One of the first blogs that I read regularly was I Awoke In Britannia!, where Ghosty kept me up to date on all the latest Ultima Online dirt. Sadly, Ghosty is closing shop on I Awoke and (no doubt) moving on to bigger and better things. He says he’ll continue to post on UO Screenshots and UO On The Web, but I will really miss his insight and great writing on I Awoke.

See you around, Ghosty, and please send us a link when you start your next enterprise.

I just upgraded my blog software to the latest version, WordPress 1.5. It may take me a bit to get the layout and such back up to snuff. You’re visit is important to us. Then next available css file will be with you shortly.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m going to be out of town all next week. I am going on the “Mission Tour” with our church’s middle school youth. (Don’t ask me the difference between a mission tour and a mission trip, because I haven’t figured it out myself yet.) Yes, I’m going to spend all next week in Munchkin Land. It should be a great time to build some relationships with the younger kids in the youth group. I’m looking forward to it, even though it will be hard work.

We are going to San Antonio and our middle schoolers will be leading Vacation Bible School in several inner city churches and doing some community out reach. All I really know so far is that it’s going to be really really hot and we’re going to be sleeping on the floor. So, yeah, it’s pretty much what you’d expect while serving in God’s army.

Please pray for the kids and me next week and please pray for London. If you are not a Christian, wish me luck (or what ever it is you place your faith in) and pray for London anyway.

For the first time in the history of SYNS, I have ten incomplete articles queued up. That means I have ten great tid-bits of wit and wisdom to share with you, but I have not had the time to polish them, finish them, or in some cases, even type them up. I have a couple of articles that, so far, are nothing more than a link to a news story. So what gives?!

The answer is simple. After several months of frustrating road blocks in my day job (long story, don’t ask) the flood gates have opened. Productivity… Yaaay! Finally, my cohorts and I are busy almost all day with projects. We are getting things done. But the successes which put food on my table have come at the expense of the projects for which my only compensation has been personal satisfaction. In short, my hobby projects have been put on the back burner.

Not only is my poor old blog languishing, my Ultima Online world building project has been pushed back a couple of months, at least, and my gaming time has slowed to a trickle.

But fear not, faithful readers. I shall endeavor to forge ahead. I pledge upon my Geekness to deliver fresh silliness and crisp wit once again on a more regular basis.

Thank you for your time. Now I must make up the five minutes I spent on this post by simultaneously debugging a .NET application and designing a drop-dead-gorgeous web interface… AT THE SAME TIME!! Yeah, I’m cool like that. Ph34r my l33t r0xx0r $kilz, noob. (That’s “leet speak” for, “I am better than you.”)

Some of you may have noticed some new art work popping up here and there at good ol’ SYNS. One regular reader made a comment yesterday.

Hey I just noticed … what’s with the new artwork at the tops of the pages? Nifty.

Nifty indeed!

I found a new source for retro art and I plan to put it to good use. I’ve got oodles of new images just waiting for the right story to come along. While before I had four rotating banner images, now I have ten! (That’s the title image at the top of the page. It’s different every time the page loads… What do you mean you never noticed?! Gaww!)

Now, I know what you’re thinking: How could you steal some else’s images and use them as if they were your own, you vile internet scum!! Well, cool your jets. Every image you see was traced drawn by your’s truely. Granted my work may bear a striking resemblance to someone else’s art, it is because I traced it in PhotoShop purely coincidence.

Good grief. I can’t leave me alone for a minute. I turn my back on me for just a little while and a whole week goes by without a post. I should be ashamed of myself. I will now send myself to my room without dessert and tell myself to think about what I have done. Then, I will pout and sob quietly as I submit to my punishment.

Well, let’s see what else can go wrong.

Last week, if you recall, I had a bout of insomnia. I’m quite sure this lead to me coming down with a nasty cold on Monday; sinus rebellion, fever, and general nastiness. I stayed home from work on Tuesday and tried to sleep it off. I also missed the first practice for the church’s spring musical. Wednesday, I went to work with less fever, but I was still quite loopy and mentally unfocused. Today, I have no fever, but for some reason, I’m still very groggy and unfocused. Honestly, I feel like I’m drunk, but I’m not even medicated, so there’s no good reason for it.

While at work on Wednesday, my PC freaked out again and kept me from getting any work done all day. It’s been slowing dying for a few weeks now, and keeping the new network administrators on their toes all the while. They finally threw in the towel and started build a new computer for me.

Today I received said computer and started setting it up for my needs, installing this and that. In the mist of my installs, the video card puked. Another hour lost. I finally got to get some work done this afternoon. Once caught up, I thought I’d check on the blog. Well, what do you know, I can’t log in. Grrr.

Keep in mind, I’m still only half here mentally. This cold still has my brain working on auxiliary power for some reason. So, I decided there must be something wrong with my installation of WordPress. I went ahead and upgraded my install to the latest version available on Fantastico (the service BlueHost uses to provide nice applications like WordPress).

This did not fix my log in problem, but did do a nice job of overwriting all my style changes. I was able to strong-arm the database for WordPress to get my password fixed and get me logged back in. I was also able to find an old back-up of my CSS files and PHP template, although these back-ups do not have the latest and greatest. I am still missing my WBQotW on the menu. I’m hoping I can find a newer version of my template at home, maybe in my browser cache.

I had hoped to make a couple of posts about current events in the news, but now I’ve eaten up what time I had left today. Now, I have to get home and get to spring musical rehearsal. I just hope I don’t get pulled over, because I’m fairly sure I would fail a field sobriety test.

*sigh*

I’ll be gone all this week. The first half, I’ll be camping with the guys from the youth group. The plan is to go to Pedernales State Park, down by Austin. But with the weather map being green from Nebraska to Mexico, we may choose plan B, which is to go to Mineral Wells. If we going to get rained on, might as well be closer to home.

After the camping trip, I’ll be back in DFW just in time to put Tammy on a plane to Amarillo, change out the clothes in my bag, and head down to La Grange. Tammy’s doing Thanksgiving with her family, to lend support to her sister who is getting divorced. I’m going down to our traditional Ladd family Thanksgiving on the ranch. There has been talk of paintball wars in the woods, and I plan to bring my “game face”.

So, please forgive me if your comments don’t get approved for a few days this week.

Now, go and be thankful! God think’s you’re special and He loves you very much!

I know a few of you have seen the new design “in development”. Now it’s all done.

The 50’s theme has been tugging at me for a while now. Most designers lately have been going for the “weathered look“, first mastered by Fossil. While I like the nostalgia of the weathered look, and LOVE the art style of the 40’s and 50’s, I wanted to do something different. I spent some time surfing “vintage” clip art sites and found enough material and inspiration to finish SYNS v2.0. I’m sure there will be tweaks and such in the future, but I think this design will server for a good long while.

I’ve also got some new features cooking on the back burners. Keep your eyes open for “Nutrition for Dummies” in the near future.

As you can see, I’ve moved my blog “in-house”. My personal web site is hosted on Blue Host, and one of the many perks that drew me to them is fact that they offer all kinds of great site tools through Fantastico. One of those tools is WordPress, the blog tool I’m using now. My buddy Randy Peterman openly campaigns for WordPress pretty often. It’s good stuff.

WordPress is able to pull in all my old posts from Blog Spot through the RSS feed. It also gives me the ability to design the layout from scratch. Bear with me as I work out these features. I intend to have a new gah-rooovy-bay-bee design for this blog real soon.

See you then!