We have just returned from our second trip to Kings Dominion. As always, I posted some new pics for you guys to enjoy. This trip was better than the last in some ways, and more exciting in some ways too. Last time, we had all the fun of a tent collapsing while we were attempting to put it up in the rain. Then we had to repair it (and thankfully Kim remembered to remind me to bring duct tape!). This time we managed to get the tent up in one piece, and didn't have to fight the rain. Near the end of the trip though, we had quite a storm, and a big branch from the tree directly above us, broke and fell, missing our tent by mere inches. The rain poured, but we only had a minor leak from when the air mattress was leaning against the edge of the tent while we were in the park. The campground did refund us a night's stay which I thought was a great gesture on their part. We weren't upset about anything, but it sure does make you feel good to know that they want you to feel a little bit of relief after going through that. Or maybe they are trying to avoid a lawsuit.. Either way, I'll take anything free!

I did make some time this trip to build some campfires, and I learned that pine needles make great fire starters (Insert clever Smokey the Bear joke here). We managed to ride some things that we left off last time around, and Austin became a bit more brave, tackling the Triple Spin, the Scooby Doo Ghoster Coaster, and the Flying Eagles and Avalanche more times than I can count. Hannah rode the Anaconda in the front with me, and I got the chance to ride Shockwave and Flight of Fear (I rode this at Kings Island as well, but at Kings Dominion you can see more of the track which makes for a better ride.)

During the rain one day while in the park, we took shelter in the loading area for the Avalanche, and we spent some time chatting with a couple of the workers. They were great, and after the rain quit, we rode the Avalanche like eight or ten times straight without ever leaving our cars. The front of that ride is awesome, and if you get the chance to ride, ride up front.

Back-tracking a little bit, while we were in line to enter the park on our second day, a gentleman came up to us, and gave us a free meal tickets to a all-you-can-eat buffet in the Picnic Grove sponsored by the DC Police. Apparently this fellow and his family couldn't make it, and had a prior appointment, and he didn't want the tickets to go to waste. We ate great, and if that fellow happens to read this blog entry, my family and I want to send a BIG THANK YOU to you. The food was great, and we ate more than we should have. I had a hamburger, a barbecue pork sandwich, roasted chicken breast, ice cream, cake, salad, and rolls. It was quite a meal. (Note to Saturn: when you have Saturn Day at Kings Island again, contact the planners of this feast.. you could take a lesson or two.)

Overall this was a great trip. I am not sure if this is our last trip of the year, but if it was, it was a great way to end the year.

We took another trip to Kings Island this weekend. There are new photos posted in the Kings Island photo album for this year. Overall, a pretty good trip. At the end of the day, we return to our van to find that I had left our portable fridge hooked up to the cigarette lighter, and our battery completely dead. Thankfully, Kings Island has a great customer service group, and within 5 minutes of talking to the customer service folks, the van was running. This makes the second time I have drained my battery using that portable fridge. This is one time I wish that the cigarette lighter plugs didn't function when the van is off. But aside from that, a good trip.

As you can see, work continues on the site refinements. I hope to have this more or less done before too long. Then, I can post on other topics. For now, I kind of want to document my thought process during this site redesign. Mainly, so if I decide to do it again, I can look back, and think, "Man, that was a lot of work.. Am I really sure I want to do THAT again?"

On a more serious note, I really like how it is shaping up. I am still working on the movies section, but the photos section is right where I want it now. I changed how you view photos. I think it's more intuitive now. I liked the fly-out postcard thing I was using, but viewing pictures wasn't very intuitive for the less technical among us. Now, I think it makes more sense having a continual running slideshow that you hover over and control, if you like.

In addition to changing the photo slideshow and viewing, I tweaked the navigation a little, so I hope everyone can find what they are looking for. Along with these changes, I added some more photos to each of the albums, so there is new stuff to look at. There will be more photos in the near future, so keep an eye out.

I have almost completed the look-n-feel for the new site. It shouldn't go through the drastic changes it has seen over the past few days, as I tried to determine just how I wanted it to look. Changes on tap for the coming days are mainly refinements to what I have in place, and adding more textual content to the pages.

