A few years ago I wrote a little post on this here website about my idea for the Best Band Name Ever. Imagine my surprise when there was a comment on that post, this here mornin’:

did a google search of my band name… found this…

So it appears that some one else passed all those highway exit signs in Jersey for “The Amboys” and figgered it was a cinch for a great name for the band!

Folk rock, not my thing. But at least someone has the stones to put together a band and make some music under the banner of “The Amboys”! Check ‘em out on this here myspace page, they might just float yer boat.

It was my idea first, though. I’m just sayin’.

Yeah so it’s been over a month since I’ve posted, and it’s not that I fell over dead from surprise that this nation elected a black President. Been busy, been distracted, been lazy. Lots of my friends whose blogs I read are either resorting to posting infrequently and populating their pages with twitter links and whatnot, or giving up altogether.

But I kind of like this blog thing. I’ve had some sort of presence on the web since 1998 (starting with a crappy little static page on my old panix account that I can’t even find on the wayback machine), and a “formal” blog, complete with archives and shit, since late 2002. I have documented some thoughts about 9/11, the deaths of my Grandfather / Father / pet cat of 17 years, my move to Boulder, Colorado, commuting in various forms, bacon, TiVo, and of course, all kinds of people who bother me. You know, the idiots. And I don’t want to stop.

In the meantime, I have discovered Facebook, Flickr and lots of other sites that vie for my web attention dollar. Oh and I also have decided I might like to become a veterinarian in my lifetime, and have started taking classes in that vein.

But the fact is, I also just like to write. Life is getting interesting around here these days, and it seems that when I’m doing interesting things that’s when I do my best writing. And when I’m writing, I find myself thinking about writing, even more. And that leads to more writing, for better or for worse.

So I’m going to take some time these next couple weeks as the semester winds down (good lord, is it ever odd to have my calendar revolve around that time frame again) and think about how I might go about this. There is much to do. Update blog software. Maybe a site makeover, with some organizational changes. Maybe finally add in all the missing content and keywords from the last three makeovers. But even if none of that housekeeping gets done, I can at least start writing again, which is what I plan to do.

I’ve got some stuff in the hopper of life and I hope it all bears fruit—on here, and out there.

With my new website layout came a nifty rotating masthead image capability, so I created a gallery page that shows them all, with descriptions, in case anyone cares.

Check it out: rumblestrip Masthead Image Gallery

Once again, rumblestrip.org has a new look. This time it’s based on the neoclassical theme by Chris Pearson. Very clean, and with a rotating masthead graphic (currently randomly selected from eleven images, more to come).

The bigger news is that I’ve upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress. The new version supports tagging, which allows me to assign tags, or keywords, to each post. This allows a finer-grained content definition than the traditional “categories” I used to use. One nifty feature of the new layout is the new “tag cloud” feature, which displays all the tags in my blog; the more a tag appears, the larger the tag shows up in the cloud. This simply offers one more way to select posts by topic. Categories remain, and are selectable from a pulldown menu (as are monthly archives).

I’ve also changed the way images are sized, and as a result (and in order to assign tags to older material) I will be combing through my old posts to update them; in the meantime, old posts’ images will not display correctly nor will the tag cloud reflect the actual total content of this blog for a litle while, until I have a chance to go through them all.

I’ve finally joined the modern age and added a digg section. You’d think that with one of my friends and blog readers being an employee at this up and coming internet company, I’d have latched on by now. Well, now I have a “Digging” section that will list my latest Diggs, or links to things I find on the internets that I find interesting or amusing. My first one is a real doozy, and recommended reading!

Lastly, my static pages are not accessible yet, but that’s ok because they largely said “coming soon” on them. It is my sincere hope that this change, once and for all, motivates me to comb through all my old posts and fix typos, dead links, add tags and, finally, add in all my old static content from my original websites that were online as far back as 1996. Should be fun.

Oh yeah, and if you read my site regularly, you may have to force the css file to reload (ctrl+refresh or command+refresh) to get the images to display correctly. If the pics of Elle are huge, then you need to do this.

Bear with me as I bring all my content up to snuff and online. Onward!

You may have noticed, I changed the site’s style. Based on this style, it’s been a joy to add pages and look at the elegant php code the author used to create this style. It has renewed my interest in the site, in fact. Between the new WordPress version and the new style, I have a lot to play around with, here.

Long overdue is my reinstatement of some very old bits from my older websites, and I’m in the process of doing that now. As such, the new/old content won’t necessarily show up in the blog, so I will periodically post short links at the top of this page to new stuff that’s been added elsewhere on the site.

Since I had drinks with my co-workers this evening to celebrate the engagement announcements of not one, not two, but three couples in the office, I felt the first order of business was to re-post our own wedding “team photo” and the thank-you letter I wrote to our guests. Have a look, here.

I hope you like the new look and the new (old) content!

It’s been hanging over me like a dark cloud, upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. After reading the directions 1,000 times, I decided to just go for it. It was easier than I thought. (yawn). The links (“blogroll”) feature has been revamped, and the code that places my links on the home page no longer works, so that’s a work in progress. But everything else seems to work. Yay. (yawn.)

More later.

Later.

A couple of weeks ago I posted an innocent little blurb about riding my bike in the snow to deliver some christmas presents to the post office. I included a picture of my beloved singlespeed “townie” bike that was used for the purpose. The thing is, the bike’s frame is whimsically called the “Il Pompino”. It’s made by a company in the U.K. called On-One, and it’s a great, bombproof bike frame, perfect for the task. Perhaps because the company is in the U.K. they don’t realize this, but the phrase “Il Pompino” means “blow job” in Italian. Eh, probably they do know.

I knew of this alternate meaning when I bought it, and I sometimes refer to my townie bike as the blowjob bike. It’s all fun and games until someone gets inundated with spam. See the thing is, ever since I posted that story I’ve been getting Italian porn spam, and Italian porn sites are even linking back to my story. I don’t know much Italian, but like Potter Stewart, I know porn when I see it, and I could see that some of the text of these spam emails was just dripping with hot, italian fellatio.

Yes, I clicked some of the links. Hot!

Anyway, here’s the thing: the only place that the word pompino shows up in the entire post is in the alt title of the image of my bike. The title of the image is “pompino-snow.jpg”. Now, I ask you: who among us has gotten a blow job while lying in the snow? Have we all forgotten the lessons of the infamous “Shrinkage Episode” from Seinfeld?

At any rate, regardless of where you get your freak on, I thought this was interesting, how a single word buried in a blog post could spark such an (admittedly automated) reaction from so many sites around the world. And I’m sure that after this post, my inbox is gonna be scorchin’ for the next few days…

Well, shit. That took longer than I thought. Delayed by a holiday party video project and thwarted by my webhost’s computer being downed by the horrid weather and resultant power outages in Seattle last weekend, I am now moved in to a new home at dreamhost.com, and my email is slowly trickling over to the new home on a more regular basis. In the meantime, I went to a roller derby contest (no shit), made a movie (no shit), read a book (well, I started it, anyhow) and prepared for the upcoming Christmas holiday (as best as one can). All worthy of talking about here, and in earlier times I would have talked about all these events in realtime. All I can say is that it feels good to have finally gotten my website moved to a new home and out of my friend’s hair, I’m looking forward to the holidays, and I’m fully planning on tweaking my site and — most importantly, posting more often — in the new year.