Beta Testing Skype 4.0

As a long time user and a paid user of Skype, I’m interested to try out the new beta version 4.0 I downloaded it tonight and so far am slightly impressed AND slightly paranoid at the increase in real-estate it takes on my screen.

Here’s what we have so far:

New Look:

What’s up with the new splotchy thingy that comes with the new Skype download? It looks like they’re marketing to 12-year olds with this.  Then again, they’re very European with their designs anyway. That’s what I’m calling it anyway; Neo-European meets the Power Puff Girls!


New fancy installer… ok seems workable. You don’t download the entire app, which I don’t like. Instead you download a 2.1 mb installer file and it contacts Skype’s servers for the full app. That’s great unless I’m deploying it across a network in which case I have to download the same app 300 times when I could just download it once and save the bandwidth… why do people like the idea of Live installers so much?

New Splash Screen

What’s up with the splash screen? That’s not even full size. What you’re seeing is about 90% of the actual size of the splash screen. I could have done better with the smaller version. And the rainbow? WTF gives with that? Hi, we’re really really hoping to attract the kindergarten market!

N00B Guide"

 

If you’re into the whole “read-me” thing, you will find this useful. It pops up each time you load skype unless you uncheck the “Show Welcome Screen at Startup” at the lower left side of the screen. I can deal with this feature. It’s actually helpful considering all the new stuff they’re adding to skype. I clicked on most of them and read through ‘em. They have added Plugins for skype now, recording plugins, outlook integration plugins, etc. I downloaded one that looked really neat, until I saw the full version costs 99 british pounds. Lemme see, that’s about $200.00 US for a plug-in that works on my FREE program, right? Ok.. not sure how long THEY’ll be in business!

New Chat Interface

This I like.. if I could get rid of it. It’s really cool to have complete access to a contact during a chat session, but really all I want to do is chat. Do I need 3/4 of my 22” monitor taken up with a chat screen?  You can do just about EVERYTHING from this screen though, see their screen name, their full comment tag (which used to be cut off if it was too long) their web site, contact history, etc, all from one screen.

Private Notifications in Taskbar

This part is pretty cool, I have to admit. The chat notification appears as a number on the taskbar, signifying how many messages or calls you have waiting. When you click on it, you get the little screen shown above. If you double click that screen, you see the large screen shown in the previous picture above.

New Contact Status Icons

This is another change, and a nice one. I can easily see who’s online (Green), who’s “away” (yellow), and who’s an outlook contact (light green with a phone icon).

CONS:

There are a few things I’ve noticed so far:

• The footprint is a little bigger (46mb running unloaded)
• The Skype plugin manager (skypePM.exe) runs all the time and takes 25 more MB, making Skype now more bulky in its footprint than Yahoo Messenger 9.0 Beta, which has the largest most horrific footprint of all.
• To get to the compact view you have to set it manually rather than it being the default. To do this click on View –> Compact View.
• History: I hate how Skype handles history. I use Skype for work. My clientele contains financial, government, and medical clients. As such, I’m strongly urged to keep logs of all chats for record keeping purposes. However, I definitely don’t want my personal chats archived with my business conversations, so I have disabled the history feature. It doesn’t matter how many times you set it to NOT remember the chat history.. it still does. I’ve got chat histories going back 45 days in my program history, right through two version upgrades, AND i have my Skype set not to save history. When I hit the enter key and send the message, I usually hit the ESC key and clear out the screen. From that point on, I never ever want to see that conversation history again.. usually at least. Why can’t Skype completely disable the history feature? It’s retarded that they’ve kept this bug through the last two versions through hundreds and hundreds of user complaints regarding it. Tonight, I went in and manually cleared the history. After doing so I tried to pull up chat history and poof, there it was again, even after manually clearing it out.

It’s a great telephone and teleconference program, which is 95% of what I use it for, but it’s never going to be a decent messaging appliance until they take user privacy into consideration. They’ve made small steps in this area with the discreet notification area changes, but its still too open. Anyone who has ten seconds at another user’s skype-connected computer can pull their entire chat history. That’s WAY not cool for a lot of my clients, and I’m not too keen on it either. If I just spent ten minutes ranting with a friend about what an ass some guy at work is, the last thing I’d want is that same guy checking into my PC to process an invoice and see my Skype history.
Overall, I give the new version a solid 4.0 out of 10. Bigger, Bulkier, Messier, tons of useless frills but no core changes that reflect user input, gay logo…

Technorati Tags: Skype,3.8,4.0,Beta,Testing,Chat,Phone,Telephone,Conference,Software,Messaging,Message,Communicate,program,pc to pc,mobile,privacy,history

Home after the Holidays

This was the road home today as I was leaving to come back to Greenville. I took this on Alligator River bridge, heading home from East Lake. The fog was eerie. I thought it was a neat picture, worth sharing.

