02.15.2006

(off-site links open in new windows)

Don says:

A few days ago I was going through some email from a friend who has a serious email addiction while listening to a really good internet radio station when my speakers exploded with an incredibly loud, horrible, midi music file that was embedded into one of the links I'd clicked on in my email.   Of course this has happened before, plenty of times, but I'm always startled, highly annoyed and left with a sense of futility because there's nothing I can do about people who're rude, callous and inconsiderate enough to embed music files in their websites but this time I wasn't prepared to simply sit and feel helpless so I made a webpage about it.

The peaceful web of silence.



(right-click and open in new window if you don't wish to leave this page)

*grin*   Yeah, I know, what good did that do?   Well, maybe not much but I felt better and after I spent some time thinking about it I decided to brag about it so I wrote an email to Lockergnome and the page was mentioned in one of their ezines the next day so we got a little spike in our web traffic and my web host (Bill Chambers, only we call him "Beeyul") scolded me to watch my bandwidth but I guess, so far, we didn't use enough to get charged extra so we'll be ok as long as Fred Langa doesn't mention us any time soon *grin* (and, of course, I wrote him too).

Over the last few days I've redone most of my button images on the site and made a bunch of new ones.  As always, nothing teaches like doing and I learned a lot while I was working on these.   Ultimately, I may not use all of them but I still enjoyed making them.

After I finished and we tried them on the website, we decided that they needed to be transparent images instead of shaded buttons so some of them got redone

Lisa and I may never be "Professional" graphics artists but we're having an awfully lot of fun with it and I think we're getting to be pretty good too.

We may be on the "road less traveled by" much of the time but the scenery is wonderful.

Life is good, love is wonderful, joy is infectious.   Happy Valentines day my friend.

Lisa says:

In front of Don's mother's house is a low stone wall upon which a family tradition has developed.  It's called "walking the wall".  As soon as a child is past toddler stage, of course the next direction is up.  That low wall is seen as a challenge.  Don's daughter Lily still bears the scars on her knees from her turn at "the wall" twenty-three years ago.  The other afternoon we captured a picture of her third son carrying on the tradition as had his brothers before him.  His image is blanked out for reasons we need not repeat here.  Suffice it to say, it was a moment we'll all treasure.

On the way to work one day we spotted a lovely sight.   The sun on the water looked like a lake full of diamonds.   Don kept wanting to stop and get the shot, I said, " Just up ahead a little,"  He stopped, I took the shot and about 30 feet ahead the illusion disappeared. " My philosophical lesson for the day?   Stop - take the shot.

Adios, y'all.