Most of you know that I’m living in Austin, TX for a couple months on a temporary work assignment. I spend most of my time wishing I was back in California with my wife, but since I wasn’t flying home this weekend, I took the opportunity to drive to Dallas (actually Allen) to visit my friend Suzanne, her husband Tom and their two boys. I arrived at about 4pm on Saturday. They got a babysitter and we went out to dinner, had a few drinks, and reminisced. Suzanne pulled out some old pictures from our trip to the Rose Bowl and I found them (and my stupid 1997 haircut) so amusing that I made Tom hook up the scanner so I could post them for all to enjoy. The next morning, we all went to church and had lunch. Christian, her oldest boy, flattered me by crying when I left that afternoon. I had a great time and really enjoyed catching up with Suzanne and Tom who I hadn’t seen in about 4 years. It’s hard for our paths to cross these days . . . either a fortuitous trip like this one or free time at the holidays are only chances, but I hope they can make it out to California sometime so I can return the hospitality.

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I know you were on the edge of your seats: all the old content is migrated (by hand), I even got the right timestamps on the comments. I really like the clean look and feel. Compare it to the old stuff – that state-of-the-art-circa-1994 look is no more.

The WordPress learning curve wasn’t too bad and I’ve became obsessed with making things look “right” over the past couple days. I was surprised with how much fun it was; I’m feeling a load of nerd pride for hacking on the default theme to make it my own without knowing a damn thing about style-sheets and php going in. It’s reassuring to know that part of me that could read, write and debug code is still around. I just didn’t want use a standard template – that inexplicably felt like a cop out to me. This is especially ironic given that even now when I feel independently differentiated from the WordPress herd I’m still leveraging like 99.9% of the code untouched. Still annoying: the site seems slower and I’m not sure why. Anyway, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

The blue header was Cynthia’s suggestion – she said navy blue was a “Pat color”. “Blog-like substance” popped into my head during the setup and I was compelled to use it in the tag line. I may experiment with some entries that are not related to new pics in the gallery or site maintenance . . . the wordpress backend makes posting even easier then on Cutenews. The real question is not one of ease of use or even motivation, it’s how often I have something worthwhile to say to everyone/no one. With pioneering peers like Dave, who have >800 quality posts in less than three years, the bar is high in this corner of the internets.

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I’m migrating to WordPress, the photo gallery is still up. Stay tuned . . .

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