Donna and I are on our way to CT for the week­end and in order to avoid chang­ing planes any­where we drove up to Char­lotte, NC to catch a plane. We got here early just to be sure (hav­ing never flown out of here before) that we could find our way alright. On top of that our flight sched­uled to leave at 9.55pm has been delayed at least an hour. It is com­ing in from San Fran­cisco and must have taken a wrong turn in Albuquerque.

We have spent the last cou­ple of hours sit­ting at var­i­ous spots in the air­port watch­ing the peo­ple go by. Boy, you can tell we don’t get out much by the way we are amazed at how many dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes there are.

Watch­ing is fun, but lis­ten­ing is even more enter­tain­ing. Seems as if 75% of the peo­ple in the air­port have a cell phone and they are all using them. My favorite are still the blue­tooth ear­bud user who look like they are talk­ing to themselves.

Well, the first half of the migra­tion process is com­plete, a new domain name has been cho­sen: mr-miata.net I got it through Yahoo! they have a deal where it is a $1 for a year (first year and new names only), so for $21 I have that domain reg­is­tered for the next 3 years.

Now comes the hard part, find­ing a host. I want one that is cheap, less than $10 a month, that is reli­able and meets some not to demand­ing require­ments: UNIX host­ing, 5G stor­age, 25G trans­fer, 5 MySQL dbs, FTP and the lat­est PHP & Pearl. If they are giv­ing a domain name it bet­ter get reg­is­tered to me, not them and then they bet­ter offer to host that name and my new dot net one on the same site. Yahoo is just a lit­tle over the limit at $12 a month. Right now I’m lean­ing towards Blue­Host for $6.95. Their CEO even has a Word­Press blog: MattHeaton.com.

Reg­u­lar read­ers know that I like to change things up a bit around here style-wise. While search­ing around for just the per­fect look I down­loaded a cou­ple I thought, that with a lit­tle tweak­ing, I could make do with. Then I ran into one that is just too cool for words, trou­ble is it doesn’t really work in IE and Inter­net Explorer users are nearly 70% of my vis­i­tors. So I couldn’t imple­ment it across the board.

So I down­loaded a theme switch­ing plug-in and installed it. Then I crudely added it to all the themes’ side­bars, so when some­one tried a dif­fer­ent theme they could find their way back to the orig­i­nal theme.

Give them a whirl, but remem­ber only one has been truly per­son­al­ized by me:
* Word­Press Clas­sic — came in the box
* Word­Press Default — came in the box
* Painted Desert — long run­ning cur­rent
* Blocked
* ChinaRed
* New York, New York
* Wuhan
* Vis­tered Lit­tle — if you run Fire­fox check this out, click on the lit­tle squares at the top to change the background

No, I haven’t been play­ing Monop­oly, just unearthed my park­ing stub from the Char­lotte air­port under some papers at my desk here.

Park­ing is at a pre­mium at Char­lotte– Dou­glas Inter­na­tional Air­port and as they fill up one fence enclosed long-term lot they open another down the street. When Donna and I went to CT for Labor Day we parked our car way out in a satel­lite lot as directed by air­port per­son­nel. A fel­low handed us a ticket with a hand­writ­ten date on it and directed us to the shut­tle. We we in Lot #2, Sec­tion Z.

When we got back 3 days later it took a lit­tle while to sort out which shut­tle bus to take. The bus took us back to the lot and pulled in through a gate next to a booth. We loaded up our car and fol­lowed the exit signs back to that same booth, but on the other side. I rolled down my win­dow to hand the ticket to the per­son in the booth and the gate opened in front of me. The booth was empty. I drove out and away.

Hum­frz The­ory of Men­tal Rel­a­tiv­ity:
The sen­sa­tion of “speed” is rel­a­tive and is directly pro­por­tional to the “speed” at which the bio­chem­i­cal process works in the flow of neu­rons across the synapses of ones brain. As we age, this process slows while the world around us, con­tin­ues to move at a con­stant “speed”, thus giv­ing us “old guys” the sen­sa­tion of “great speed”.

He has an equa­tion he is work­ing on to help explain the the­ory:
H + S + A x AGS ÷ X ≈ PS
hat + sus­penders + age x actual ground speed ÷ (X) ≈ per­ceived speed

This explains why 80-year old men in hats are doing 20 MPH in the 45 zone…they think they are flying.

I like it. Might even try and find a promi­nent spot for it here to go along with Sturgeon’s Law.

