So much of what's happened in the past few months has been the same old thing. Get up, take care of kiddos, feed kiddos, naps, up again...etc. Right now I have a little boy slumped over my right arm sleeping, and a little girl in her bed, also sleeping. The dishwasher is running, clothes are folded and still sitting on the couch downstairs. Hopefully the cat hasn't decided to claim them. I still have so much to do. I secretly hope Dylan is off work, as it is 4 pm and technically he SHOULD be off work right now. More than likely though, he's not. I just want a little adult time with him. I feel like I haven't seen him in a couple days or so.

It's muggy inside the house. I've gotten the windows open and a couple of fans running in the kid's rooms to keep them cool at night. I'm amazed at the peacefulness a baby can exhibit when they are sleeping. To be so sound with the world around him, not a care, smiling at his dreams. It's beautiful really. And to add to it, he's just so darn cute. His sister is the exact same way. Beautiful beyond all means with a runny nose to boot!

This weekend should be pretty busy. Yard work is calling, as well as those elusive errands that are truly never done, like grocery shopping and running to the recycling station. I suppose I should check on the noises coming from the living room. As far as I know, no one else is down there...

So this is the first entry of my blog about the husband, the kids , the house and life in general. Hopefully it's interesting to someone :D

Today has been kind of a rollercoaster. Isabel's potty training right now and just went in the "big girl Dora potty" for the first time today. Yesterday she did fantastic. She stayed dry from the time she woke up and got changed until about 4 pm that night. Both kiddos are sleeping right now, as that is the only way I'd be able to type this all in one sitting. We're planning on going to the playground just behind our house to play on the "green slide", as Isa calls it, once school lets out and the kids go home for the day. We went yesterday too, and I forgot to get Isa's gloves, so we headed home early because her little fingers were too cold. We had been playing for a good half hour or so, but Isa was so disappointed when I told her we would have to wait to go back.
Shawn has been doing well. He's officially decided rolling over is the best thing ever, and will attempt to do so at will (usually when lying on a flat surface, but occasionally when being held or drinking his bottle). He's also started to do it in the middle of the night when he wakes up. He won't cry, he just rolls over and plays with his binky or bumper pad. This has me worried half the night when I hear sounds coming from his room, mostly because he's gotten himself stuck in the corner of his crib and couldn't get himself out. I shutter to think what could have happened if I hadn't heard him struggling. Anyways...
I should get back to the housework as laundry and the dishes are calling me :D

If you can see this post then the escape from the repeatedly down hosting is finally at an end.

I finally got away from VizaWeb.... Talk about horrible hosting. Anyone considering them... DON'T! They were cheap at the time (and had a history of good service) but the boom from Leo Laport plugging them sent them in a downward spiral. I hung out thinking they just needed a little time to handle the extra volume... but it appears they did nothing... and good service with them is only found in their advertising... The last stretch before completely jumping boat right before I would have to renew I saw at least 5 times where my site was unreachable. The only response I got was some processes on the node my site was hosted on were taking up full CPU and the issue was resolved by killing them.... Doesn't look like they could take that a step further and be proactive and stop whatever was causing this.

I am now with 1and1.com. Setting everything up was easy and once I found out from vizaweb where they put my controls for my domain the transfer went fairly easily (once I was able to get a full backup between times the site was down). Anyways here I am. Also, I have somewhat turned on the comments again. However, you must contact me to get an account created for you. If you are not logged in, then you will get a message in the comments box saying they are disabled and when you hit submit it will take you to a blank screen.

Expecting the new Baby somtime around the first week of August for all those that still read this but don't talk to me. Will be a boy. (and no I have not created a web site this time... the extra time in college is much missed now).

So I have been neglecting my site a bit.... OK, a lot! I knew there were a few spam comments out there, but had no idea how bad it had gotten. I just deleted about 20,000 comments that talked about all the usual stuff you see in your junk mail folder. This included everything from degrading comments about the caucus, to "enhancement" drugs, to the "see my web cam" sites. Due to this I have opted to stop the ability to add comments until I find time to increase security so that real comments are not lost in the junk. Sorry if I deleted any valid comments in my mass purge.

I finally have some photos that are fairly up to date (a couple of weeks old still though). Its in the Photo Gallery at http://dylman.com/gallery

Enjoy!

It's been a while since my last blog. So a quick update. I have started my new job in KC and I have moved. My little girl is now going to a day care for the first time (its run by family though). So far work feels a lot like college (lots of training classes, etc...) Only this time they pay me :). well I am gonna check email before class starts today. God Bless

To get to the new pics go to http://dylman.com/gallery/ Pictures of the baptism and more!

I just found out that some of you may not have been able to leave comments due to some css changes I made a while back. That should be fixed now so feel free to make comments again!

For those of you who want to see the sonagrams of my little girl and see how Liz is progressing go here http://dylman.com/baby

ISP's should never have this power. This is like the city government putting road blocks in front of all the fast food places that don't pay them extra money. Check out this video to learn more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9jHOn0EW8U

after watching go to savetheinternet.com to learn how you can help.

So I was playing around and right clicked on one of the images on my site in firefox and did a "Block images from dylman.com". You would think this would be easy and fairly intuitive to undo. But looking through all the firefox menus I could find nothing.

Through some googling it appeared I should go and edit image controls from the tools menu but there is no such option with the current version of firefox (who knows why?). Another said you just needed to right click on the image again and reselect the "Block images from..." option. However, when the images are blocked you can't right click on them because they never load and are not there. I then tried to find some css file that may be affecting the page. Once I found it I realized that it wasn't in use and not a solution.

