Parrotheader.com

I know I haven't updated in awhile. Most readers of my blog know that over the last couple months I've been transitioning from one department in my company to another. I'll still be working very closely with my old department, but I'm also taking on new responsibilities in my new department which can keep me very busy at times. I've been working extremely hard in the office and logging a lot of hours from home of late. As a result, I haven't had as much time to do things like update this blog, update my Flickr, keep as close track of my friends updates, etc.

You know me. I'm a geek and you can't keep me away from some of this stuff for too long. But when you get home after an extremely full day (with the prospect of more work potentially ahead later that night) you want to soak up every minute of relaxation you can by enjoying your family, watching a favorite show/movie, playing a game, etc.

I finally got around to updating photos from several months ago to my Flickr page. Pretty soon I'll only be a month or so behind.

I think I figured out an easy fix to that IE bug for this new template which was causing the bar at the bottom to float up the page. It seems to be working in both Firefox and IE now and the content within that element is also finally displaying properly. If you have any problems with it please let me know.

On second thought, don't let me know . . . .because I don't know much about CSS, so I probably won't be able to fix it anyway.

I felt like shifting a few things around so I'm trying out a new template I found earlier today. I wanted something with a bit of color that would allow me to organize things a bit better. I like the crisp, vibrant look of it. However, I've still got to touch up a few things.

I've also got to figure out a solution to an IE bug that you might have discovered if you came directly to the post page instead of the home page . . . sorry about that. Eventually some of the feed-driven content on the side will be shifted to the bottom. But until I get the bug figured out I'm not going to mess with it.

Another template I might tinker with is the very Web 2.0-ish Minyx 2.0. I like the very efficient layout, but I don't think it has quite as much personality as this one. Still, I might give it a shot and see what I can do with it. So if you catch the site mid-shift I apologize for the mess.

I'm a geek dad. My occupation and long-standing love for tinkering with computers clearly identifies my fairly high geek acumen. I don't try to hide that fact. In fact I literally shout it from the rooftops via this blog on a pulpit that's heard by maybe half a dozen people each week.

Being a dad, I'm always looking out for my children's best interests. Being a geek, I'm always looking out for shiny, blinky objects with Internet connectivity. Merge the two together and it was inevitable that I'd come to the realization that I had to do my part to protect the inalienable online rights that my children so richly deserve. So I got them both email addresses.

Granted, they can't read yet. And then there's the small technicality that one of them hasn't even actually been born yet (which I found to be a bit of a sticking point when trying to register for an account on one service.) But when I see the long, convoluted email addresses at the major providers that some poor people now have to settle for (wol1yd0g17@gmail.com) it made me realize that I don't want my children to be subjected to such trauma. So in true Sooner fashion, I decided to stake our claim while there was still real estate available.

But where to get the accounts? What companies will still even be in existence 10 years from now? Gmail is currently the hot online property while some people scoff at the idea of Hotmail accounts. Yahoo was the only major portal to survive the tech crash and has thus far managed to hang on against Google (I still prefer Yahoo mail over Gmail actually.) Is Live.com going to gain traction now that Vista is out? I decided to hedge my bets by going with Gmail and Yahoo Mail since the former seems to have the brightest future while the latter has had the most staying power to-date. What the heck, it's free right?

Rather than divulging the full email accounts here and also subjecting my children to their first doses of spam, I'll just say that the email addresses are basically their full names in the following form: firstlast@gmail.com and firstlast@yahoo.com. I figure those of you who know them and might be remotely inclined to send them an email (I'm looking at you grandmas and Uncle Adam) should probably be able to piece together this highly cryptic puzzle.

A normal dad might stop there and be content with his efforts. But that was too easy. I was actually surprised/thrilled that I was able to snag both of their names in the preferred syntax. Surely there had to be a greater challenge waiting somewhere that required some more meaningful commitment. Ah yes, something I deal with regularly at my office - domain names. A land where cyber-squatters greedily gobble up full name combinations by the thousands in the hopes of reselling them for profit. Well not if super geek dad can prevent it.

Fortunately domain names can now be bought for dirt cheap and I was able to secure the full names of both girls for several years for a surprisingly modest price. My wife was not so lucky, but she still manages to sleep in spite of it. These names currently don't point anywhere and likely won't for the foreseeable future. But they're ours now and that's what counts.

While I'm generally pleased with the current state of the site (it fits my humble needs) my geekier nature compels me to constantly tinker. One example of this is the baby countdown widget I recently added to the sidebar. Sure it might be a bit too much with the Flickr widget already over there, but I'm excited to be a future dad again so sue me.

Another recent addition was a feed that compiles the most recent posts from all my friends sites into a single feed (or 'mashup' for you geeks out there.) I think this component is actually a fairly useful addition (for my needs anyway.) But it was also a great excuse to give me a chance to tinker with Yahoo Pipes. The feed I setup was relatively simple and could have been accomplished by a number of sites. But I wanted a chance to get my feet wet with Yahoo Pipes as it's an extremely promising service that offers a myriad of possibilities for robust (and highly useful) content aggregation. I can definitely foresee us using it for some of our clients. If you decide to tinker with it be forewarned though. While the interface is nice and slick, it can definitely be a bit confusing and more advanced mashups have a steep learning curve. The best thing to do is just make a copy of an existing feed you found useful and then retool it for your needs.

