the really early stuff of Emily and I. I decided I didn't want to just throw out all these pictures so instead, I "sucked" them all into my photo gallery. My next problem was I didn't want them to appear as if there were recent photos (because good god, they aren't) so I did some SQL hackery and got them stuck at the end rather than the front of the query. I think this section was also the pre-beta-alpha version of my Photo Gallery so it made sense to just incorporate it into that.

Finally, I have hopefully made my site more "IE6 friendly". I was never able to install Multiple-IEs on my computer because it hasn't been released for Windows Vista yet, but I recently found an even better program for testing in IE which comes with 5.5, 6, 7, and 8 beta! It's called IE-Tester and it is totally awesome. It allows me to open up different IE instances in separate tabs in one browser! This is especially useful for IE6, IE7 and IE8 which can't be installed simultaneously. I've also noticed that is a much more accurate representation of IEs rendering than Multiple-IEs was. My site looks pretty crappy in IE6 and I really don't know why anyone would go through the pain of using that browser, but yeah, I still get 10-20% of people using it.

I'll probably write up a blog next week summarizing Christmas and vacation, and also expect a totally, super, uber cool blog post after the first of the year summarizing 2008 related to my website and life in general.

Seacrest, out.

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