It’s 8:15 Saturday evening and I’ve just gotten home. We left Mom’s today around 1:00 and stopped by to see Gerald and Priscilla Holliday (Doc’s parents) on the way home. After a visit of about an hour we were back on the road again bound for the house, but only long enough for BookWorm to cook a green bean casserole, and then we were off again to Michelle and Gary’s. (Bridget’s cousin and his wife, also one of her best friends). We enjoyed a nice meal with them and then watched Clayton play WII everything for about an hour and just now returned home. Now comes the unpacking, the unboxing of gifts, trying to find new places to put things, more enjoyment of my new coffee pot, and a massive uploading of pictures to FlickR. I’m actually doing that now, while I write this post, so maybe I can have the link generated by the time I’m finished writing.

My Digital Life:

 
That photo is my actual life… on a daily basis. I just had to get a picture of it to share, just for the sake of humor. Right there in that shot I’m charging my iPhone, iPod, a Motorola Razr, and a Samsung BlackJack. The only things NOT shown, but currently turned on, were my iPod remote control and my GPS.  If electronic devices really DID generate deadly radiation I would have been dead long ago from gamma exposure. On the other hand, this could be a commercial for the quality of the alternator installed in my Jeep.

Well, I’m going to take a break for a moment. I just had company come over. Marcus’ wife is working tonight until 10 so he’s got some time to kill and decided to stop by and say hey. I was hoping we had some holiday food to pawn off on him, but I think it’s actually all been eaten. Thank God!

Finally, The Photos:

It took long enough, and as usual, the flickr uploader goofed up, but I finally got the 55 photos taken over the last two days uploaded to the web site. If you want to see, feel free to check ‘em out. They’re located at: http://flickr.com/photos/tommyjordan/sets/72157611750637572/

Technorati Tags: Holidays,Driving,Christmas,photos,pictures,ipod,iphone,blackjack,samsung i-607,jeep,scooby central

Buried under presents

Here is a picture of TJ, buried under gifts - 2008

Christmas in the Harbor

Well, it's Saturday as I compose this. I'm using this time to blog rather than to fall asleep in the chair.

We came down to Mom's today for Christmas with her and my daughter and we've just finished opening presents. Mom 2.0 is cooking fried chicken for lunch with  sweet potato casserole.


iChild is sitting contentedly on the couch watching Cesar the Dog Whisperer and bookworm is reading a novel she swiped off mom 2.0's shelf. Me, well I'm sitting here in the chair with my new house-shoes writing this and looking through all the pictures we just took.

I thought I'd blog some of them before adding all of them to FlickR later this week.

I've decided that people need nicknames. That's my new blog niche. lol Sad huh? Technically I can't take credit at all because I first admired the idea when Merritt did it a few years ago on her blog. She run the Coffee-Talking blog and you'll often see her reference coffee-kid or coffee-husband, rather than call them by name. I've been playing with the idea for about a year and gotten nowhere, so I figured I'd just start trying out ideas and see where it takes me.  I even ran across the perfect new name for my blog the other day... Coffee and Code.. but alas I ran across it because it belonged to someone else. Rather than impinge on their creativity I will instead wander around in search of identity a little while longer.  Scooby Central is no longer the home of the Scoobs, so it's only fitting that it be renamed, much like an old diner that's been purchased by new owners and serves a new clientele. I need a new name. Jordan's Java? Nah. I really do want a coffee theme.. it's what I do. It's me. I'm always drinking coffee, from the time I get up until the time I go to bed. My best ideas come from the bottom of a coffee pot, having wired my brain into overdrive until it has no possible alternative except to rise to a new level of hyper-creativity and jittery awareness.

There's an idea. LMAO! How about Java Jitters? That's only funny if you're aware that I stutter... sometimes horribly so, other times less pronounced. The Jittery part is definitely me. I don't want to stretch for it though. I'll let it come to me in its own time.

Other Highlights of The Day

Bookworm looks like someone Santa left behind by mistake, all decked out in her holiday wear she got this year.


