While this is not one of my standard charity picks, I could not pass up Scott's request!

My father-in-law has diabetes, (not as bad as Scott's situation)! We all have someone dear that needs our help!

See Scott's blog for a very thought provoking monolog about this issue!

While you are there, help out and send The American Diabetes Association some $$$.

I can vouch for Scott's integrity, I even sent my contribution through him via Paypal!

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TeamHanselmanAndDiabetesWalk2006.aspx

I noticed Omar Shaine is telling the world how busy he is, that’s cool; always busy is so much more fun than the dull life.

One of my favorite observations, is if you want something done, ask a busy person, they get it done. The procrastinators of the world don’t ever get anything done!

I guess I am something of a work-aholic I usually take my employees work home with me most weekends, if I am not working on the wife’s “Honey Do’s”, I am working on an employer work project. I work for DOD contractor, so I can’t really go into any detail on that!

Will recently I have changed my modes operandi, I am still the same old work-aholic, but I have decided to spend some of that free time on personal projects instead of giving my free time back to my employer.

Hence all my recent work on the dasBlog support environment. I really like this product but the more I really use it, (and I have become a power user in a very short time), the more I discover how it should not be used!

I created the dasblog.info documentation site. For the first 50% of the effort I had the site hosted on my personal web server, and it went fairly fast. Later I moved the site to our hosting provider BoundGrid.Net. Then things really slowed down. Not BoundGrids’ fault just the inevitable result of a hosting environment. Making the remaining 50% of current changes took several days.

dasBlog is a great blog engine but it’s really not the best document management system I ever used. Having said that I think it is way cool that dasBlog is being used to document itself! (Even if I do say so myself!)

So to sum up this little diatribe: Crap I am busy!

• Working on creating two new commercial web sites for my employer as a subcontractor. (This is to mostly keep my “hands on” in the tech stuff and to pay for my IT hobby expenses) Yeah I think its fun, most of the time. When you are the only developer on a web site, you get to touch it all bad or good!

• Working for a foreign government (part of my employers contract), actually doing some hands on coding for an “international database web application”, (almost over my head here), but they swear they are happy with beta 1, so who am I to complain. Again just trying to stay up with the technology. No I don’t really consider myself to be a programmer! I have been trying to stay at the DOD business analyst level, but it’s hard.

• Building a new studio recording “computer system” for my son “the musician” this weekend. I bought a really nice four channel I/O sound system (M-Audio delta 44) and a 200GB drive etc. etc. Learning about music recording PC’s as I go! A little slow here, since I am not a musician myself! I think he will be thrilled, he is not expecting the super duper system I am building!

• I am also working on updating a charity www site I support, Day-of-caring.org  It's way out of date!

• Oh did I mention, I am far from finished updating dasblog.info documentation, it’s still pretty chaotic, and I would love to have a single “user manual” document for new users to peruse or download! FAQ’s could stand a lot of help also! And I continue to husband dasblog.us as much as I can, I really appriciate the users who contribute here!

• I have not figured out what I am doing for Christmas for the remainder of the family, and I only have this weekend to figure that out! Oh my!

So are we having fun yet (smile)

Tom

Sticks and Stones, a video that has been lost in the ashes of pre Internet days (1992) and is no longer available anywhere else is presented here with permission. My son Cameron was one of the actors, and Larry Turner the Director is a family friend.

The video is 12 minutes long, and uses streaming flash (FLV), all but the slowest connections should be ok.

Larry Turner, a graduating senior at Colonel White High School (1993) in Dayton Ohio, won the first place award of $500 and a $3,000 scholarship in the National Scholastic Art Competition for Film and Video. His film "Sticks and Stones", which deals with sexual abuse, child pornography and teen-age prostitution, also won the top prize in the Ohio Governor's Art Exhibition in May 1993. He received his award from First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C.  Larry has many other movies and awards to his credit.

A current link related to Larry's efforts can be found at http://tattooboymovie.com

This is a freeware flash MP3 player that I created (with open source help), in one of my weekends of programming for fun and stress relaxation. It works and you can play it here!

The sample features a few songs my son wrote, sings and produces. I, like my son have not yet figured out where to use our talents, so we are posting them here!

Wes is really my daughters dog, but I have never liked a dog more than Wes, he is smarter than most people, and a whole lot nicer!

Well he’s really not a mutt, he’s a Siberian Husky.

It's too early to see if we have anything interesting to say?

Hello Video