Hey there everyone in Timbit land! So I’ve been slaving away at a new design for the site, mostly so that I could do some proper twitter integration. A good chunk of me decided that it was high time I overhauled the site anyway, so this here represents Black Box 5.0 …

I owe some stories and some pics … after all my daughter turned two this past weekend and I didn’t say a darn thing! so now that I’ve got the major design changes out of the way, I can focus on getting some more content up and running. So stay tuned!

Hey there followers of mine! In case you hadn’t noticed a few changes on the site, I’m currently trying out a new plugin for my blog … one which has a bit of tighter integration between the blog, Twitter and Facebook. So there may be some weirdness occurring on any one of those three sites and I apologize for that … but if I can get this running smoothly things will be just great … for me … not for you … you’ll still be bombarded by extra info … oh well …

So here we stand at the threshold of a new decade? Are you excited? I am! I’ll be entering this decade with two toddlers and leaving it with two preteens … god that sounds scary to say right now …

So what’s on my mind? Well let’s see … clearly the world’s been going to hell in a handbasket … Mark McGwire is in the news again about steroids, eroding what little love I have left for baseball … plus it irkes me that all of this will reduce the resale value of my McGwire rookie card … whoops, I almost typed that as WOOKIE card … that would have been a completely different beast now wouldn’t it?

Conan O’Brien is losing his late night spot … which although it doesn’t really affect me because at that time slot I’m either asleep or more likely on my XBox, I still feel bad for the guy. The letter addressing the People of the Earth really hit the nail on the head, and he didn’t get a fair shake at earning his own audience.

I’m in yet another weight loss challenge with the circle of friends. Yes, there will be a web site going up for said challenge soon enough and yes, it will be designed by yours truly. It’s amazing how Shari one day suddenly turned into a project manager from work and started assigning deadlines on me for having my code done.

The kids had a great holidays, and Shari and I had a blast watching them enjoy themselves. The two of them were perfect angels at every function and it was wonderful. We’re just now left wondering where those two kids have gone two because that’s NOT who’s living under our roof.

Sooooo … that’s about it for right now. As more thoughts cross my mind I’ll try and be mindful and make them public here on the site. It’s always a little unsettling to get a couple of complaint e-mails from people asking why I haven’t posted. Kinda freaky to know that people are actually reading this. So for those who are put out by my lack of posts please be understanding. As I’ve tried to point out above … I’ve got a couple of things going on. I’ll post when I can!

OK … SimplePie didn’t work out like I thought it was going to … basically SimplePie is like an engine … you can have a Corvette engine sitting in your driveway … and it’ll look nice and even theoretically run … but unless you got a car wrapped around it, there’s not much point to it … I might come back to SimplePie and try and build my own RSS Aggregator …

So what I’ve decided to cave in and try is Skype … there’s a number of people I know who are using it … and when you’re going client to client it’s free … so hey, why not give it a whirl?  So if you’re reading this blog and have used it before … sound off … let me know what you think of it …

EDIT – As Sean pointed out … this sounds like I was trying to replace SimplePie with Skype … nope … I’m just moving from one project to the next …

Hey everybody … I’ve decided to start playing around with some movie editing tools again … Shari and I have several good videos of the Boo and we want to share them with all of you …

So … there’s now a section in the Gallery just for videos … I decided to call it BooTube … get it?  I hope the YouTube people don’t get it and turn around and sue my ass …

As I cut more videos, I’ll post them up there … so keep an eye out for ‘em …

Alright … as usual I’m probably late to the game … but I just discovered a tool called SimplePie … what is that?  Well … it’s what’s known as a Feed Parser … which isn’t much on it’s own … but it can be used to pull down RSS and ATOM feeds and populate them onto a web page … or something else …

This is something I was trying to do on my own through Domino … and it was REALLY sucking … mostly because the underlying xml feeds are not standardized … where something like SimplePie handles all of the retrieval and translation … and then you can just deal with the resulting output …

In non geek talk?  Instead of me going up to Google Reader to get all my daily news items … I’d much rather just come right here … to my own home … and also be able to let the people who skim my blog see what I might be reading as well …

I’m gonna play with it … I’ll let you all know how it works out …

I figured … meh … what the hell?  Let’s give this a shot and see how it works … modified the home page a little to include a twitter update at the side there … and I’ve also linked it in on Facebook … that way when I’ve got something pithy to say, perhaps maybe more people will hear it …

Alright … so clearly some things have been happening and I just haven’t been talking about them … so I’ll tackle these in order of importance … least important to most … first up?  My brand new Wii …

So there was a charity event at work, raising money for the United Way.  Someone came up with the brilliant idea of having a three pronged Wii competition.  Three games, three winners.  The games were selected as Wii Golf, The Price is Right … and Guitar Hero.  Well the volunteer committee went out looking for helpers to run this thing … and someone told them I liked games … imagine that!

So I helped out with the running of the events … but I also got to keep an eye on people trying to win the Guitar Hero comp.  What ended up happening was a big ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ kind of attitude where several of us kept one upping one another.  We were playing the same song at the same diffculty so there was some measure of control.  I ended up pulling off a 100% just to put a punctuation on the contest.  Epic win … Me …

On a slightly related note Microsoft released their new XBox experience for the 360 … part of which includes a new avatar system.  Which is what you’re seeing smiling down upon my site in the title bar.  That’s dynamic so as I change outfits that avatar will change as well.  Have I mentioned lately that I’m really enjoying PHP?

Just a random occurance … but I was browsing through my Cafe Press account … yes honey, I was thinking of designing some new shirts … and randomly checking through my order history someone actually ORDERED ONE OF MY T-SHIRTS!!!

Granted the person probably just randomly came across it and liked the slogan I had across the front … and she probably didn’t know that I had my logo on the back of the shirt … but still … that means I’ve got a little bit of random advertising out in the wilds of … hold on, let me check …OKLAHOMA!!!

So to you … checking … Charissa Sharp, I say THANK YOU!!!  You’ve just made my day!

OK … for all those of you who were dying to see more pics of the darling sweet little girl … here we go …

The new web server is allowing me to do some pretty nice things … including the ability to run a gallery now … so if you click on that photo it’ll take you away to a whole bunch of cutsie baby Brie photos … yay!