Archive for the 'Friends & Family' Category
Ok, so in a previous post, I mentioned a new Web site that has launched in the Texarkana area, for the Texarkana area. The name of the site is rateTexarkana.com and the owner/developer of the site is no longer anonymous thanks to an article published this past Sunday by the Texarkana Gazette.
The site’s developer and operator is a good friend of mine, Randy Rankin. Randy and I have been working together since around 2001 when we partnered up to buiold an online order tracking system for a company out of Dallas, Texas. Since then, Randy and I have worked together on a number of projects and ideas. Randy is an extremely talented guy with good business ideas and has done an extremely good job with this site, from the development, design ,and the marketing and public relations.
Check out Randy’s site, rateTexarkana.com and let me know what you think. I think it all looks great and works flawlessly! Good job, Randy (if you even read this site any more)!
Until next time…
It has been quite sometime since I have blogged on this site. I guess this can be a little overview of what has been going on since my last post.
I have been playing WoW a lot lately. I really enjoy this game. It is extremely fun getting your character leveled up and meeting new people. The “World” in World of Warcraft is very fitting for this game. The game is indeed like a whole different world. There are tons of people playing this game and a lot of people willing to help you battle the opposing faction as well as complete quests and instances. I am extremely glad I have started playing this game. Now, if there were only more time to play…
I have taken my Alliance Dwarf Hunter on Blood Furnace to level 38. I have some nice weapons that some higher level players have helped me acquire. My armor is good as well. Especially since my brother-in-law, Nfinight, has started leatherworking within the game. That is nice to be able to create items that you can actually use on your character as well as sell to other players within the game. I hope to drop engineering and start blacksmithing soon so I can make weapons for us to use. I just wish I would have started doing blacksmithing sooner and Nfinight would have started doing leatherworking sooner… There’s no telling what types of gear we would be wearing these days.
I’d also like to plug a guild I joined last night on the game, We Have Cookies. This seems to be a pretty laid back guild that enjoys gaming and having a good time playing the game as it was meant to be played.
Well, average admins got slammed again this month. The 10GB of transfer bandwidth was used up by the 9th or 10th of the month. Chris has started parsing the logs for the month to see if there is anything exciting going on that is attributing to this and if anything can be blocked. Surely, there isn’t that many visitors coming to the site… Something fishy is going on around here and I hope we can get to the bottom of it so AA can be available for the 13 people that actually visit the site for legitimate reasons.
Web Development
A project I have been working on is set to go live tomorrow. I have been working on this new site for many weeks now. Those of you that know me personally will know where to find the new site. I’d like to leave that project at that.
Also, I have a friend of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous on this project) has launched a really cool site for the Texarkana area called rateTexarkana.com. I highly recommend all of you “Texarkanians” to visit this site, register, and start rating our businesses around the Texarkana and surrounding areas. His design is really good. The functionality is really good. And, I should start working on this project soon. I look forward to it.
I am still loving CakePHP as a development framework for PHP applications and sites. It just works. I have one project that I am trying to complete that I will more than likely move over to this framework and another for the New Boston Chamber of Commerce in New Boston TX that I am about to start and will use this framework from the ground up on their site.
I am also about finished with the Fruitful Solutions web site. Once that is completed, I will be redeveloping an application that I host (and hope to sell more subscriptions too in the near future) called En Route. This is an extremely cool application that allows businesses and organizations with lobby traffic (vendors, customers, visiting employees, etc.) to be tracked throughout their visit. There are a lot of reporting and notification features that assist the organization using the program with helping their “guests” in a timely fashion.
Photography
My cousin Andrew, a.k.a. Dingo, came down a few weekends ago and took some photos of me getting tipsy down and doing some Spider Man poses as the “gangsta” that I am.
There’s a few more of these shots on my Flickr page.
I also had the opportunity to take some photos of an electrical storm we had here in the Texarkana area a few weeks back.
Since you can’t just point and shoot an electrical storm, I set my camera to continuous mode and held down the shutter button to catch these shots. Needless to say, I had a lot of images that were just black or of clouds with no electrical activity going on. Shooting at night is difficult. I also think that shooting an electrical storm is difficult. But, some of these photos turned out pretty good and you can see more in this photo set on my Flick page.
Musical Preferences for Today - July 15th, 2007
I started the morning off listening to DJ Screw. After I woke up (yes, I went to bed at 6AM… I’m having some issues sleeping these days… Maybe it’s the Red Bull I drink to stay awake during the day) I listened to the iTunes Live Sessions of Five for Fighting, a live album from Maroon 5, and then on to the latest studio release of Finger 11. Those of you that know me know that the last 3 bands I listed are not in my “normal” rotation, so, you’ll be glad to know that I finished off the evening with Hatebreed and Mudvayne. Nice little mix, I’d say.
Until next time…
Bruce and I visited the Apache Trail again this year during my visit. Last year, on my first trip, we made one end of the trail before dark. This year, we started at the opposite end and went all the way to Fish Creek Canyon before turning around and working our way back.
Here are a few photos of Bruce and I at one of the lookout points. We broke out the tripod and prayed that it would stand up through the wind. Knocking your “I paid too much for this camera” camera down just for a few shots would have been bad. but, the photos turned out great in my opinion. Enjoy!
Until next time…
I blogged a while back about my trip to Phoenix, AZ and hit some of the highlights of it. Well, I have finally started moving some of my photos from that trip to my Flickr page. I posted some photos from our (Bruce and I) trip to Crown King, AZ.
Bruce and I went to Crown King and along the way stopped in Cleator, AZ. This trip was a day long and was extremely fun. We went like 25-27 miles on a dirt road. You see, Crown King and Cleator are considered
“living ghost towns”. There are no paved roads to either place and they are way off the beaten path. The population in Cleator is less than 10 (I believe, Bruce correct me if I’m wrong). Crown King has a higher population and I believe it is just over 1,000 (or was it 100… Bruce?! HELP!!!).
Anyway, this trip was very enjoyable and I’d do it again… Dirt roads and all! If you’re ever around the Phoenix area in Arizona and have some time to explore, this would make a very cool trip for a couple or a family… Hell, I’d even do it by myself!
Until next time…
Some of you may know my community blog, averageadmins.com, others may not. If you’ve never visited it, don’t go there now… Or, for the rest of the month of June for that matter. If you are a frequent visitor of the average admins site, you’ll remember last month we had a little issue with bandwidth. Well, this month is no different. It just so happened to strike us as a problem yesterday evening, the 17th of June.
The averageadmins.com web site has 10GB of transfer bandwidth available per month. It was set at 8GB last month and I upped it due to the fact that 8GB didn’t last very long. This month, around the 8th, half of the 10GB was already used. That’s ridiculous if you ask me. I will be doing some research on who is making all of the connections, what type of content they are grabbing, and try to figure out what’s going on. I’ll be posting my progress on here into my “investigation”.
I may have to enlist the skills of Chris to help me further investigate this. He’s a pretty savvy network forensics guy/log parser. Until then, the average admins site will be down for the remainder of the month. If we can determine who is chewing up all of my bandwidth, and block their IP address(es), then I may extend the bandwidth for the month and June and see how it goes… We’ll see.
Until next time…
Flickr Updates