So finally I figured out if you type out the full URL to an image (e.g. http://thedomain.com/pic.JPG) it would load the picture and then you can right click on it. Still kinda wonder why a direct URL will load the picture but a reference to that image through an HTML/PHP page won't... Anyways thought I may post this to help others that may have the same problem.

The public library got "The Zen of CSS Design" that come from Dave Shea (webmaster of csszengarden. http://www.csszengarden.com/) So I am currently reading that and hope to more improve my site and perhaps even learn how some of the stuff I use works :)

Thats all I got for now... time for sleep.

You may notice I have changed a few things on the site. For the backgroud I decided to use a night photograph of the Eiffel Tower taken by my co-worker Lacy (thanks again) and for my first header (which I still need to figure out if I want to put in some text) I used a few of her pictures of La Sagrada de Familia (A church Gaudi designed in Barcelona) and my lovely picture in the middle. Comments, Suggestions, and Critiques are always welcome.

Oh and I also think I found out why firefox tends to make the scrolling choppy. It apparently has to do with the transparency. Oh and the header picture that I made in Photoshop Elements 2 doesn't display right in IE (no transparency) and the background scrolls away as you scroll down in IE. The drop down menu still doesn't work in IE either (I hace to add some javascript to make it work). Other than that I think most of the CSS is working (except in the old Netscape Communicator). So a few more things to figure out but I am happy with how it has come so far.

Well it looks like I finally got firefox to put a background in the right place (without setting the background for the body) I am hoping now I can use this to do a background that will scale with the size of the window. but right now I can only get it to scale to show that much of the picture (not that it can show more than the window size *shrug) IE on the other hand now shows absolutely no background, and seems to choose not to show my administration menu for adding blogs and stuff at all, even though it shows up in the source code... (FYI admin menu only shows up after I log in). Now I just need to look into the background some more and some more on that unsightly menu bar (that also only does the drop down in non-IE browsers). Also I need to figure out what to put for my header graphic... Till then..

Above you see a broken drop down menu. That is my next goal for this page.

Well I got the transparency to work finally. I was also able to get the comments to look a little nicer. right now I just import the same style sheet for the comments as I do for the main page. That might be something to change later... *shrug*
Now that finals are over I should be able to work on this a little more. Hopefully I will get some side bars up and a header of some sort in the next week or so. As always if you have ideas you think I should try please leave a comment! God Bless and good night.

Ok so I finally got rid of the table structure for my site and moved it to CSS. Next step is to incorporate more so it's not so plain. Hopefully a header picture or eye candy of some sort, and then some side bars. Oh and if you view this page in IE it has opacity so you can see the full background image... still havent figured out how to make it work in other browsers...

As you may notice on my post below there are now comments! I am happy!

*edit* next step is to incorporate some css.

*Kansas*

As Bigoted as you think

As I was driving along I saw this bumper sticker proudly displayed in their back window. It was a new black SUV of some sort that was going well over the speed limit as they passed me flashing the bumper sticker and a KS license plate. Maybe it was the music for the troops playing on the radio or as I would like to think my sense of pride struck me hard right then. It gets me to thinking, As I child I used to see pride in the United States everywhere I looked. Maybe that was the naive view of a child, but as I look back in history it is obvious that people in our country have lost sight of what the United States is all about. They have gone from enjoying the spirit of what this country was founded on, to trying to exploit each letter set out by our fore fathers. I can just imagine my great grandfather starting his homestead. The pride he has in his land, in his friends and neighbors, and most of all, In a country that would let him start with a piece of land and make a home. Just imagine the work he put into building that old house. The innovation as he made his house one of the first in the area to have electricity as he constructed his power-making windmill. (even though Im sure he was on the edge of burning his house down too *shrug*). It was these values that made the United States become the proud country it is today. When I look at anti-patriotic symbols such as this it saddens me as it appears that we are moving towards an arrogant point of view. People seem to think that since they are able to have a voice, that it must be heard. Unfortunately for people like this, just because you can speak doesnt
mean that others have to listen. Everyone IS entitled to their own opinion. Just because you dont fall into the majority doesnt mean that the majority is wrong.

My second problem with this display was the fact that they appear to like to complain but do nothing about it. They complain that Kansas is bigoted yet they proudly drive their new SUV with Kansas license plates. If they despise Kansas so much they are free to move to another state. Thats another beauty of the United States, it is a geographically diverse nation. If you dont like where you are, it is relatively simple to move to another area. All in all, I just would like to see some more of that (old-fashioned?) pride that instills in people to not complain about what they see wrong, but to do what they can to better the area around them. I can only imagine a country where everyone tried to improve themselves AND use that improvement to help those currently around them and the generations to come. I know this is a utopian view and is realistically unreachable, but nonetheless I would like to see a trend towards this, instead of away.

Well Today I finally started taking the step to get away from phpsecurepages. So that I can start showing all of you my blog. Starting to use some dynamic php to hide from all of you the things I dont want you to see :) HA. Well till I find the time and motivation to do more I must sign off.

The one and only Dylman.

Almost interesting but its making me sleepy.... ahhh the joy of natural disasters...

My Mom and My Sister and family are here for the weekend!

Thanks to Lacy for helping design!!

*SMILES* Edited

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Using the auto date function