On second thought…

It came down to changing my theme and I started tweaking “Sandbox” and just a small background color change got my Web Dev blood all flowing! So I think I’ll hold on the redecorating/theme change for now. Sometimes you don’t know what ya got till it’s almost gone!

wwwgnome redecorates.

I love my chosen theme “Sandbox” and I have every intention to still use it, but I have yet to put in the time needed to really get the most out of it. I want to be able the edit the HTML, CSS and make it truly my sandbox to play around with all the tricks & tweaks that I learned when I went to school to learn Web Design. So I am going to play with some ready to go themes/templates, I like the minimalist look and there are some good ones at www.plaintxt.org. I don’t know really I will probably change it a few times, but that’s the beauty of the current state of the web and all the choices we have when we want to creat a blog or a web site. Well the wwwgnome is going to do a bit of redecorating at the place I like to call Home on the Web.

Angry gnome!!!

Here I sit on yet another cold boring winter night surrounded by all my games & a multitude of handheld gaming gadgets 3 PSP‘s, 1 DS lite, 1 DSi 2 Tapwave Zodiac’s and then all the Magic The Gathering cards, Dungeon Crawler and now even Yu-Gi-Oh! D&D books and starter sets, DVD’s, my computer and well lets just say all the toys that any geek would love. And yet I’m bored, I have cabin fever and thought after playing Angry Birds on the PSP until I could just throw it against the  wall (so glad I have wrist straps on my PSP’s) that I would catch up on my blogs that I have not done anything with for months one even a year. I started out feeling like the Angry gnome and now I feel a little calmer not angry a bit anymore. I guess I needed to just sit down and do a little venting, I knew these blogs would come in handy. This makes 2 blogs posted to in 2 days, I could be on a roll. Now if only I could make myself update my Facebook account, nah I think I’ll play some more Angry Birds or some Eye Of Judgment: Legends, yeah a few rounds of EOJ: Legends should make me forget about winter for a while and I am now a Happy Gnome!

Where did the summer go?

Damn here it is the end of September and the summer is over! But I have to say it was a great summer! So much has changed in just a month, and I need to get this blog going and updated! This is the first time in about 6 weeks that I have sat at the computer for any length of time and it feels good to be back in the saddle! Anyway I just had to make a post and keep the life in this Blog of mine, so there it is. I like this blog and I want to make it my main presence on the web, so soon I will be dusting it off and getting it up to where I want it. Until then this will have to do, just a small injection of life so it wont fade away into the WWW!

It’s not here…

Wow I just made a post about a Google Chrome Extension called ScribeFire using the extension and clicked “publish” and it’s not here! Ok not a big deal because I really did not like it that much. I entered all my stuff correctly blog URL, username, password and it even gave me a message that it was successful hmm… Oh well I like the WordPress.com Add New Post interface anyway, I just thought I would try it and maybe post more often. But just coming here is easy enough so I guess I won’t mess with something that’s not broken. But on the Internet and the computer in general there is a lot of “reinventing the wheel” apps some are great and well some are just not there/here.

Here we go again!

As I type this new post on my new install of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx.  I have to say “Here we go again!” I had my computer set up just the way I like it and have been running Ubuntu for over a year and just kept upgrading through the Update Manager and everything always went perfect. Then the other night I was going to do a fresh install of Windows XP, Ubuntu and Xubuntu to make my PC all nice and new with fresh OS’s and I wanted to repartition both of the hard drives on my box, and well after everything was backed up I started my partitioning. My 1st mistake was not unplugging my Iomega Prestige Desktop 500GB USB 2.0 hard drive, my 2nd mistake was having a SanDisk Cruzer 8GB Micro USB Flash drive with the new .iso for Xubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx plugged into my box. Well with all the media plugged in I got a little confused about which was which in the GUI of GParted, and I ended up formating and partitioning my Iomega drive with all my backed up OS’s and my Ubuntu partitions on my 60GB hard drive. All said and done I lost all my backups from just a little over 1 year of different linux distros and my partition with all my music etc, etc. I was horrified at first and could not believe what I had done. I did however not format my Windows XP partition, which I don’t use much anyway except for some of my toys like my PSP and the Media Go application and my Delorme Earthmate PN-40 GPS and Topo USA 8.0 and some other hardware/applications that I don’t yet have a Linux alternative yet. Now it’s been a few days and I’m over the loss and have moved on, I have me a brand spanking new version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx with the GNOME desktop and I’m getting all my apps reinstalled and I have to say I feel good with this new version of Ubuntu and the changes that are in this release. I won’t get into specifics but one new improvement that I love is the ability to add another pane to the Nautilus file manager! Now I don’t need to open 2 windows and drag -N- drop files/folders I can just open another pane, just like all the other file managers that I had to add in the past in Windows and Linux w/GNOME. So all said and done I have learned a hard lesson, I do backup like I’m supposed to but you have got to have another backup off site like on another portable hard drive or like the new service that Ubuntu has with Ubuntu ONE
50 GB of backup storage for $10 per month. If I would have had this service I would not be in this position, live and learn.

Jeanne D’arc 2 years later, wow.