Mom got a pretty unique gift this year. I'm not sure where in the world she'll put it, but she got it. The story goes... I took a picture of Mom in Christmas of 2004. Her pose was an exaggerated "Oh Boy!" poses. She already knew what she was getting, but being the good sport she is, she put lots of energy into looking surprised. Well, 4 years later I got an email from a gentleman in London who had found the picture on FlickR and wanted my permission to use the photo of "my mum" as he so quaintly put it. They were doing an advertising campaign for National Express Trains in London station and wanted to use this photo as part of their test campaign.

I guess the client liked the photo. After checking with mum and getting her permission, I told him it was OK to use, but that I had one favor to ask; if possible, I'd like one of the posters signed by the ad creation team so I could frame it and give it to Mom. His reply was pretty quick and informed me that my poster would be printed and mailed in time for Christmas. Sure enough, DHL delivered me an almost-life-size poster in plenty of time for wrapping. So, this year I got a picture of Mom being surprised with picture of Mom being surprised. Nope, I didn't stutter. I had to think hard to get that right.


I was surprised again this year, though I shouldn't have been. Mom always says "there's not much under the tree for you this year" and this year I was reminded half a dozen times that I had nothing under the tree.... looks that way huh? I'd hate to see the year she says there's a LOT under the tree. I was sitting there comfortably in my chair letting iChild play Santa Claus this year expecting a small box or two. Obviously I was surprised when inundated with boxes. I got shirts, some new cargo slacks, some really nice pictures of iChild and of my, my brother, and Dad, new house-shoes (which I've been dying for) and lots of other stuff. It was a day full of nice surprises for me. The older mom gets, the better her taste in clothes gets. Or maybe its that the older I get the more I fit into her buying patterns??? I choose to believe the former, rather than the latter. I'm not really one to have picked out the sweaters I got, but I think they'll really look good on me.  We just had a two minute discussion on whether they're Polo sweaters, crew neck sweaters, or something else altogether. I'll just have to take a picture and show them to you later. One of you can tell me what they are. They remind me of a british college professor... if that's any indication of the style I'm thinking of.

( I ended this post early. I'll catch it up later)

Christmas Coffee Concoctions

 

My old coffee pot finally gets what it deserves… to die! Cathy and Frankie gave me a Hamilton Beach one-cup coffee pot for Christmas this year. I used to have one like this that uses a thermal holding tank to hold hot coffee, rather than depending on the warming plate to keep it hot. The warming place usually results in my coffee tasting scorched in less than an hour after brewing and I wind up throwing half the pot away. I haven’t been able to find one I liked in years though. Most of the new styles actually make the coffee one cup at at time and I’m far too impatient for that!

Presently, my new coffee pot it sitting right next to its smaller predecessor on my  countertop, happily burbling away on a fresh pot of coffee as my old pot sits there and faces its imminent demise! I’m sitting here right now drinking the last cup of crappy coffee that pot will ever make!

 

Technorati Tags: Coffee,Christmas,Present,Holidays,Hamilton Beach,Gift

Merry Christmas!

I just wanted to take a moment to say

 Merry Christmas

to all my friends, loved ones, and to the rest of the world. I hope it’s a special day for all of you!

Christmas: 80’s Rock Style and Memories of Youth

Ok, so maybe I’m a little strange, but I did get a little un-funked today. Right now I’ve got Eric Clapton’s Time Pieces album cranked wide open. I’m putting together a new iPod playlist of the Rock I grew up to. It’s so amazing.. I can remember things I was doing 15 years ago when these songs were playing. I remember listening to the Pearl Jam Ten album with my walkman (god, a walkman.. really?) and a pair of clunky headphones.

Here’s a sample of what I’m putting together in this list:

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood Sugar Sex Magik

My mom found this CD when I was about 16 and threw it away. It was the first CD I’d ever gotten that I hadn’t bought myself. I remember Lauren gave it to me as a present shortly after we started dating.

Guns and Roses reminds me of two things:

1) Lauren and her sister smoked a LOT of pot back in the day.  I like the music but hated the pot. lol. Wow.. 107 Colington Drive. I still remember living there.

2) The other GNR memory is of riding through Nags Head Woods (before it was paved) with Richard. He and I in the bid “Red Bird” 1970 Chevy Nova, two lipstick red and black. God that was a bad ass car!

Def Leppard and my appreciation for all things one-handed is another thing I owe to Lauren. I have to admit, the woman had an amazing taste in music. I HATED it back then, because I was forced to learn every word to every Def Leppard, Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, Aerosmith, and Jim Morrison song ever written.  I love it now. All that music is just full of cool memories now.

