So I was chatting with the best friend I've ever had - You know him as Nick. We were chatting about eachother's blogs, and he made a comment to me:

I enjoy reading yours too, but it's very omgtechnical

This got me thinking.. is my blog too technical?

I originally created this blog to rant (and muse) about technology (I hope we all caught on to that), but I also created this blog as an outlet for frustrations, and just a place to write when I felt like it.

I work in a call center. This call center takes approximately 300 calls a day (+- 50). A year ago, we had more staff, and only took about 150 calls a day (on a busy day mind you). I am starting to get frustrated. Our management has a do-nothing-unless its-done-wrong attitude, and it needs to change.

I have been actively pursuing new jobs, both Web Development and Technician jobs (and I'm sure this blog has been found by several would-be employers). The thing is, I am very unhappy. I come to work, I do my best (most of the time), and I go home. At night, I have dreams that I am at work and getting yelled at by callers. This is not the life for me. I am not meant to spend 8+ hours a day in front of a phone.

I've had several interviews, most are with Contract agencies that just want to see what I'm interested in, but there have been a few promising companies that have contacted me.

Otherwise, Married life is going great. Mary has decided that I've turned her into a gamer, which - by her standards - means shes addicted to Guitar Hero, and random online games at the moment. But no complaints here!

Speaking of Guitar Hero.. That game is Addicting!! I played through the entire Medium career in about 2.5 days, and I'm currently stuck on the 5th song on hard. I've given up a little time from gaming and gone back to my older routine of playing with Linux and Coldfusion, trying to get some more freelance projects, and i might have a business partner for a new website in fact.

Other than that, I think I've done my share of ranting for a post, but don't worry, there's always more to come!

I have been getting a little annoyed with the green gradient on the site, as it was meant as a placeholder from the beginning. i have been experimenting over the last few days and finally decided that in order to do a good banner, I would have to make the site a fully fixed width, which really doesn't look that bad.

As you can see, I've changed the banner, and the sidebar titles. I also made a few little tweaks, but overall the site is really started to look like I had originally intended - good.

The graphics were made using GIMP. It's not as bad of a program as i thought it would be.. I'll put a screencast of GIMP on my TODO list.

Most of my How-To code posts end up being about PHP or jQuery. Today, I'd like to take a step back, and talk about a CSS effect to achieve transparent elements on your web page using CSS.

This is really a very easy process, and just requests a few lines of CSS.

First, Determine the element(s) you want to be transparent - for the example, I will use div#transparency.

Use the following Code:

• filter: alpha(opacity=55);: This property is for IE based browsers. It doesn't seem to work in IE6, but works great in IE7+
• -moz-opacity: .55;: The opacity option for Mozilla browsers. Note is uses a decimal number (100 would be non-transparent, 0 would be invisible);

This is the exact procedure I have used on this site to create the Transparent post blocks. Hope it helps!

Well, Firefox 3 broke my CSS rules for the site, so I had to rethink the design.

I made articles semi-transparent and added a background image, this breaks the page up a little more, and look better in my opinion. I also made the banner at the top fixed, so it sticks with you while you scroll, just a little feature I have been meaning to add for a while now, and finally go to it.

The background I made myself, using Apophysis, and Photoshop. Just one of some random wallpapers I made one night.

It occurred to me the other day that I keep promising webcasts, and haven't actually posted any for quite some time, and I really need to get on that. Since I stepped down from the assistant manager position at my residence, it's possible I will have some free time to do this now (hopefully).

Completely unrelated.. I updated my MySpace and Facebook profiles, and they actually reflect semi current information if anyone is wondering a little about me. Feel free to add me, just send me some type of message so I know you're not a spambot!

My last announcement for the night: I have come to realize the site is not indexing terms for searching to work properly, so I apologize that this feature is not working, and I hope to have it working soon. For the time being, I have disabled it.

Well, sorry for the lack of updates. I am finally back, and I am a married man now.

First of all, Yippee for me! Today is my birthday. I am all of 23 years old...

The wedding went extremely well and we had very few issues with anything, we are very excited to see the video and photos from it. The biggest issue we had was on the way to the reception. Our photographer was following behind us, and her truck started making a loud squeal. i looked back and saw smoke coming from her tire. We got her truck stopped, and realized the brake had seized.

We rolled the truck back off the road and as the tire came up and around, I was a hole as big as my fist that had burned into the tire, and it immediately went flat. I then noticed a puddle of brake fluid on the ground.

In other news:

I am a little behind, but FireFox 3 was released about a month ago, and I finally got around to upgrading. I like it a lot, but the CSS rules it implements make some of the site's graphics hidden, so I will have to resolve that.

I've also been turned onto a new Development IDE - Aptana. Aptana is a build of eclipse, but packaged for web developers. It has a built in server that renders HTML previews, and supports ruby and PHP natively. Since Aptana is eclipse repackaged, any eclipse plugins such as CFEclipse will still work once they are installed. It seems like it is a much better solution for anyone who works with web development.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get much done on WiredCMS, but there is now an index page on the Wiredbyte Beta Site. There isn't much right now, you can register and log in, but you wont see anything displayed yet, but it shows that WiredCMS is not a myth at least. You will note however, that I wrote everything using clean Urls. I am a fan of SEO :).

