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Still a bit rusty on my CSS skills... This website re-hack has been a chance to get polished up a bit on that.
Also, the banner above is my very poor attempt to be artistic.. Let me know if my toenail fungus is too disgusting to have to look at each time you visit my blog.
I am still hacking away.
Well, Here I think It worked without too much damage.. I guess this is kinda a test message. Now I get to go in and try to re-add some of my plugins and work on editing all of the templates to my liking. Stay tuned.
I have decided to do some rather radical surgery on Fingertoe.com... Things might get messed up.. Hopefully not...
I decided to start over fresh with new templates. I also am moving my installation over to the fingertoe.com domain so that the silly I.E. Commenting issue goes away.
Cross your fingers for me...
So this was by far the busiest weekend I have had in a very long time. Friday we had a Barbeque at my parents house. About 35 friends and relatives dropped by. During the barbeque, I made 2 trips to the airport to pick up even more people.
Saturday we spend much of the moring cleaning. I mowed the lawn, and we Organized all of our outdoor stuff.
Saturday evening, My sister had a wedding reception, and we attended that from 7 until midnight.
Sunday morning, we went to Church, then came home and got all set up for a Barbque of our own. We didn't have Birthday parties for our kids in March and April, so they got a combined Birthday party in June. We had about 35 people ages 2 months to 70 years. It was quite a bit of fun.
Andee and I are both quite tired.
Yesterday, my wife was gone, and he kids where playing in the house..
Suddenly there was an eery silence.
A few minutes later, Nathan came in and announced, "We are cutting Eunice"..
(Eunice is my Daughter's stuffed Unicorn.)
I went into Julia's room and sure enough, Eunice had quite a noticable haircut.
It is funny how attached parents are to their kids favorite toys. I was a bit upset. Julia was quite happy with the new look. She actually did a pretty good job... Her bed is still covered in loose unicorn hairs. Eunice is quite well loved, and her mane was pretty matted and tangled. Julia fixed her!
Anyway, I took the sissors away and asked her have her mommy help her next time.
When Andee got home I told her about it, and she had the same reaction I did. She wanted to be upset, but it is her unicorn.
We have been traveling over the last week or so. We took our kids to Oregon to stay with their Grandma, and Andee and I left for Hawaii, where my Sister is getting married today.
Hawaii has been pretty fun. We are staying on the North Shore of Oahu. It is fairly rural here, aside from the houses right on the beach, and the surfing traffic.
We went hiking one afternoon last week. Seemed like a pretty darn cool place for me. A trail leads up from the airstrip that is used mostly for skydiving and Glider operations. up the cliff to a geocache that I was after. The airfield was a old military base, and the trail had a warning sign that I found quite interesting. "Active Military Training Area, Please remain on the trail" I did. ;-)
We where driving through a park yesterday, and I said to my wife, "Hey, look at those chicks." She was kinda startled that I would talk like that, but looked at the Bikini wearing surfer girls walking along side the road tring to figure out what I thought was so interesting. "No", I had to explain, "There is a hen, and 6 little chicks eating in the parking lot."
Not quite sure what to think of this one:
Somebody transposed some digits in my new Viatalk phone number, and got Mike Bellotti's voicemail.
Now I just need to figure out how to tranfer dyslexic football recruits to Dennis Erickson.
Today I signed up for Via Talk. So far I am quite happy with it. I used some other VoIP services earlier, but was not too impressed. But the benefits of VoIP service make it worth trying again.
Since I had my own hardware (a Sipura 2100) I signed up for the BYOD service. If you are shopping for an Analog Telephone adapter, I am not a huge fan of the 2100. It has an integrated router that is a bit tricky to work with. I pasted the Username and password into the appropriate places in my sipura's configuration page, and the service came up.
Andee has been talking quite a bit with her Sister in Eugene lately. Our phone bills have started to escalate drastically, and I am quite certain that her sister's have as well. So when I ordered my service, I got a Eugene telephone number. Now we can call her and she can call us, and there is no additional charge for either party. If we choose, we can also get phone numbers in other cities that people tend to call us from, cutting long distance bills. I subscribed to the unlimited plan, so we can call anywhere in the country and there is only the 22.00 per month fee. The phone line comes with Caller ID, call waiting, voice mail and a whole bunch of extras that would cost me a fortune if I ordered them through Qwest, my local phone company.
I am thinking that I will pack up my Sipura and take it with us when we go to Hawaii. The place we are staying has a High speed internet connection, so I can plug it in, and make and take calls just like at home.
ViaTalk supports E911, which is an important feature to my wife, who is a former 911 operator.
Simultaneous ringing is also a handy feature. I can go into the viatalk website and configure it so that whenever somebody calls our VoIP phone number, our home phone rings at the same time. Today I was talking on the VoIP line, and I heard my call waiting beep. At the same time I heard our other phone ring. Andee was able to pick up the incoming call on our VoIP line using our regular phone, and we where both able to continue our conversations without interruption. If I choose to leave my VoIP gear at home on vacation I can always log onto the website and set the simultaneous ring to the phone that is in place that we are renting.
So far, I am pretty happy with the quality of the calls and the service. The only complaint I have is that I have not been able to set up any speed dials. The old service I used had these easily programmable from the website. I don't see this feature advertised at all on the Viatalk website. Not a huge deal, as my phone has memory dialing.
If it works well, I may go ahead and port over my land line. I have always wanted caller ID and other features, but didn't want to shell out the big bucks. ViaTalk is cheaper than my entire phone bill with Qwest, has more features, and Unlimited long distance. That deal is hard to beat!