New Additions to My Collection:

I added a little new material today too. I’ve been on a female-vocalist country music kick this week. I’ve just gotten some new Sugarland and Miranda Lambert. I decided to sample the Miranda stuff before I committed to it, but she’s got a really awesome voice; country and twangy without being nasal or too pop (read as Taylor Swift).

Now I can’t decide what to mix up next. I’m on a kick here.

Memory to Share:

In memory of my younger days running the roads with Richard, I found a picture of our old car. I say “our” because he paid for it but I spent more hours in that car than just about anywhere else that year. Ours was built with bondo, spackle, and LOTS of work before it was this pretty.  Richard loved that car more than any woman. If it were the Red Bird or his girl that had to go, she’d better know she was packin’ to leave.

She was hand-sanded and had custom paint ordered from Chevrolet. She bit it one day in a deadman’s curve in Currituck. Richard was driving around a curve when two camaro’s rounded the curve racing towards him, each trying to get in front of the other. He had nowhere to put her except the ditch… The red bird plowed through a cornfield with two tons of steel and 307 cubic inches of haul-ass at 70 miles an hour and never drove again. To her credit, she kept him alive. He walked away without much of a scratch.

Technorati Tags: Music,Guns N' Roses,Metallica,Def Leppard,Eric Claptop,90's,80's,Rock,Alternative,Drugs,Country,Miranda Lambert,Sugarland

New Look, New Feel

Well, it’s done, for better or worse. The look and feel of the last three years has been replaced with a more “me” feel, or at least as close to how I feel as I can relay through some CSS code and imagery. I hope you’ll take a moment to share you thoughts on the poll (to the right). I’m not sure if this is the final new look or just the newest look for now, but it was time for a change. The old site was stagnating and uninspiring. At least this feels… brighter.

I’ve added the navigation to the top to make it easy for those who want to communicate with me. If you so choose you can easily get to my Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, work web site, photos, and whatever else I can eventually think to add that people might want to see. The most common request lately is the photos. I’ve switched to Flickr over these last few months and am about 65% through the uploads, currently at around 8,000 photos. The link takes you straight to the Collections section. If you’re looking for photos from Christmas, they’ll be in an album under Special Events. Conversely, if you want to find photos tagged of yourself, look in the Friends collection. Any friends that I have a substantial amount of photos of will be there. You can always just search my photostream for your name; you truly never know what you’re gonna find.  I should note that I’ve purposefully not tagged or included anything from the family history section in the other sections yet. I’m going to wait until all the photos are scanned first and then just waste an entire day trying to tag them all at once.

New Thoughts

I’ve been in one of those get to know myself moods for awhile now, finding out again what I want in life, thinking how to get there, determining what is important to me and what’s not. I’ve determined that of all the things I miss, I miss the country side of me the most. That’s not really the right word, but the word doesn’t come to mind at the moment. I’m not talking about pickup trucks and handguns, though those are nice too. I miss the outdoorsman I used to be. I miss working with my hands, being outside in the cold of the early morning while the frigid air pulls the heat from my firmly held coffee cup. I miss the smell of nature when the sun comes up in the morning. The grass has a decidedly cleaner smell in the early morning. I miss having my dog around my feet, searching and huffing at the scents and the sounds that are unique to each morning.

My working life is that of a tech-head. That’s not going to change unless I have a mid-life crisis, sell the business, go in debt for a red convertible, and become an hard rock roadie. Considering the unlikelihood of that course of events in my near future, I’m pretty much stuck as a tech head, a geek, computer-nerd, what have you…  Anyone that knows me knows I really don’t fit the geek mold, but it’s my career path, so I embrace it.

Spending all that time each week at work and again at home behind the computer is starting to get to me. I probably spend 12+ hours per day on the computer, not because I want to necessarily. Even on the days I get to go out and work in the field, I still have to come back to the office or my home-office and play administrative catch-up because no one in my office knows how to invoice, prepare estimates, follow-up with customers, take out the trash, break down cardboard boxes, remember to pay the bills, or anything else remotely related to the actual running of a business. I’ve got the greatest team in the world when it comes to implementation,but the worst possible team when it comes to follow-up…

So, putting all this together into what makes up my average day just really leaves me longing to be able to DO something with the little free time I do have. I want a barn.. not a nice high-tech office ( I already have one of those), but a tobacco-board barn with a wood floor and lights that are strung against the roof trusses with a switch on the wall. I want table-saws and band-saws, my hand tools, a plywood work bench to craft on, and then I want an old coffee pot in the corner and an old radio with no cd player, iPod hookup, and nothing but an old pair of stereo speakers in those huge unwieldy old-style box cases. I want to smell saw-dust with the lightest hint of turpentine from where I left my paint brushes drying the day before. I want a wood burning stove that I have to cut wood for myself to have heat. I want to sit for hours in my free time and on weekends and build patio furniture, or bird houses, or new cabinets as I get the money.

