Tally Me Banana

It seems that the votes are in, and number 6 won. The pool look. The problem with the pool look is that it does not exactly fit in well with the font colors I have. So, I will need to tweak the font colors a bit so as to make everything look OK. I may have to slightly alter the background image to make the blues slightly darker. Or lighter. Either way the font colors need to be changed.

So I went with 5, but it is not going to be the final new look for 08. I just need more time to play with the look and feel. Ill get around to it.

In other news, winter arrived last night. A front moved through and temperatures are in the mid to lower 30s. For all you Celsius people that is 0 - 5 or so degrees. No lower than 0. But the winds are cranked up so it feels pretty cold. And if you add Miami Standards to the equation it is like a full on blizzard. If you live in the north, imagine that outside it is 50 below freezing, and the carbon dioxide from your breath freezes before your eyes and falls to the ground as dry ice. That is how people are acting.

Today when I was out and about I saw people in Eskimo style jackets. Not as thick of course but with the same basic look. You know, with the fur lined hood that goes over your head. One of those jackets.

Really now - it was not that cold this afternoon! The sun was up. The latitude is still 25 degrees north. Hell 120 nautical miles to the south and it is officially the tropical zone! So it is not like this is Greenland or anything. The wind was blowing at about 20 knots steady, with higher gusts - so there was some wind chill. But I was out in jeans and a short sleeve shirt and did not die. If I was going to be outside all day I would have probably sported something with long sleeves, like a flannel shirt or a lightweight wind breaker. But a jacket? Come on now. Get real. It was not that cold.

If I were outside right now I would bust out with the jacket. And I would probably still be cold because while I have a jacket I lack proper cold weather lower body clothing. All I have are Florida jeans - which have no liner or anything. Long underwear? Yea right. Don't have any of that shit either. The best I could do would be jeans just a little too small for me but that I could still get into, with jeans that fir looser over them. Or my sleeping pants (flannel pajama bottoms) with jeans over them. But more often than not, if I venture too far north in the winter and it gets cold (by South Florida standards) my ass freezes. And my feet freeze. I just have regular shoes but I can double up the socks.

But all in all, this cold snap will being me some good benefits. I may venture into the Everglades this weekend. It has been a while since I rode the Shark Valley loop. I want to do that. The cold will mean less mosquitoes. In fact, it should mean NO mosquitoes. And the alligators will be sunning by the tram road, as the road soaks up heat. So that is always fun. There will be many photos if I go. It all depends on the wind really. The ride is not that far but I do not want to fight a strong head wind either.

There also may be another fishing mission this week.

Template Madness

OK apparently the new look for 2008 has provoked mixed reactions. Scarlet claims it is not blue. Well I say something is wrong with Scarlet's monitor - or my monitor. Because it looks blue to me. It looks as blue as the blue label on a bottle of Chimay, as you can see for yourself by the photo to your left. Also the web page I stole the background from had it listed under "blue" backgrounds. I did not exactly "steal" it, I found it on one of those "free web page background" sites. It is not possible to steal something that is free.

I got another comment from Cheesemeister about the new background screwing with your eyes because of the pattern. It is too linear.

So....I picked out seven backgrounds. And you get to vote! Yes, vote. Backgrounds 1 - 6 are in the photo below, voting for 7 keeps the current background.

Click the image to see them all on a plain white background, and slightly larger. I may have to overrule 6 if it wins, or change the colors of the text. I have gone with a dark background / light text color theme. If I switch to a light color background, I need darker contrasting text. Six is kind of cool - but then again it could be "too busy" for a proper background. Who knows.

And in other news, I need some TEMPLATE MASTER input here. See what I want to do is create a new blog layout optimized for mobile devices. Namely my phone. Yes I can view my blog as it is now, but I have to resize the page to 75% and it scrolls slow. It is a cell phone after all, not a full blown computer. So I found a plain one column template with a plain white background. PERFECT! But what I need to do now is have the posts I put here show up there. How the heck would one accomplish this? How could I have the same posts show up on two blogs? Oh yea, I also want the comments to show up on both blogs. So if someone leaves a comment here I can look at it from the other blog. And if I leave a comment on the other blog (from the phone) it shows up here. Or hell, if someone wants to just read the posts here without all the pictures and Bush countdown and other highly un-American propaganda I have here that can just go to the plain blog.

Anyhow you get the idea. I tried but could not get anything to work. I figure there has to be a way, but I can not figure it out. Maybe you can think up something I overlooked or just did not even think about.

In other new phone news, I figured out how to screw ATT out of $10 a month charge! Bastards wanted to charge me - CHARGE ME - $10 a month to "enable the GPS function of my phone". Uhhhhhh....NO! I have three GPS units now. The oldest is my hand held Garmin E-Trex Legend. It has street level maps for most of Florida from Orlando to the Keys. That is all the map data I can fit into the thing with its 8 megs internal memory. GPS 2 is for the boat - it is an ass kicking full color GPS Chart Plotter. Since that thing got installed I have not run aground on any shallow areas. GPS 3 is a device made for the car. It has a touch screen and voice prompts telling me when to turn and shit. Really cool. I set it up for "US English" for input and "UK English" for the voice prompts. It is like having my own British chick butler in the vehicle, telling me when to turn, what road I will be on, and what direction I am going. I tried Japanese but I could not understand it. I do not trust electronic devices speaking to me in languages I do not understand. They could be plotting my untimely demise for all I know. Or they could be getting ready to make me drive through an area of town that not even the police drive through unless they have to.

So I declined the GPS for the phone, using the logic that three GPS units were enough for one person. Well later on I thought "fuck that". What the hell? I might as well take the ATT phone back for an I-Phone with the superior Safari web browser if I am not going to use the GPS! But then I did some looking. And you know what I found out?

ATT sucks. They lied to me. They said I HAD TO pay the $10 a month for the GPS to work. BZZZZZZZZ! WRONG!!!! The shitty software that came with the phone needs a $10 per month subscription to work. But GOOGLE MAPS IS FREE! Thats right, GOOGLE MAPS IS FREE! All hail the totally free Google Maps application that works on smart phones and Pocket PCs and also accepts GPS data! So I downloaded Google Maps and installed it on the phone. Then I started the application, and told Google Maps to use GPS data. And just like that - I was in. Google street level maps AND satellite view works on my phone with the GPS. ASS KICKING! So now I have 4 GPS units. Now if I get lost it is just because I am a dumb ass. There can be no other reason.