Wow, I was really excited to log in this morning and see that I had 8 comments awaiting moderation. People are paying attention to me!! Unfortunately they were all spam.

Okay, I know I haven’t posted in awhile. There’s been lots of stuff going on in my family life and I haven’t had a lot of time to just sit down and think. This weekend I was planning on working a good deal on my latest web design project and the weather was so beautiful all weekend I wanted to take a nice long bike ride, but those plans fell through when I found out we were rearranging the entire house so that my oldest could have his own room.

A couple years ago my dad and I built a large corner desk out of oak. This was one of the things that had to be rearranged this weekend. I was very thankful that we had designed it to be collapsible. It made moving it very easy. Just remove 20 screws and it breaks down into 4 very manageable pieces. Nice work, Dad.

Anything else I can update you on? Well, I lost 10 pounds in a week and I’ve kept it off for two whole weeks. That’s what happens when you realize you don’t have money to go out to eat every day for lunch. I’ve kind of hit a plateau now, and I think I have to bump up my physical activity in order to lose any more. The bike riding has kinda tapered off with the weather getting colder. I’d like to keep it up, but I don’t have any cold weather riding clothes, and no money to buy some. We do have an exercise bike, though, and I think I might try to dig that out from under the pile of laundry and see if it works.

Well, that’s all for this morning. I’ll try to be more diligent this week and throw up a few posts. Thanks for checking in.

I don’t want this week to go past without saying something about my adventure this past Saturday.  I had the wonderful opportunity to spend the entire day with my 7-year-old son, just he and I (and about a billion strangers).  We dropped his mom and sister off at Grandma’s Saturday morning at about 9:00 and drove an hour down to Great America.  It was his first time there, and I’m sure he was bubbling with anticipation.  He’s seen the commercials on TV, so I know he was excited about it.

He was the most wonderful kid all day.  We had so much fun.  When we got home, he was so excited to tell his mom and sister about all the cool rides we went on.  He drew me a picture of his favorite ride, and at one point he said, “Dad, you’re my best friend”.  Wow.

Take a look at my archive calendar. Here we are on day 28 since I started this blog, and I have already made 24 posts on 16 of those days. This is much better than I thought I would do. I realize that hardly anyone reads this, and I think that helps me to just put down whatever thoughts I have without worrying about what people will think. I’ve adopted the attitude that this blog is simply for the purpose of journaling my thoughts, for myself and anyone else that cares. Apparently nobody does, which is just fine with me .

I’m constantly trying to think of new subjects to write about, and recently testing the waters a little bit in a more technical arena. I think I’ll be doing more of that as we go along.

If anyone is reading this, please leave your comments – otherwise this will continue to be my own stupid ramblings. If I were to discover that I actually have an audience, I could pick topics as though I’m talking to someone instead of just thinking out loud.

But don’t worry, if you prefer to lurk anonymously, I’ll just keep thinking out loud.

For the web developers out there: Do you regularly use a CMS framework in your projects?

First a little background about me
I’ve been developing websites seriously for about 6 years. I’m self-taught and have no formal training. I started out by learning HTML and table layouts — no CSS, no <DIV>’s, etc.

Pretty soon I began hearing some talk about server-side scripting and became interested in JSP. I had a short period of formal “C” training in my past, so I caught on to the Java syntax and language structure very quickly. However, for most of my clients, JSP was not a practical solution.

I started to notice that something called “PHP” was included in most hosting plans, and after some investigation discovered that it was a “lightweight” server-side scripting engine without all the overhead and server configuration required for JSP. So I dove right in and before long abandoned JSP entirely.

Then about a year ago I finally discovered the wonders of CSS and table-less layouts. What a liberation!

So up until about a month ago, my design process has been as follows:

Today I realized how far I have come since the beginning of summer.

I wanted to take a longer ride this weekend, but things didn’t work out. I had about an hour this afternoon so I decided to just sprint my old 10 mile loop. This loop is pretty hilly and when I started training four months ago, I could average maybe 14 or 14.5 mph on this loop. I since graduated to longer and longer distances (although also flatter), and after awhile I quit doing the 10 mile loop altogether. So it’s probably been a couple months.

Today it was raining and 55 degrees, but the ride was surprisingly comfortable. I’ve been pretty fortunate this summer and haven’t gotten caught in the rain, so I was also intrigued by the idea of some poor-weather riding. I finished the ride in less than 40 minutes and averaged 16.4 mph (you road-bike riders keep in mind this is on a mountain bike with fat tires). The hills seemed a lot smaller than I remembered them! In the past, I would climb the hills slowly and at the top I was out of breath and coasted down the back side. Today, my legs pumped me up those hills like they weren’t even there, and on the backside I cranked up the gear and shot down to the next uphill.By the end I was quite out of breath and my heart was racing, but my legs felt perfectly fine (though slightly shaky as I got off the bike). I realized that this was probably the first ride this summer that my heart got a better work-out than my legs. It was a neat feeling. I’m going to have to do more sprints like that in the future.

This was really my first ride since the century last weekend. That ride took a long time to recover from. But I think I have just experienced the benefits of those longer trips. I must have put on a lot of muscle mass.

Also keep in mind I was a flabby couch potato at the beginning of the summer. I guess I still am, but I’m starting to replace some of that flab with muscle. And it feels real good. I really hope I can keep up with some kind of exercise routine through the winter so that I don’t have to start from square one with my riding next summer again.