Hooray for me! My site is now valid CSS and XHTML 1.0 strict according to the World Wide Web Consortium. Why… I think I could pull the ears off a gundar. How much you wanna make a bet I could throw a football over them mountains?
If you missed some of the movie references in that post… do not let your heart be troubled. I’m sure you’re still a really good person.
Chances are you are visiting this site for the first time… because I just sent out a massive email to about everyone I have an email address for announcing my blog (you’re looking at it)… and here you are. Feel free to poke around although there’s not too much to poke yet. I will be making entries fairly regularly so feel free to grab a feed and/or post a comment whenever you like. If you don’t know what a ‘feed’ or ‘blog’ is then click the jumps tab above and do a search using either the Dogpile or WikiPedia forms.
Future additions to this site: Books currently reading, music currently listening, games currently playing, movies currently watching, recommended lists of music - books - games - movies, Amazon.com wishlist, photo gallery and media gallery (music - flash games - programming examples - etc). I may even eventually add some limited advertising on here… not because I’m looking to turn a dime on this, but because websites with advertising - for whatever reason - look more professional.
I appreciate feedback of all types so give me a shout if you get the chance. 
On the blogging front, I completed my Contact page and learned a little about ways to obfuscate my email address from annoying spam-bots. A rudimentary web search will yield mucho hits on protecting yourself from spam scum. Here are three that represented common ways to skin this donkey.
This article, verplant.org/obfumail.shtml, shows how to use CSS to obscure an email address that needs to appear in the body of HTML text on your page. This takes minimal work but won’t help you if you need to hide a mailto: call inside a link tag.
This article here, alicorna.com/obfuscator.html, provides a small utility that will convert your entire email link and display to ASCII coded characters. While this is not 100% foolproof it does stop almost all current spam-bots.
The best method came from here, www.jracademy.com/~jtucek/email/, where another web utility will create a javascript function for you with your email address encrypted using a public/private key combo internal to your webpage. This is VERY strong and very clever… and no spam-bot can touch you. This is the method I used to do my email addresses on my Contact page… can you find them in the source? (Good luck… I even used different primes to create separate key combos for each one)
I got the idea of periodically posting my current desktop wallpaper. I keep quite a collection of them, mostly because I get bored easily and find myself constantly changing them. This is also a good way for me to share from my extensive collection of works that I have so painfully and carefully gleaned from the ether of web-wallpaper-chaos. My current wallpaper featured here is from Musician’s Friend, a web music store I frequent, and should remind you of something if you look closely enough (to me it’s obvious… but, hey, I know what to look for)… can you tell what?
UPDATE: The above line about the wallpaper “reminding you of something” was referring to my former WordPress theme where I had a section of that wallpaper lightly superimposed onto a sunrise landscape of relief. Since this theme is no longer being used this reference is no longer pertinent.
As I struggle to get my browsers to properly render my pages I would be remiss if I didn’t pass on some of the true gems of the webpage formatting world. The websites CSS Zen Garden, PositionIsEverything.net and Eric Meyer’s website are powerful resources for anyone who wants to get the most out of their xhtml and css. These three sites also link to dozens of other similar sites that are also filled with tips and tricks. I have gathered much knowledge from perusing the examples people have demonstrated on these sites.
On another note… you’d be surprised (or maybe not) how complex a task it is to get a working blog site compliant by the W3C standards for CSS and XHTML. For an up-to-date report on how completely derelict my website is simply click on either the CSS or XHTML links at the bottom of any page on this site. Lately my pages have been riddled with errors. 
I know that I already posted this a couple weeks ago but that was with my previous blogging software and I whacked the previous database before I could import those postings over here… sooo… Here it is again:
I am almost done with this book and it is great! No More Christian Nice Guy, by Paul Coughlin of Christian radio station KDOV, is practically a sequel to John Eldridge’s Wild at Heart, the highly acclaimed tome of masculine apologetics, no apologies required! 
Now Paul Coughlin documents the causes and cures of modern Christian male pussification… that is the acceptance and practice of men shunning their masculine qualities (regarded as somehow sinful) in favor of effeminate over-domestication (like a pussy cat). This is a must read for any Christian male who has forgotten they have a pair, and even those who are readily aware of the fact but find themselves in a world that doesn’t want men with pairs. What the book does, clearly and simply, is dispel the myths of Christ’s nature and conduct that have been pushed by post-modern feminist culture into our modern church culture. In fact, Christ was not the nice, soft, peaceful, non-confrontational, non-controversial nice guy that we paint him to be. Don’t believe me? Read your Bible!!! (and then read this book)
Here’s a great review found on CrossWalk.com.
What is the Nashville Number System you may ask? It is a common music chord “language” that, I assume, developed in Nashville in the recording industry.
In my own music circles we have been using this lingo already… and I never really knew what it was “officially” called, only that it was rather universal among serious musicians and could be found in modern instrumental instructional manuals. The system allows chord progressions in music to be expressed in key-less terms, using numbers and their relative position from each other to express the chords in a progression of music in a given key. For example, in the key of C, instead of saying that a progression is C - G - Am - F you would call this 1 - 5 - 6 - 4, or using the sometimes alternate Roman Numeral variant, I - V - vi - IV. Dig?
In an unbelievable revelation I have learned that although all major web browsers supposedly interpret the same HTML and XHTML and CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) according to the same W3C standards… they never-the-less may look unique from every other browser! For instance, the work that I have done here on this page that you see only looks correct in Internet Explorer. Opera tweaks it some and Firefox tweaks it even more. Yet don’t get warm and fuzzy about IE, because it has major issues, too. It wasn’t until I really started delving into the world of CSS formatting that I realized all the hacks web designers go through just to get the same page to format identically in all major browsers.
At any rate… I think I’m done tinkering with the look and feel of this site. It’s time to add some content.
What you are seeing here is my theme, or template, that I have been working on for this site. I am always open to comments and suggestions so please feel free.
As evident as the new theme is the fact that there’s not a lot of content here yet (and the links to the right are not mine). Very soon I’ll be adding some real content so check back often!
I’ve been working with this WordPress software and I really love it. Hopefully in a couple days I’ll have my site design finalized. What you see right now is very rough, and very temporary. The final design will not even be the same color scheme, nor will it be similar in appearance.
Yeah, I’d...
Web designer and developer. Loud discerner. Software engineer and 