Wow it’s been 2 years since I got the PSP game Jeanne D’arc and have been playing it on and off. I can’t believe that it’s been 2 years and I have not finished it yet, I love the game and have got a bit over 65 hrs into it so far. I guess it’s the way I play games, I jump around from game to game a lot. I get into a game then forever what reason I just don’t feel like playing that game at that particular moment, so I pop in another game and then play that for a while. And this just goes on and on and I will have 8 games going at once then by the time I get back to Jeanne D’arc a month has gone by or even more. I think I have even started Jeanne D’arc over at one point because I forgot what was going on with the story and felt I would get into it more if I just start the game over. I read somewhere on the net before that I am not alone in the way I play my game collection. The article said something about adult gamers having the money to buy most if not all the games they want, and having so many games don’t finish a lot of them and jump around like I do. I also don’t remove the shrink-wrap from most new games if I am already playing a similar one, I figure why open a new one when I still have to finish 3 others in the same genre. So about 1/2 of my collection is still mint in the shrink-wrap still worth 100% or more of their original value. I got a lot of the games off of eBay, Amazon.com and other online stores and some were very hard to get. I figured I better get the ones I want before the price goes up or I can’t get the game anymore. I would be interested to get some comments on this subject if anyone comes across this post. Jeanne D’arc is a great game and I would say in my top 10 favorite games, I’m glad I popped in the UMD and started playing it again. If you like TRPG‘s and have a PSP or even the new PSPgo give it a try, it’s also available on the PlayStation Store in case you only have the PSPgo. I thought I would include a few screenshots of the game to give you an Idea of the game during play, this is truly a great game that will forever be in my collection and played more than this one time if I ever finish it that is! So many games so little time.

Rotate & zoom game play area.

In game grid system.

In game combat.

In game dialog.

Grid movement during game.

World Map.

Cutscene graphics.

Main option menu.

Cutscene graphics.

OMG my geek juices are flowing!

I was looking at my blog and it’s been a while since I have really done anything with it and thought, I think I’ll check out some new themes. So I started looking at the themes and trying this one and that one and then I came upon this one called “Sandbox” and it looked so plain and tweakable and upon reading it’s description it’s very tweakable! I have a background in Web Design and really love messing around with html, xhtml, css and creating graphics in the open source image editing application GIMP which is as far as I’m concerned just as good as Adobe Photoshop for anything that I need to do in the way of image editing. Anyway the possibilities are endless as to what I can do with this theme. I’m all excited and cant wait to get out my web design books and start tweaking around with the code and see what I can come up with. It’s been a while since I went to school and was really into web development, I think about 8 years ago in “02″ and I even had a site up which was one of my last class projects which was my site and had examples of a few sites that I developed for some businesses in my area and had prices etc. I’ll dig all that out and post it with the links, I still have an old dial-up ISP account with 100MB of server space and it should be perfect to host them old sites. Yeah it’s good to be amused and inspired by something as simple as a WordPress theme, it’s good to be a geek!

Army photos and memories.

I can’t seem to keep this or any of my blogs for that matter updated with any regularity. I seem to forget I have them and then I come up on them in a bookmark and go to the blog and think damn it’s been a while, I need to post something. Anyway I recently got a call from an army buddy and he told me over a year and a half ago to go to Facebook and start an account. Well I never did then my girlfriend went to Florida for a while this winter and she got a Facebook account, so I started one and between Facebook and text message’s we kept in contact. So my friend and I were talking and he told me about all the guys we were in Basic Training and Germany with and that there were a lot of them on Facebook. So he sent me some friend invites or whatever they are, (im still a Facebook newb) and well I sent a bunch of them friend invites. I have spent a good part of today at their site pages looking through all the photos that they took while we were there. And wow the memories that came back to me it was great. Then I come to 1 photo and the caption said something like ” HQ platoon’s resident shutterbug Steve Schumann” and there I was sitting in the drivers hatch of a Bradley IFV with my camera covering my face! But that’s how it goes when I spent a lot of time while in the army learning photography, and then I was a professional photographer at a few studios for over 12 years. When I’m taking all the photos I’m not in many. Anyway I commented on the photo and I have so many photos from the army and Germany that I can upload to Facebook and I hope that some of the guys I was there with will get a kick out of looking at them like I did looking at the photos they uploaded. Now I just gotta get my damn scanner to quit acting so stupid and scan so I can get some photos up.

A call from Florida

It’s been 5 days now that Cindy has been gone to Florida and I can’t belive how rough it is without her in my life. We were not seeing each other every day before she left but we tried and when we did see each other even for an hour or so it would make me feel so good. I knew that when she left it would be hard but I never thought that it would border on “unbearable”. I try to stay busy by gaming on my PSP, messing with my computer, running errands to town or whatever but I just can’t make myself feel at ease. We text message every day at least 1 or 2 times, and just that makes me feel good. So I texted her tonight and said to give me a call if she could. I was watching TV and wondering if she will call and then there it was Cindy called! It felt so good to hear her sweet voice and to hear about what she was doing, and what has been going on in her life now that she is in Florida. She said she missed me a lot and that made me feel good she also said that she thinks of me all day and I thought she is feeling just like me. I don’t want her to feel bad, but to know that she is feeling like I do about her but about me was so good to hear. So now I feel so good and I hope Cindy feels as good as I do, Just a phone call and I am so much better. Now tonight at least I can relax and know that I love Cindy and she loves me, and it feels so good to love be loved. Now I just have to make it for about 47 more days, then I will be on a plane heading to Florida for a week to 10 days to spend her birthday with her and to just hold her again and look into her eyes to just spend time by my baby’s side. Oh just 47 more days, I hope it don’t seem to go on like the last 5 days did. So along with the texting and emails there will have to be some phone calls to make the time go by just a little easier.