I would like to take a moment to say my goodbyes. I am leaving tomorrow afternoon for a fifty-two day train-up at Ft. McCoy, Wisconsin. Afterward, I will be deploying to Iraq. Not much to say about the deployment other than 396 days and a wake up until I come off orders. 'Til then...take care, and I'll see you when I return.

"1 in 4 teen girls has sexually transmitted disease"

"NASA's Shuttle Endeavour Begins Mission to the Space Station"

"Boy in ICU; Army won't let dad come home"
Updated: "Boy in ICU; Army won't let dad come home"

Wal-Mart Yanks Linux PC From Shelves, Keeps Them Online

I read an article on our local news site today that made me stop and think. About what? Well, first question that comes to mind..."What are kids thinking?". Apparently, a ten-year old boy from Everett saw a cartoon where a character was buried head first into the sand...up to their chest. Thinking this was a good idea, the boy and a few friends decided to bury himself in the same manner. Head first, up to his chest. Basically, he was buried in the sand from the top of his head to his chest. After a moment, he began to struggle, and his cohorts thought he was "playing". Unfortunately, contrary to the other children's idea of "playing", the boy was asphyxiating. Once he stopped moving, the kids summoned an adult, who unburied the boy and performed CPR until paramedics arrived. Due to what the children thought to be a funny game a young boy's life was tragically ended. However tragic, and accidental this was, makes you kind of wonder what was going through their minds. I know kids will be kids, and do some stupid things sometimes. God knows, I did my fair share. But, I really don't recall watching a television program and thinking to myself, "Wow! That seems like fun...let's try it!". Maybe I did, but I sure don't recall that to be the case. In particular when it came to stuffing my head somewhere it just didn't belong. Too bad for the kids and family of the boy. [Full Story]

Was doing my usual surfing through the Joomla! forums the other day and ran across a thread about wanting to change the layout of the 'Author' and 'Created Date' fields. Something else that was mentioned was the need or desire for having the ability to show a users avatar next to the content item title, the author and created date sections.

I had a pretty good idea, this was going to involve quite a bit of hacking of not only the Joomla! core content.html.php, but there would be additional files that would need to be hacked apart. Fortunately, Community Builder is already installed, allowing for users to upload JPG's for their avatar. A few components take advantage of using the core CB Avatar functionality to assist in controlling their own avatar functions. MyBlog, JomComment, Fireboard to name a couple.

Read an article on MSNBC.com earlier this evening that made me chuckle to myself. Apparently, after the U.S. Navy took a pot shot at the gimp satellite, China has expressed their concerns over fallout that could be harmful to those in their country. The fallout of vaporized hydrazine would not be very pleasant. However, I think it's only a fair trade. Feed U.S. children aqua dots and lead, dust China with hydrazine...seems fair enough to me.

"China requests the U.S. to fulfill its international obligations in real earnest and provide to the international community necessary information and relevant data in a timely and prompt way so that relevant countries can take precautions,"

Today our host decided it would be a grand idea to upgrade the server software without letting me know it was going to happen. This of course caused a couple issues with the site, however I was able to get everything back up and going in a relatively short amount of time. Well, o.k., not short but 6 hours wasn't too bad considering the work being done.