Wednesday 31 August 2005 Lookee here, I broke the Sunday string. Nice job, me.

Managed to make it up into the mountains again this weekend with my wife, mother-in-law, and daughter. We joined our friends Kevin and Kris, along with their son and daughter, up in their cabin. It was a great time of cards and hiking and grilling and looking at the stars and cooking s'mores around the campfire and chit-chat. Thanks again to Kevin and Kris for having us up to their place. It's always a great time.

I'm still picking up new CSS tricks and tips right now. My friend Grandy was kind enough to turn me onto Eric Meyer's books, and I've been utilizing them heavily to spruce the place up a bit. Right now I consider the pages and the site a heavy work-in-progress, especially with the sprucing upsies and the manner in which the content is ultimately displayed. I think I've got a firm grasp as to what the content will be and how it will look, so I don't feel too guilty in spending an evening mocking up a cool looking calendar for aid in blog navigation.

Work has been a nightmare for the last stretch. There's a manager that I'm reporting to who seems to have it out for me, and has taken to making subtle jabs in meetings an in emails. It's been going on for a while, but I've finally decided that I'm not just being oversensitive and need to start documenting things. He reports directly to my actual manager and the two of them work very closely together, so my fear is that Mr. Doesn't Like The Meal may end up doing a good chunk of my year-end performance review (you know, the thing that determines my compensation). If I'm to go to my actual manager before that happens and explain that there's an apparent personality conflict, then I'd better have a howitzer with which to back up my claim. Fortunately he does not seem to adverse to keeping these things out of work emails (well, fortunately and unfortunately both, I suppose -- it's their existence in emails that are sent out to "the world" that really gets my goat) so my documentation efforts shouldn't be too difficult.

Sunday 21 August 2005 Heck, maybe I should change this from my "Supdate" to my "Sundate". Heh.

Great week for the site this week as I was able to bring my other two projects into the fold with their generic top-level sites, and I'm getting a bit better with the web stuff. Slowly I'm getting the web end of things figured out; pretty soon I'll be able to spend some time working on the content of those other sites. My intent is to use each of the top-level pages of the sites as a topic-specific blog, so folks who aren't interested in NHL Hockey or amateur astronomy shouldn't end up too bored with reading the text on this page.

Has been a nice span of days off the internet, too. Work was bringing me down at the beginning of the week, but a few victories on Thursday and Friday actually make it such that I'm not dreading going back in tomorrow. Also spent a lot of time this weekend with friends (we had our tenth Guinness Weekend celebration, ironically called GW-XI {as we've always intended for GW-X to be held in Ireland, and with four sets of friends currently expecting babies, we were thinking that this probably shouldn't be the year}) and family (took in a couple of movies: The 40 Year-Old Virgin and March of the Penguins, both of which I highly recommend). My daughter begins seventh grade on Tuesday of this week, and with our move into the new place last year, it means that she's in a new school. Fortunately she's a lot like me -- I get excited when I'm heading into a new situation (new job, new town, new website...), she's very much more excited about the new school than she is apprehensive. I love discovering that underneath her seemingly apprehensive nature she's got a great attitude about trying new things.

Finally a special shout out to my friend Rip at Navigator Hosting for helping me out with this web stuff. Rip, despite being an Indiana Pacers fan, is a really helpful and capable person who's struck out on his own and has a great little internet business. I registered my URLs through NH, and I'm proud to say that his machines are the host of this little family of sites. If you're looking for a great place to host a presence on the web, you could do a lot worse than giving Rip a try. Thanks, man!

Sunday 14 August 2005 So much for me spending a lot of time getting this page up and running. Much like many projects I undertake, this is a classic example of Ready, Fire, Aim. Sometimes it works, and sometimes you create a lot more effort for yourself down the road.

So I think I should comment about the colors. Originally I had a pink motif that my daughter loved, but eventually I came to my senses and picked a bit more gender-appropriate color scheme. My wife wouldn't come right out and say that she thought I had gone fruity, but the insinuation was sure there. I'm pretty sure that I like how things have turned out, but there's no guarantees that I won't be playing with things into the future. Fortunately I'm making a real effort this time to design from the ground up with intelligent CSS practices. So if things do need to get changed, it won't be the end of the world.

As I haven't started advertising the existence of this page yet, I don't consider myself "live". And since I'm not yet live, I don't have any problems with the broken links in the navigation menu on the left, nor with the crappy title bar across the top of the page, nor many of the other aspects of the layout which I'm still kicking around in my head.

Sunday 7 August 2005 Oh cripes have I ever done this a lot of times. College, post-college, post-post-college. I've honestly lost count of the number of times that I've started up new web pages at new places and new URLs all over this web. I'm the equivalent of astronauts hitting golf balls off the moon, littering up an enviornment that you really have to go out of your way to litter up. And yet, here I am again.

So the deal is that I'm just formulating everything in my mind right now, trying to get this page up and running. Lots and lots and lots and lots of work needs to get done before the page gets to go live. Don't be surprised if the entry after this date ends up being months after this one.

So, what's the intent? Why come back a fourth (or fifth, or who-really-knows?) time? Do I have anything more important to say? Have I learned something from my previous forays on the web? Can I actually provide a useful service? Well...

I see three things coming out of this.

1. A page to (occassionally) toss down my ideas on life. I've done this in the past and ended up burning out for lots of reasons. I think I've learned from that experience and I think that while the next incarnation of Sup With The Meal is destined to be less interesting for the reader, it can succeed better on my end of the business.
   So what's in store for Neal's hockey on the web? Well, honestly I have a few ideas, but nothing too solid as of yet. I do intend to run a smaller scale regular season tournament, and I'd like to re-unleash NNPT with a catchier name.
2. The NHL took 2004-2005 off from its business of playing hockey. I took the same span off from having a home on the web. However, they're back in business, and so am I. Neal's NHL Playoff Tournament needs a home. And here we are.
3. I've got a new hobby from the last time I've spent time on the web, and in the process of developing this hobby I've perused many many online resources. Unfortunately I never came across the one resource I really wanted, and so discovering a hole in the web, I thought I'd spin up my own little patch. It's a healthy endeavor, but I intend to create a webpage focusing on naked-eye amateur astronomy -- talking about the constellations, history of the myths and names behind the various organization of stars in the skies, other naked-eye nighttime phenomena, and whatever else seems interesting to me. I came into the hobby woefully uneducated, and would love to target my writing to folks in the same boat -- someone interested in the skies above, but lacking anything in the way of a formal education. It doesn't take squat to be interested in the skies above, and so it shouldn't take squat for someone to learn many of the interesting things that are involved in our evening's natural entertainment.

The goals are anything but modest, but my excitement is high, and the motivation extreme. Here's to wishing me luck in my (newest) endeavors and excitement as to where the project takes me.

Page updated 6:20 PM 9/4/2005 (MST)