What I really want is a horse in a stall outside, a little property to run him on, and a labrador retriever to keep us company while I feed up in the mornings and evenings.

I spend so much time Doing what I do for a living that I’m becoming what I do, not what I want to be. I don’t know how to fix it yet, but I do know that its becoming an ever increasing desire, so much that I don’t stop thinking about it much anymore. I’m not looking to change who I am, just to get a little bit of “me” back into my life, just enough that I can appreciate the high-tech side of my life and then come home to the low-tech relaxation that you can only get from working with your hands.

 

Holidays

 

I should take a moment to say Merry Christmas to every one while I’m at it. I really DO wish everyone a very very Merry Christmas, though I haven’t been in much of the Christmas spirit this year myself. I’m not sure if it’s just because money is tight or other reasons altogether. I’m not a humbug by any means, but I’m not my usual holiday self. I’m usually that guy that’s playing Christmas songs the day after Thanksgiving and only stop at New Years because my friends threaten to break my iPod if I don’t. This year I’ve played two Christmas songs, and neither all the way through to the end. I’m just not Christmasy this year…  It seems I’m not alone in that though. There’s been a run of the mill blah attitude with lots of people this year. Maybe its the economy. Maybe its the weather. I dunno. I just want it to go away and to cheer up and be uber-holiday-spirit-man again like usual.

Well, I think I’m gonna shower and go to the office for a bit and check on things there. I’ll write more soon. Merry Christmas Everyone!

Technorati Tags: Christmas,Holidays,Dreams,Goals,Scooby Central,Tommy Jordan

0 Day Microsoft SQL Vulnerability

Important News Some of You Might Want to Hear:

 

Microsoft has confirmed the existence of a new and potentially serious security threat to users of its SQL Server database software.
The threat is exploitable software code that hackers could use to access or alter corporate databases built with SQL Server. The malicious code could allow remote code execution - a process by which hackers could, as one example, alter a bank account via remote access.
Microsoft said SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine, and Windows Internal Database (WYukon) are all vulnerable to the threat.
Microsoft is urging customers who believe they've been targeted by anyone using the vulnerability to contact Microsoft customer service, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internet Crime Complaint Center.
They don't appear to be releasing a patch at this time. There's a shoddy workaround.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/961040.mspx

 

Technorati Tags: Windows,Microsoft,Vulnerability,0 Day,SQL,Virus,Attack,Compromise

Happy Holidays?

I’ve decided that crap is like kitty presents under the tree. My cats are celebrating the holidays by taking a dump on my hardwood floor. There’s nothing quite as refreshing as cleaning up cat-crap at 7:20 in the morning to get your day started off right. Today I’m going for one of those “It can’t get any worse philosophies.”

Out from the Ether

In case some of you think I have fallen off the face of the earth, I'd like to assuage your fears, or hopes as they may be, and assure that I am still here.

 

It's been very busy in my life lately. To say more would be to insinuate that I could adequately explain what I've been doing for the last two months since I posted. If I could do that, I wouldn't have been gone so long in the first place now would I?

 

Suffice it to say that I've been lurking and learning with fervor lately. I'm not here on the blog as much because most of what I've been doing you would find more boring that just reading nothing at all. Hence I've actually saved you all time by not wasting it any more than I am right now.

 

I'm hungry for knowledge lately, working more than ever, and sucking the information from every source that will voluntarily give it.... those that won't are locked up in a vault in my basement until they break fromt he strain of watching I Love Lucy reruns.

 

In the recent months, I've spent the vast majority of my time restructuring my business to ride the wave of this new economy. Some think that it's just business as usual and that life will return to normal shortly. To those, I extend my deepest condolences. You have no idea what you're talking about.

 

Others think that falling gas prices are a good sign (they're not), and that the specials they get in stores are because of the holiday season. (again, they're not).

The world around us is changing and if I am to be successful I must throw away what I think I know and open my thick head to learn from those who are better and more accurately able to see where the economy is going, where the IT market it going, and where the business market will be six months from now, 1 year from now, and three years from now once our economy actually starts to return to something it can call a status-quo.

