We’re here…

For a lot of reasons we got distracted from the blog thing for a bit. Posts will still be sparse for a while but we’re working on a massive overhaul of the site, both in terms of “look and feel” as well as content.

We’re excited about the new approach but finding time to implement will be challenging…

See you soon!

Well, Desiree and I are back from a well-deserved break… our first “real” vacation since our honeymoon. Almost all of our travel between then and our recent trip has been either for work or to visit relatives. As much as we love our families, travelling to see them is not really the same as leaving the country to go to tropical destinations. For the same reasons that ColdForged mentions, we weren’t inclined to announce our trip ahead of time, so I offer my apologies to our (semi-)regular readers.

Our vacation was a cruise, just like our honeymoon. I don’t think we’ll be doing it again. Don’t get me wrong - Desiree and I had a really great time and it was fairly relaxing. The time in the sun, the ocean, the pools, the hot tubs - all great stuff. But when it comes right down to it, Desiree and I have a very similar attitude toward people; let’s call it “hopeful misanthropy”. What I mean by this is that we strongly dislike other people in general, but we’ll give individual people the benefit of the doubt until they give us a reason to hate them, too.

Being in a confined space with so many passengers who were behaving so badly - both to the crew and each other - did not do a lot to enhance our dim view of humanity. The good times (which were thankfully the rule, not the exception) were punctuated by all sorts of infuriating behavior from people. We were on a European cruise line for which English is not the primary language and the dining and service customs are distinctly continental, so many of these cringe-worthy moments came from fellow Americans (the vast majority of the passengers). Our countrymen acted with such ignorance and were posessed with such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that Desiree and I exchanged the phrase “…and that is why the rest of the world thinks we’re obnoxious” several times a day. Add to that the sheer irritation of lines, crowds, and herd mentality in general, and pretty soon you’ve got Sartre’s “No Exit” on a boat. Don’t even get me started on the perplexingly high proportion of adult males hitting on girls that are clearly of middle-to-high school age; it’s creepy enough all by itself, but when it causes your SCUBA dive master to leave uncertified divers in the ocean - and by divers, I of course mean me - because they’re too busy trying to hook up with sixteen-year-olds, then it’s even more thoroughly unacceptable. Well, it could have been worse - there was a diver in our group who, due to lack of supervision and no fault of his own, drifted into the boating lane and nearly got his head taken off… just a few minutes before he ran out of air due to a leak in his gear. (He made it back ok, no thanks to the dive masters.)

So, in a nutshell - overall vacation: very good, close proximity to vast numbers of stupid people: very bad. I think next time we’ll go for the sun and surf minus the people… maybe rent a big beach house somewhere with some friends.

Well, it is time to get back into the blogging swing of things for the new year - a long vacation, lots of business travel, and some pretty ugly illness (I’m on what’s hopefully the downswing of a nasy cold that I brought back from one of my aforementioned trips and, of course, promptly infected Desiree) have left our weblog a virtual ghost town for the past few weeks, but we’ll be getting back in the saddle here shortly.

(And by “we”, I guess I mean “me”, since Desiree appears allergic to posting for the past several months.)

Extrasonic now has the beginnings of its new CSS and index.php.

Many more changes are forthcoming - de-uglifying the comments page, an update of the old category/author icons (including gravatars!) etc. - but I figured it was done enough to post.

(Non-spam) comments welcome.

Quite frankly, this site is going to be ugly for a while.

The conversion to Wordpress was smooth. Except for some non UTF-8 characters in some old posts, the conversion of the entire 2+ years of Extrasonic on Moveable Type went very fast and very easily.

Desiree and I have a LOT of template and CSS work to do before we’re happy, so you may see some experimentation on the live site; please bear with us. Once we get the “look and feel” right (which is not likely to happen for a couple of weeks, given our work schedules) then we’ll focus on adding/coding/refining features. Wordpress has an amazing amount of flexibility, so I’ve got some ideas for some new stuff.

Thanks, and try to deal with the ugliness for now - sorry.

This site has been converted to Wordpress 1.2.1, temporarily using the GPL’ed “Human Condition” theme and all comments are now moderated until a less draconian approach can be implemented.

Oh, and comment spammers? Fuck you. No, seriously - fuck you.

Due to a set of complicated factors such as illness, Halo 2 gameplay, and sheer unimportance, we forgot to note that November 10th was the 2-year anniversary of this site.

Happy birthday to us, er something!

If you think back to your high school social studies or biology classes, then you might remember two of the major theories of evolution - variational evolution, in which evolution is happening at a constant, slow pace, and punctuated equilibrium, in which things stay more or less the same for long periods of time but are occasionally punctuated with brief periods of radical change.

Why the remedial science lesson? Well, it seems like Desiree and I have just experienced the latter, and we’re still reeling.

The timeline (all 2004):

May: Our old house goes on the market
Jun: Desiree accepts new job
Jul (early): Desiree starts new job with significantly different duties
Jul (late): Dan applies for new job
Sep: We accept offer on old house
Sep: We make an offer on a new house
Oct 18: Dan starts new job with significantly different duties
Oct 25: We close on the sale of our old house
Oct 25: We close on the purchase of our new house
Oct 25: We move from old house to new house

There’s some other very major work stuff that happened in that timeframe that I’m not going to blog about (including the reason for the long delay between my job interview and my actual start date, as well as the completion of a major project that I’ve been working on for a couple of years). Fortunately, our new jobs were new roles with our existing employers, so while our day-to-day job responsibilities are now totally different than they were 6 months ago, at least neither of us has had to learn a whole new work culture.

There were also some pretty crazy problems with both real estate transactions which almost made me go prematurely grey, and for sheer amusement I may post about those sometime depending on how much of a carthartic release I need.

Essentially, the past six months have been constant turmoil and, unfortunately, were pretty high-stress. We’ve still got a lot of unpacking to do before we’ll feel settled, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to start looking at my new house as a home instead of a “to do” list in time to enjoy the holidays.

Ok - so I’ve taken some time off from blogging in order to focus on some other things; I’m in the process of getting some major things accomplished at work (which, of course, I shouldn’t really discuss here) and Desiree and I are in the midst of selling our house and buying a new one. This is all very time-consuming, and in the bit o’ spare time I have, I’ve been playing a whole lot of Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising when I don’t want to think and I’ve been spending an unholy amount of time puzzling through the “I Love Bees” stuff when I do.

Desiree, though, has no excuse (beyond the house-selling/buying), so feel free to taunt her as needed.

I’m not sure what the problem has been but many bloggers, very much including ourselves, have been in blogging hibernation.

I just haven’t had the time nor desire to gather news and have an opinion about much of anything…hopefully that’s about to change.

Besides, my one little Angel post has totally goofed up the layout.