I have also planned some Modules that will be written for the CMS:
jQuery Photo Gallery: I have this one almsot done, I wrote it for drupal orginally, but it will be easy to port.
Pastebin: I got my hands on the Pastebin source files, and plan to include a module to give this functionality
Forums: Homemade forums
FileBrowser: I have written my own file browser that I will turn into a module for the CMS, as well as offer the stand alone version perhaps.

Until next Time - Peace out.

While Mike is out gallivanting with his new Wife, I figured I'd post a final "Congrats" his way.

The entire ceremony was wonderful, and I know my Wife and I had a great time. We had some good laughs with the wedding party, and even though the drive home on I-94 for me involved spending an hour getting through construction, it was all worth it.

So, this is to Mike, now a married man. No more freedoms ;)

Well, 5 days after the fun is over, I think i have finally recovered. That, or I just have been too lazy to write up a post.

Anyways, the party was a blast. 5 Hours ofDiablo2 on Friday night. That was followed by golf at 7AM and lots of alcohol - drunk by noon. That's a new record for me! I did actually finish the 1LB burger.. and fries.. and soda..

In under 5 minutes..

The Incredible Hulk was way better than I expected it to be, and I would recommend it to anyone who liked Ironman.

The second night was more laid back, but involved pizza and guitar hero.. and more beer. I wouldnt have traded a minute of the night for anything, except maybe for some more Diablo..

While I haven't given much in-depth details on my wedding, I have to say, things are finally starting to come together. The last month, I lost 2 groomsman, and had to replace my best man. Now that everything is taken care of, my new best man has got the Bachelor party all set up for this weekend.

Future Wife Disclaimer: No honey, there will be no naked women.

The plan is simple, yet it excites me so much.

• 6AM - Saturday: Golf 18 holes. It's supposed to be nice out, so this will be fun. Ive also been informed that I am supposed to drink beer while golfing, so this may affect my game, who knows if it will be for better or worse.
• Whenever Golf Gets Over - Saturday: We are meeting up with some more friends at a restaurant chain called Fuddruckers. These guys make the best burgers around, and I am being given the One-Pound-Topped-With-A-Salad-So-Big-Your-Head-Will-Explode burger.. Hope I survive that!
• 4:20PM - Saturday: Watch The incredible Hulk. OhBoyOhBoyOhBoyOhBoyOhBoy
• After the Movie - Saturday: We are then all going back to my place for drinks, and GAMING!!!!! Sounds like we will be more concentrated on Rockband /Guitar Hero 3, but who knows what may happen by the end of the night.

Now, one thing I did fail to mention, because it is still up in the air right now, is My Best man, and a friend may come to my place Friday night, so they don't have to get up as early to make golf. The big thing about this is, if they do come over, we are planning a Diablo 2 marathon. I am so pumped for some old school action! I wish I could begin to express my excitement for this weekend.

All I have left to say at this point:
I would rather take 1000 beatings simultaneously, than miss ONE MINUTE of my bachelor party.

See you all after Saturday.. If I remember who I am.

Well, here we are in June. I have several projects going, as well as WiredCMS. There also is a much larger "project" at hand - my wedding!

3 weeks from Saturday I will finally be getting married, and I can stop worrying about where money is coming from for all of the vendors. This cannot happen fast enough!

To keep myself sane, Ive been working on WiredCMS in my spare time (which hasn't been too much, paid projects come before personal - of course).

I found an Issue with the SessionManager script I posted a few weeks back, and I couldn't put my finger on the issue. It seemed to be randomly expiring my session any time up to the actual expiration time, and there was not pattern to it. It was probably just an issue with the database. Anyways, I went back to allowing PHP to manager the sessions for the time being, as Database storage only really makes a difference on load balancing web servers.

I also read a blog of a developer who is completely against using the PHP function

in any situation other than the page has been moved.

He goes on to say this is against standards, as the location string passes the HTML code 302 to the browser. This code indicates that the page is temporarily moved or unavailable.

After reading this, I started thinking about my own uses of the function, and read up on HTML status codes.

I found that using:

Sends an HTML status 303 code - See Other. This seems to be more standard, and will not give the wrong status code for redirecting to another page - eg. from a log in form.

Just thought I would share this with others, in case you are as obsessed with standards as I am.

I'm still working diligently on WiredCMS in my spare time, and ran across a grate trick for OOP with PHP. Traditionally in PHP, wach class has its own file, eg. class.inc.php.

When you have a script that requires several classes, this gets tedious to include every class file. There is a built-in autoloader method for classes, called __autoload(). The problem with this, from what I have read, is that you can run into issues when using this method, and using 3rd party web apps, as the methods can clash. To get around this, I wrote my own autoloader method.

Please note, I am using the MVC model for OOP, and so I have both model classes (.inc.php) and controller classes (.controller.php), so this method may not be exactly what you need, but can be modified easily enough.

To initialize this method as an actual autoloading class, you must callit the following way:

Above: the array passed to spl_autoload_register specifies the class the method belongs to, followed by the method name.

The argument passed to the autoload method is simply the class name. If I was to call :

The class 'Core' would be passed to the autoload method as $c.

And that is all there is to it! I hope this helps out some developers, as this method has helped me and saved me a lot of time!