If you notice the date/time for this post, you may be thinking that my clock is not correct, but sadly, it is quite correct. I am actually up this late. Have you ever gotten into one of those moods where you were just having so much fun, the time flies by, and you don't seem to tire? Yeah, me either, but this is pretty close. I am enjoying the re-design of my site, and I have always enjoyed being creative graphically (though I am not very good at it). And then I get into this mood tonight, and I just can't seem to quit, though I am going straight to bed after this post. I know I will be more or less worthless tomorrow, so its a good thing that my schedule is not too bad right now at work (and if my boss is reading this, then my schedule is crammed tight and I couldn't possibly do any more).

It's late now, so I'll stop here. More to come.

I am using a program called RapidWeaver to maintain my site now. It's fairly flexible, and its not tied to a specific hosting setup like iWeb was. iWeb was nice. It was easy to use, but managing uploads of changes to a website was tedious unless you were using a dotMac account. RapidWeaver is more flexible in maintaining your site, and appears to have a great community effort behind it, as well as a lot of great theme creators. It handles publishing just the changes, and allows you to mark things as not changed too. So you could, for example, work on multiple parts of the site at the same time, but only publish the changes that you want. That could prove quite useful.

So, now I have my site basically setup, and I sent an e-mail to several folks I know who used to frequent it, and let them know that I finally managed to update it. Then, I find that the navigation I am using is not as intuitive as I would like it to be. For some reason, when someone clicked the photo albums link, they expected to see photo albums right there in the main content area. Well, I knew this going in, but in an effort to get the site out there more quickly, I opted to not do that. Well, I am changing that now, and I think the result will be a lot better.

For now, I don't have comments enabled on my blog. I have done this for a few reasons, but mainly, I don't want the hassle of it. If you want to send me a comment, e-mail me. Everyone can still send me comments, but they are not there for the world to see. This has two benefits. One, it saves me from having to screen comments (I don't spam comments, and I don't want comments with questionable language), and two, it gives readers who want to comment anonymity, so maybe they'll be more apt to send me a comment. I don't expect to have anything on here that will send someone into a fit of anger, but you never know. So, to maintain the dignity of my site from a potential hideous comment flame-war, I have opted to not have comments enabled.

I'm sure man of you who used to read this blog, I have all but given up on me. Probably most have given up on me. Well, I am back, and I hope to get this thing going again. It has been quite a few months since I have devoted any time to this. I think I had just lost interest in maintaining it, and I got involved in some outside activities.

I have completely re-done the site. All the old content is gone, and has been replaced. I simply want to start fresh. If I try to maintain old stuff, I'll probably get tired of converting it, and will fall back into a lazy mode, so I am opting to start fresh.

As for news and such, a lot has happened since I last posted many moons ago. We have taken a few trips, and you can check those out in the photo albums. We have been busy around our house doing maintenance and the like, and the kids have been enjoying the summer. Our church just finished up our VBS a few weeks ago, and you can see some videos from that in the home movies section. Man, that week really wore me out. I created videos for each day's activities, and had those ready to be played for the kids the following night. But since I didn't take any time off from work, and VBS didn't let out until 9:30 PM or so each evening, I was up late putting these things together. Still, it was a lot of fun, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I have finally got around to working on re-writes of my games. Mainly, I am doing this for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I want to make them available to more folks, so I a re-writing with portability in mind. The new games will be provided for Mac and Windows. They will have a better game engine behind the scenes which should enable these games to run smoothly on a wide range of hardware. IN fact, I am developing them using an old 500MHz G3 iBook with 320MB RAM. For the techies among us, they will realize that this is paltry specs for a development machine. Doing this allows me to ensure the game will work for those who have not upgraded to the latest and greatest (this includes me, obviously. The first game that is being ported is my all-time-favorite, Kaboom. It is nearing completion, and should be available in the next few weeks. Maybe sooner if my schedule allows.

We are planning a couple more trips before school starts up, so I will get photos from those trips posted as well. It has been quite a summer, and I am sure fall will not disappoint. I am glad to be back, and I hope I still have a few readers left. Maybe I'll get some new ones. IN any case, readers or no, I am going to do my best to post more regular. Take care!