We aren’t even safe in our own homes from killer beasts. A lady in our community found an alligator in her kitchen after returning from a friends house. Apparently the gator busted through her screened in lanai and she like many people in the neighborhood just leave their sliding glass doors open to let the breeze through. Well this gator busted through and wandered into her kitchen. The lady called 911 and the operator, who I’m sure thought this was a prank call, asked the lady if she was sure it wasn’t an iguana or gecko. The damn thing was 8 and a half feet long.

Luckily this wasn’t at our place, our animals would have been swallowed up. Haley would have tried to play with the thing, Jeter would have sniffed it’s butt then been chewed on, and then Rocko probably would have just ran away so he would’ve have lived. I would have crapped my pants and then peed all over myself just for extra measure. It’s scary to think the hundreds of times I’ve gone outside at night, not thinking about it to take Haley out. From now on all doors are closed and no one leaves the house past 9.

I think with all of the debates going on and the races starting to heat up, the candidates need to start discussing real issues. Issues like clean code, valid XHTML, usability, and coolness. Each candidate has rather up to date websites, in terms of look and standards. All are filled with ads, flashy galleries, sign-up forms every where, videos from YouTube. For me, my vote is going to come down to who has the cleanest XHTML, great use of standards and usability, because a candidate that cares about their site, cares about the people.

Worst Code
Taking a look underneath the hood of each site, you’ll be able to see just how well these sites are groomed. While all of them are up to date with certain 2.0 trends, there are a few that missed the boat. John McCain takes the Worst Code award. Very disorganized and bloated with inline JavaScript. Sorry but I just can’t look a candidate in the eye and believe what they are saying when they have coding practices like this. Coming in a close second is Mitt Romney. Full inline CSS style sheet just isn’t very 2008.

Most Like a Billboard
The winner of this category goes to Hill-Dawg. This site is piled high with ads or announcements that look like ads. I wonder if she has those tied into Google Adwords and just gets paid by herself for serving them, bold strategy. The rest don’t have a huge amount of advertising and actually cram a lot of content in the correct places.. so points to everyone else cept Hill-Dawg on this one.

Best Logo Design
Obama has by far the best logo of the bunch. It’s intuitive and fitting, really presents him the best. Others have various renditions of the flag or else there’s McCain who just has a standard Photoshop shape of a star as his logo. Minus 5 points for McCain again. I think a lot of thought went into creating Obama’s logo and it definitely shows in the end results. Obama 10 everyone else 2, except McCain who’s sitting at negative 10.

Best Color Scheme
This is a tough one to judge because it’s a little hard to waiver from the red, white, and blue.. but I think Obama shows the best use of a great palette. The vibrant blues and reds show off well with glowing accents and other effects throughout the site. A few others use a rather dull and boring palette, but McCain once again scores at the bottom with his use of heavy black tones. Trust me it’s nothing personal against McCain, I just don’t like him.

Overall Design Concepts
Huckabee’s is probably the most bloggish looking site, but with Chuck Norris on his back I don’t really want to go any further on that one. Guiliani I think, has the best integrated video player. Almost every other candidate went the easy route and just embedded some other video source. Best rotating feature pane goes to Obama, surprise surprise. It flows very well with the rest of the site and doesn’t look like every other rotating pane.

Conclusion
Adding up the points, looks like Obama wins with a score of 124 while the next closest, Ron Paul comes in at 34. This rating system is based solely on the time of day and how many cups of coffee I have had at that time. Other notables are Hill-Dawg with 8 points, and John McCain comes in at -17 points. So looks like based on these issues, which every true American should weigh, Obama is the clear favorite in 2008.

I have been looking for posters to put up in the office for awhile. I was specifically interested in the ISO50 posters and was looking around for them for awhile. The other day I was dropping Tommy off at this detailing shop when right next door I notice these posters. They had boxes and boxes full of them, the exact same ones I was looking for. I immediately got out of the truck and took a look. Apparently, tucked away between a detailing shop and a auto repair shop is a place called Merchline.

Merchline specializes in online store fronts for bands, artists, etc.. They had all of the ISO50 prints right there. They also had hundreds and hundreds of t-shirts, stickers, hats, cds.. anything and everything. We talked for the guys running the place and they were awesome. There are only three of them that do all of the online orders, packaging, shipping, inventory, updating.. everything for the sites. They have a huge list of clients. I definitely recommend checking them out.