Another thing I might update on the site soon is creating collapsible navigation for some of my links (similar to the blog archive.) I don't want to bury any of the links (and part of the reason I added the Yahoo Pipes feed was to get people to visit my friends sites .) But at the same time the sidebar can quickly grow unwieldy. I just wish Blogger would add their own widget for it rather than having to use my own script.

Www.parrotheader.com has always got you to my site in some form or fashion. But now that the new version of Blogger is allowing custom domain hosting, I can once again host my own domain on Blogger (instead of having my domain just forward to the more generic parrotheader.blogspot.com address.) All I had to do was point my DNS over to Google's hosting service and it was up and running within 15 minutes.

The page might load slowly the first time you visit as it changed the routing of a few site element images that I was hosting. But after that first load you should be fine from then on.

I'm once again having to dance around some hosting issues. The main part of this blog has been hosted on Blogspot for awhile now (so parrotheader.blogspot.com should continue to work just fine) but I had some forwarding issues from my domain name http://www.parrotheader.com/ which might have been affected recently.

To add insult to injury, my cable modem connection at the house has been down more than it's been up this month. It shows how far we've progressed (and how spoiled we've become) when having to use dial-up as a fallback option is an agonizing experience. I must confess, I even tried piggybacking off some of my neighbors wifi connections on a few occasions in the last couple weeks. Most of them are smart enough to have password-protected networks, but there's a couple that are still running open networks. However, the lots in my neighborhood are fairly large spreading the signals out and making it hard to get a solid connection. Not to mention the fact that most of their connections are likely impacted by the same issue that's been plaguing my connection.

As the downtime continues to linger off-and-on I've started to research my options. While my experiences with Charter's digital TV were abysmal, my experience with their broadband Internet service has been, for the most part, very positive. My connection speeds have always been faster and (other than the occasional glitch) far more stable than comparable DSL offerings. But when it crashes, it tends to crash hard and be out for days, not hours.

I had previously been informed that DSL was available for my area, but after doing some more research this week, that might not be the case. I don't live in a remote area by any means, but according to DSLreports.com I knew I was at the extreme range from my nearest hub. Satellite broadband is technically an option. But it's more expensive yet significantly slower. Cellular broadband is currently geared more toward laptop and PDA access, not primary at-home network usage. So it looks like I'm going to have to tough it out for now and wait for Charter to get its act in gear.

Over the last few months I was beginning to consider whether or not to jump ship from Blogger in favor of another service. Blogger's obviously the most well-known blogging platform, but because of that it's also the most basic.

However, they've recently added a whole slew of changes that have made me decide to stick around. The main feature they've added that I've been wanting is tagging (or 'labels' as Google prefers to call them.) I added an element for those in the right-side navigation. They've also added some updates to the behind-the-scenes template structure, although you probably shouldn't see any major differences on my site as I imported most of the elements from my old template into the new system.

There's a whole host of other nice features as well (embedding RSS feeds, dynamic page regeneration, archive widgets, object-oriented template controls, upgraded RSS/Atom compatability) but I'll try not to bore you. Suffice it to say, my geeky need for more bells and whistles has been appeased for now.

I reorganized and updated my sidebar links just a bit. That Flickr badge thing is kind of cool. A touch of eye candy for an otherwise straight-forward page. And a good way to get a sampling of our photos. I've still got to get some of the older photos from my old site imported over into Flickr.

But hopefully if you click anything on the side now MOST of it should work.

At least I hope.

My domain name came up for renewal and I almost let it lapse. That's taken care of though. So you can still find this site via www.parrotheader.com. It'll just re-route you here to my Blogspot address where I'm having to host the site now.

For the very few people that actually have RSS feeds setup for my site, the address for the feed has had to change since I switched servers. The new address for my RSS feed is:

http://parrotheader.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I've always liked using Yahoo for my home page. It loads relatively quickly, has a lot of good topline stories and provides one-click access to a lot of useful major functions.

This morning though, a different version popped up on my spare system at work. My main system is still getting the 'old' version so it must not be dependent upon user profile. A different browser on the same system actually gets the 'old' version as well.

Either way, here's what Yahoo's next iteration might look like. Besides the reorganization of the typical 'Yahoo' structure we've come to know, it also increases the width from 800 to 1024 pixels. If that sticks in the final version that would probably make Yahoo the biggest player yet to go that route.

My laziness updating my own site has finally forced me to just settle on a blogging service rather than custom designing my own site. It's kind of sad really given that I work for a company that designs web sites. But then again, I'm not a designer so my site was going to be pretty basic anyway. I really just needed a place where I could post photos to share with family and maybe make an occasional 'here's what's going on in my life' kind of udpate. In that respect, a blogging service is the perfect solution.

Plus, I can at least host this on my own server under my own domain name.

I eventually plan to add more content and update all the non-blog pages (particularly the photo galleries) to match the design for whatever template I settle on. They've actually got some pretty nice little templates, but I still want to tweak it and personalize it a little bit for my own purposes when I get some time (with the very first thing being getting all that bulky CSS code out of the page file and loading it externally.) But for the time being, this will have to suffice.

Just messing around with this. Want to see how it works.