 

I've spent a lot of time implementing the lessons I've learned; spinning down my break-fix mentality and ramping up my Managed Services Platforms to be able to offer full-suites of complementary services that can actually help my customers better survive their own economic troubles. If my customers are losing money, and they are, then I need to be able to better support them with less headache, more profit for myself, and less overall expense to them; creating a win-win that insures their trust as well as my continued operation and growth potential.

 

Thanks to brilliant minds like Erick Simpson, Vlad Mazek, Stuart Selbst, Anne Chase, Ted Roller, and a slew of others I've had the pleasure to speak to and learn from, I'm finally able to bust out in this market and grow when those around me fall into tatters. In the last three months our economy has taken the largest downturn in recent history. In those same three months I have managed to increase profits over 100% from just a quarter year ago, without ever raising prices, and in effect lowering prices on some items that have a sustainable margin.

 

I’m currently in what I call the “Squirrel” phase of the year, putting money away in case the worst does happen and I need to be able to sustain a month or two of no growth. Expenses have tripled, but the profitability of services has risen to match without costing my customers any more so I’m fairly confident that I’m doing most of it right, though I can definitely see spots where improvement is needed, mainly in my understand of how best to implement certain technologies or business practices. 

 

On a recent highlight, I’ve just acquired my first SLA customer this year. It took me two months to put the policies in place, test the technologies, form the necessary partnerships with the big vendors, and put tires to asphalt to get it moving. Even the damned contract took me over a week to get right.

 

My personal life? Well, not that I’ve had one much lately, but I’ll fill you in on that too in case you’re interested.

• Went to see Dad and Becky and took Mom and my sister Karen out with me. Had a wonderful weekend and got tasked as the family historian; meaning they gave me every photo album ever collected and I’m in the process in my rare spare time, of scanning all these and putting them to a chronology. It’s been really interesting, though it’s also a crap-load of work. I’ve seen photos of family members that I never even knew existed.
• Spent a week in Mississippi and another week in Alabama working for a new contract client. 14 days of bouncing around hotels in 4 states, $2,000 in gas, and 8,000 miles on my truck later I was back home again.
• Installed two new security systems for new customers in Virginia, both up and running very smoothly.
• Increased my remote services client base about 50%.
• Wait… this was personal stuff wasn’t it? See, I told you I don’t have a personal life. I have work. That IS my personal life.
• Got most of the Christmas shopping done, though it’s a much slimmer Christmas than in years past. My apologies to all of you who I wanted to buy for but just couldn’t this year. My only solace is that it’s not just me who’s broke, so I feel a little better sharing in the recession with the company of loved ones and friends.
• Got a new laptop! Since Dave hasn’t made any effort to get in touch about mine, I can only assume he plans on keeping it and never returning it. That really scalds my goat but what can I do? He’s six thousand miles away with my laptop and has absolutely no reason to want to send it back other than that I asked for it and he promised to send it. Where I come from that’s enough, but Scottish customs apparently dictate less stringent bindings between friendly agreements.

Other than that I haven't’ been up to much. I mean I’ve been up to my freakin eyeballs, but not in stuff you’d care to hear about. The only thing left on my personal creative agenda is to recreate the blog. I get in this mood about once a year, but I think it’s about time the site had a name change. When I first started Scooby Central, it was for all the Scoobs, most of which weren’t techno-literate at the time.  Most of them now have married off, gotten other hobbies, mastered FaceBook and MySpace, or just gotten bored with the site. I’m pretty much the last one standing on here in the last 12 months who posts.

 

I’ve still got carolinaregion.com for my personal posting site, but the Google results are significantly higher here on SC, so I’m going to keep the address, but likely will change the name and the layout to reflect a more “me” feel and drop the community userbase off, unless there are some that actively want to stay. It’s not that I don't love all my Scoobs, just that there’s no point in having it advertise everyone else if it’s really just me ranting and raving about my own personal thoughts while masking that singularity in a pretend community. I haven’t decided on a new name, new layout, or new idea though, and I’m certain not to get around to it until at least the new year. It will mean re-categorizing every post on the site, which is over a thousand at the moment at least, though I’m not sure of the exact number. That’s a task I dont look forward to…

 

Well, I’m off to watch some TV now. You all have a wonderful evening and a Merry Christmas!

To those who prefer “Happy Holidays”, bite me you Jew.