I just posted some photos to my Flickr Account.. They are picture taken on our little trip up to Orlando to check out the Ikea store. We walked out with a bunch of stuff for the house and saved a butt load too. I can’t believe how inexpensive that store was. It was kind of a pain to have to put everything together but it was really easy. I also got a couple new monitors this past weekend. I finally upgraded to a 23″ monitor to help out with all of the design work that has been flowing in. When I first got it, it had a dead pixel right in the middle of the screen. Luckily the people at the Apple store were awesome enough to swap it out for me. Gotta love great customer service.

Anyways hope you enjoy the pictures. More will come. Well don’t count on that though cause the time between this batch and the last one was around 6 months.. so don’t get your hopes up.

I must admit that, I do have bad breath. I might not be able to smell it myself, but I have been told by a couple people that confirm this. Which makes me wonder all the time now, do people hate talking to me because of my breath or just plain hate talking to me. Moving on, I just ran across this article on what contributes to bad breath and what can help prevent it. As I sit here eating some Lunchables® and a Dr. Pepper® here are some of the key points:

What causes bad breath:

• Lack of Saliva in the mouth, especially in the morning
• Acidic foods and beverages; soda, alcohol, dairy products
• High protein foodds

What can help in your fight against bad breath:

• Obviously brushing multiple times a day
• Drinking 6-8 ounces of water a day
• Eat watery foods: celery, cucumbers, carrots
• Start with breakfast, helping build up saliva

One in 3 people suffer from bad breath, and they don’t realize it because the brain becomes used to the smell. So if you see people taking a little scoot away when you’re hovering over their shoulder, dusting them with your horrible breath, start off with these few little tips and before you know it you might actually have some friends.

View the related article

Everyday there are millions of people affecting others in a positive way. People that take their own benefit out of it and focus on making others happy, but in doing so, make themselves happy. My brother sent me this link to an hour and forty five minute movie last night. I got it at about 1:30 and stayed up til just past 3 watching it. It’s of a guy who is suffering from 10 tumors on his liver and the Doctors have given him 4-5 months to live. But he might be the most upbeat and happy guy you have ever heard. Obviously not everyone has almost 2 hours of their day to sit down and watch a video on their computer, but if you can skim through and just listen to little 5-10 minute clips of what this guy has to say. You won’t regret it.

Dying 47-Year-Old Professor Gives Exuberant ‘Last Lecture’

Within the past few months, I have looked into purchasing a house and have looked for a few cars. Apparently in that time they have run my credit so many times that it has now negatively effected my credit. How many things do they pin against you to RUIN your credit, simply to take more money from you with higher interest rates once you are eligible to obtain some form of credit. There is a serious problem with the credit system in this country and how badly young adults are effected by the lack of education on their credit. One tip for potential car buyers: Don’t goto Carmax.. they run your credit to dozens and dozens of banks at the same time and then let you choose which one you want to go with. So really, you are applying to ALL of those banks and this will effect you score in a very negative way. Carmax sucks for many more reasons that this, but for purposes of this post I’ll stop there.

I didn’t even know about credit until about 4 or 5 years ago, when I tried re-financing my car. I didn’t know that simply going to school and having student loans would hinder me. Nor did I know that missing one payment on a credit card, or going over the limit would drop me down into the “Hell No” credit bracket. I find it amusing that the system that determines how bad one’s credit is, is the same system that profits from higher interest rates.

The awesome thing about credit scores is that it could take you seriously about 3 days to completely destroy your credit score, but would take you years and years to gain back 20 points. I’m going to simply just save up cash from now on and stick it to the credit card companies. Credit Cards are the devil.. just ask 90 percent of people that get completely molested by them. What was that a late payment by a few hours? Oh, your interest rate just jumped up to 29.9%.. sucks to be you.

I am apparently living in a 60 year olds body. I struggle to get into my car, my chair, out of the couch, off the pot, wipe my own ass.. It all started the other day when I was getting ready for my baseball game. I was all set to leave when I grabbed my hat and tried putting it on my head. I guess my head has gained about 10 lbs. since the last time wore a hat, so I snugged down on my hat, straining my neck in the process. I had about a 60 degree range of motion with my