The default theme for this blog is called Painted Desert and I like it, but I just can’t leave well enough alone. First I changed the orig­i­nal header image to one with a Miata to bet­ter suit me and now I’m work­ing on a lit­tle thing to keep it fresh that I hope to get going this week­end for all you Inter­net Explorer users.

Last Fri­day I fell in love with a theme called Vis­tered Lit­tle, that is real slick, but choked on IE big time. Well the good news is that Inter­net Explorer 7 RC1 dis­plays it pretty well, so it has become Donna’s favorite way to read this here gibberish.

My favorite way to view this blog is using a theme called New York, New York. First I kept the white style and replaced the New York sky­line back­ground with a Miata col­lage, but then I saw some one’s dark ver­sion of the theme and knew that ws the way to go and I had just the image for the back­ground, the one from the Win­dows Vista home­page. A quick search of the web led me to the stand alone jpeg. The girl would look kind of stu­pid in the back­ground of a page called “Life of Brian” and I didn’t have a suit­able photo of me I could pho­to­shop in, so lucky for me the same place had a de-girled jpeg too. I’ve spent the last cou­ple hours tweak­ing the CSS (Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets) to get it to look great in Fire­fox 1.5, but I still need to do a lit­tle work on sin­gle post pages and archives and such. In IE 7 it looks pass­able, but the post header opac­ity doesn’t work ren­der­ing them too bright white. In IE 6, who knows.

We had promised to visit Donna’s youngest brother and his wife later this year after the “baby to be named later” was born and hope­fully named, but when an eti­quet­tely cor­rect invi­ta­tion came to the baby shower arrived, a plan was hatched. For­get later, Donna and I would show up at the shower unan­nounced. The eldest brother and his wife were con­vinced to join the sur­prise crew and we almost snagged his other sis­ter too. Well, we cleared it with Beth, the expec­tant mother, but we still wanted to sur­prise Scott.

The shower is on Sat­ur­day and the four of us were get­ting into the Seat­tle area on Fri­day after­noon, so Plan B called for the sur­prise to hap­pen at an impromptu anniver­sary din­ner for Scott and his wife Beth at her par­ents house (their anniver­sary is tomorrow.)

Things were going along smoothly until Beth was try­ing to get, Mr. Worka­holic, Scott to take off on Fri­day after­noon to get ready for the anniver­sary din­ner. He finally demanded to know what was going on and not being able to lie to him any more she told him that we were com­ing up. At first he didn’t believe her. Well, I hope you’re pleased with yourself.

I guess I’ll get back at you the only way I know how, post a baby pic­ture of you for the whole inter­net to see. That’s you sit­ting on Donna’s lap play­ing on the piano in New Orleans.

At least that is what it said on the license plate, which segues nicely into…Traffic Court, Agana, Guam, Sep­tem­ber 29, 1976. The large room is filled with scofflaws await­ing the chance to plead their case on why they weren’t really speed­ing or why they shouldn’t be thrown in jail for dri­ving with­out a license. The clerk leads 4 ner­vous young adults in the back doors, past the rows of defen­dants and their fam­i­lies, past the tables used by the lawyers, down to the low wooden rail­ing in front of the impos­ing, still empty judge’s bench. The noise level drops a cou­ple notches as the crowd starts to whis­per among them­selves won­der­ing what is so spe­cial about these kids.

The bailiff enters from the right and loudly pro­claims, “All rise!” After a few sec­onds the judge enters in a swirl of black robes from a door right behind his chair, looks out over the court­room and gruffly says, “Remain stand­ing.” He then gazes down at the 4 trem­bling young­sters in front of him and asks in a pater­nal voice, “Is this to be a dou­ble ring ceremony?”

After the judge pro­nounced the cou­ple man and wife, and as they and their wit­nesses were escorted back out of the court­room by the clerk, the bailiff could be heard to say, “Be seated, the first case will be…”

Newly mar­ried Brian & Donna Bog­a­r­dus along with Brian’s squadron­mate and his wife, Ken & Helen Tiller walked to a park adja­cent to the cour­t­house and cracked open a coconut to celebrate.

Why am I writ­ing this on Sep­tem­ber 28th you ask, instead of the the actual date of my 30th anniver­sary, I’ll tell you. Guam is lit­er­ally half way around the world from here and as such is 15 hours ahead of east­ern day­light time, so as I write this at nearly 10 PM on the 28th it is already 1 PM in the after­noon on the 29th and we are a cou­ple hours into our 31st year of wed­ded bliss. Guam, where America’s day begins and Brian and Donna’s mar­riage began.