I realized today that I hadn’t published any of our pictures from our awesome trip to Disneyland on March the 13th.  Here are a few of them!

Cue the drama, folks.  The names were dropped into a hat (dish, actually), and the wife pulled the names, one by one.

Congratulations to Eric M. and Chelsea L.!  The gift cards will be e-mailed to you electronically within the week.

So, that was pretty fun, neh?  I’ll do this again in a few months.  What type of prizes would you like to see?

Hello, what’s this?  A new blog?

I had a heck of a time getting this new site ready for launch.  I thought that it’d be nice and easy…install a new blogging software on my Web site, take the main page down for a while, and voila…but no!  I had 42 headaches to contend with.  But now I can take a deep breath, relax, and begin posting the daily rants and ramblings of my mind.  And I hope you’ll find some entertainment value in reading what I have to say.

Because if you’re new here, you may notice that I’ve been writing posts for a while.  Seven years, to be exact.  Well before such publishing tools like Blogger, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter became insanely popular, I was trying my hardest to get content online.  I’ve met some success throughout the years, but have been reduced to smithereens over and over again because of my uncanny ability to wax lazily into oblivion.  Why do I feel like this time will be any different?  I suppose I never said that.  I’m just crossing my fingers this time!

So, to those of you who haven’t stopped by here before, welcome.  What do I do with this site?  The blog page, which you find yourself at currently, is the main portion of the site.  This is where I spend the most time pruning and cultivating the inner workings of my mind.  I try hard to stay relevant, sticking to topics that matter to people that read my work.  Religion, politics, and similar subjects are not necessarily taboo, but rarely discussed here.  But again, trying to stay relevant, they may pop up more as time goes along.  And I must admit, long blocks of text aren’t my thing.  Normally, there will be pictures to go along with whatever story I have here. 

Other sections of the site include the Moblah’g, which is powered solely by my iPhone.  There’s rarely anything said here of real substance; but there you’ll find some of the best personal pictures around.  There’s just something about having a camera that can post anything your eye sees, whenever the mood strikes you. 

You’ll also find examples of photography, but I must warn you…this is not my strong area.  In recent years, I’ve noticed the literal explosion of Web sites dedicated to close friends who have discovered the flair for digital photography.  Many of my friends and acquaintances are exceptional at their art, and they nobly make it known with remarkable finesse.  I make no such statement with my photography.  Indeed, as is mentioned on the front page of Outsidetheworld, these pictures are simply what I saw when I was lucky enough to have a camera by my side.  Hopefully I’ll get a bit better with time. 

So, that’s it for now.  You’ll notice that I have a bit of a promotion going on right now, so if you’ll be kind and leave a comment at the end of this post, you’ll be entered to win one of two $10.00 Amazon.com gift certificates.  To be sure I know who you are, please leave your name.  Any other type of personally identifiable information isn’t necessary.  Anyone who leaves a comment will have their name put into a hat for the drawing.   Comment as much as you’d like, but you’ll only get one entry.  Sorry!  I have to maintain some semblance of order here.  The contest will run until Saturday night at midnight.  The winners will be announced by Monday.  I’ll run campaigns like this every so often to show my efforts toward maintaining a respectable and consistent blog, so keep your eye on the site and bookmark me, neh?  I promise to make it worth your while!

Geez.  I’ve spent way too much time in front of the computer today.  Time to go play some basketball.  Sorry for the heavy tone of this entry!  I promise to be much more candid in the weeks to come.  This really doesn’t even sound like me.  I suppose I’m trying to put my best foot forward, as I only have this chance to make a good impression.  See you next time!

I ordered myself a new Dell Mini 9 “Netbook” today with the money I had been saving from my birthday.  They had a great deal going at only $199, though I did choose a few small upgrades.

Ship date isn’t until mid-April, so I’m not holding my breath for a quick arrival.  But when it does get here, I’m removing Linux and installing OS X.  It should be a fun adventure.

The new blog is live. It would seem that the hours and days of fuss over the Web hosting paid off.  After many years of crafting each and every blog page by hand, I grew weary of the tediousness of the task.  Each new post meant at least three other pages needed manual updating if I wanted the previous entry archived properly.  This, coupled with the fact that I could never establish a reliable comment or tracking service, pushed me over the edge.  What I found on the other side was WordPress, which is powering the very page you see before you now.

It feels alien to me, typing a new blog on this busy looking admin page.  I suppose I’ll get used to it in time.  It really was dead simple to install and start using, after all.  I have more options than I know what to do with.  But I like options.  The best part about it?  I can finally allow comments on each blog that I create, and each entry will be automatically archived.  No more manual creation of pages for the blog.  It’s both sad and breath-taking at the same time.

What scares me stupid is that I have no idea how it all works in the background.  Yes, I got it installed, configured, and customized to my tastes, but the whole program uses programming languages that I am not inclined to learn at this point in my life.  And it uses a MySQL database.  My best guess is that if my database ever dies, so do my entries.  Ho, hum.

The other project in my life is the yard.  After nearly 2 1/2 years, the wife and I have decided to do something with the small plot of land we were granted with our house.  Up until now, it’s simply been a grand (not so grand?) swath of rock and dirt, with a single, lonely navel orange tree occupying the north portion.  We’ve made honorable attempts in the past to make it livable.  We’ve raked the rock, planted the previously mentioned tree, and allowed Sumner to go nuts with the shovels and rakes.  But we’re on the cusp of something big, I think.  We’ve decided to go with the blank slate approach; that is, we are having concrete poured over most of it.  Pavers would have looked finer, but the financial impact was lessened with the concrete.

To better visualize how it stands now, here are a few pictures.  I’m very impressed that I figured out how to post these in here already.  Either that points to one of two things: the ease of use of this program, or my utter brilliance at figuring things out.  I tend toward the former.

This should all go down on Wednesday morning.  All in the household are quite glad that we’re getting it done this early in the spring season.  When this is completed, we should still have at least two months of cool evening weather in which in to enjoy the newly christened patio.  Even better is the fact that this will be done before Sumner’s 5th birthday, which undoubtedly means his party will be hosted in the yard.

The funniest part about this entry is that it probably won’t be seen for a few days.  I’ve not yet decided how I want to reintroduce Outsidetheworld to friends and family, but I do know I am having some sort of launch event.  Since writing this post bored me to tears, I can only imagine the effect reading it must have on people, so no…this won’t be the inaugural post, I’m afraid.  But that statement implies further posts will be full of action and intrigue!  We’ll see.

But if you found your way down the blog to read this fine entry, good on you.  Leave a comment, if you would be so kind, so I know you stopped by.  There’s more to come where this came from.