The Day the Music "almost" Died

Okay at least this song has a happy ending.

We spent Thanksgiving and the day after inside since Brandon was sick. I took him to the doctor on Wednesday then went to the store to get him some medicine. I parked the car in the garage and that was the last time I was in it until Saturday morning.

I knew something was amiss when I saw the garage door ajar. I knew something was wrong when I saw the car hood had been pulled.

I got in the car and found my 80gig iPod, the car adapter and all my change gone. The ashtray was broken but thankfully nothing else. There were no signs of forced entry so I must have left the garage door unlocked in my scatter brained thoughts on Wednesday.

It didn't take me long to realize it was A. a rushed job because they fumbled around and popped the hood (it wasn't opened and still latched) and B. the perps were total amateurs because they completely missed the cold hard cash inside a compartment on the top of the dash.

After my disgust passed I called my neighbor who happens to be the maintenance supervisor. We didn't have a courtesy officer on site and he felt horrible for what happened (hold that thought.. we'll come back to it), so I called the Boys in Blue and Deputy Darnell showed up not long after. He took my statement, the serial number of the iPod and fingerprinted my car. At this point I didn't know what was worse losing my essential tunes or having my my pretty Infiniti violated twice in two days.

After they were gone all I could do was take her down to get cleaned and detailed. Take my advice, if you ever think you need to get something fingerprinted, think really hard if it's worth it. That crap does not come clean easy and it gets everywhere. Not too mention it was worthless. Most interior surfaces of a vehicle are not conducive to print powder or fingerprints for that matter.

Later that day I talked to Jim the maintenance guy. Come to find out his son and several other lazy ass, non-working, trouble-making bums, had a huge fight in our development Friday night. Jim said he wouldn't doubt if one of those boys had it and since they were in the process of being evicted and he had to go do some work over there he'd keep an eye out for it.

Fast forward to Sunday, 8:00 pm. Jim knocks on the door, my iPod in hand. Says he was over at the apartment and saw it laying on a dresser and just stuffed it in his pocket. Figured he'd ask me if it was mine. He said he suspected his son's best friend (total loser) named Jamal. I didn't have my car adapter but he said he'd ask JB (his son) to check into it.

An hour later Jim is back, adapter in hand. According to JB, Jamal is the one who took it the night of the big fight.

Here's the deal. JB is a very impressionable young man who usually does whatever his friends do. Furthermore he doesn't have the highest morals, values or work ethic to say the least. Did I mention his choice in friends pretty much sucks too. Secondly there were a lot inconsistencies when Walt and I thought about everything Jim had told us.
Here's just some that didn't seem right.

Jim said while the fight was going on Jamal decided use the bathroom in Jim's house (Jim and JB live directly below us) and that's when they think he went down the breezeway checking garage doors for any unlocked.
- First nobody is going to leave his buddies in the middle of a foray to go take a piss.
- Second the fight was all the way over on the other side of the development - why walk all the way over here passing dozens of commodes on the way?
- Third, I can't see anyone being stupid enough to go looking for crap to steal with the cops right outside.
-- Jim also said the Jamal had left the iPod on a dresser of the apartment but Jamal doesn't even live in the apartment he left it and why would Jamal leave a $400 dollar iPod and take the $60 car adapter?

There are many other things that don't make sense and we think JB and Jamal did it together and when Jim found out it was me he told them to get it back and be quick about it.

See in June Jim 16 year old daughter was involved in a massive car accident where her best friend died and she had to have a large part of her brain removed. She's been in a coma ever since. We were the only people in the development that gave them money to help with whatever they needed and we helped them get their Medicaid benefits for her disabilities and home care. So Jim watches our back.

With this said we're letting the issue drop. Jim knows what really happened and went to bat for us. He's a good guy that just has a trouble teen.

I'm just glad to have it back.

All's well that ends well.

TLC

Where Does it All Come From???

I'm exhausted and didn't leave my house today.

I had no choice but to lock me and my youngest in his room and other than to eat and go to the bathroom we didn't come out until every nook and cranny was clean.

What a MESS!

Honestly it amazes me what a 9 year old is capable of smuggling into the house. Rocks and pices of toys that don't belong to him. Candy wrappers, half chewed erases, Happy Meal toys, and even what looked like a wooden stake. Did he plan on going vampire hunting or something?

Don't even get me started on all the crap that was in every place OTHER than the one it belonged. Everything had just become a mish mosh of stuff from multiple places. Kinex and Legos, crayons and markers, rubber balls and playdough and this was just in one bucket suppose to be for markers ONLY.

Every box and bucket in his room was like this. His bookshelves... forget it. Why is it so hard to put the book back on the shelf with standing up with the binding facing out? I have no problems doing it but for some reason for a 9 year old it becomes harder to figure out than proving the existence of alien life.

It took all day to go through his room and get everything back in it's place and throw out the crap.

The sad thing is I know as hard as I try to instill into him putting things back where they belong we'll be locked in six months from now to do it all over again.

I wonder if I could start a museum of odd and unidentifiable objects discovered in a child's room?

Customize Multiply - Graphics Galore

Take the time to browse through some blogs and there's no question we love graphics.
We love them in our posts, we love them in our titles, we love them in our comments and personal messages. There are hundreds of sites dedicated to providing us with a literal smorgusborg of graphics to choose from and we're happy to spend as much time needed looking for just the right one.

In this class I'm going to show you how to add graphics to your blog and give you some tips and tricks to help you use them more affectively.

Finding That Perfect Graphic
First lets go find a site. There are plenty to choose from. I prefer to find one that allows me to manipulate the graphic to better suit my taste and how I want it to look. Here are a few I like.

Glitter-Graphic.com
XooSpace.com
Glix.com
JellyMuffin.com

So lets pick a graphic. I'm going to go to Glitter-Graphic.com and I like this one.

glitter-graphics.com

Most graphic sites will give you several HTML codes to choose from. You'll see one that starts with:

[url=http://...

Just highlight the code and hit CNTRL-C to copy it. Go back to your blog and if your posting a true blog post go into the HTML editor and paste the code CNTRL-V.
For adding graphics to blogs you'll primarily use the code.
For my graphic I copied this code


glitter-graphics.com

Notice it started with . These are the graphic link beginning and ending tags. They will always match but the ending tag will have the (/) line in it. Some graphic might have several of these links. Like this one does. If you look half way through you'll notice these / tags repeat and there are two web links that start with ---href=http://LINK.--- The first one is the actual graphic the second one is the link at the bottom of the graphic you'll notice - glitter-graphics.com. By removing this second link I can remove this annoying line. Like this.




Viola the link is gone. This doesn't however remove the ability for a viewer to click on the graphic and visit the site it came from. If you find this does then leave the whole line in and just remove the plain text between these two markers > < as seen here:
glitter-graphics.com
Take the blue part out and you no longer have the words but still have a link to the site via the image itself. Like this.

There are some things like Slide shows you will find have several buttons linking back to their site like "Get your own Slide show". You can easily delete these annoying buttons and clean up your image by looking for these separate links in the HTML code.

Sizing it Up
What you may not know is most graphics provide you with size dimension codes that you can modify. Take the code above and you'll see this graphic size is 221 wide by 193 high. This is in pixels but you don't need to worry about that.

width=221 height=193 border=0>


Let's use another graphic to play with. I like this one.



Notice I've already cleaned it up by removing the www.glitter-graphic.com link at the bottom.

This is a great graphic the problem is if I were to post this say as a comment on another page it's far too big and would totally throw off the look and layout of the page. The page owner can't edit these and will most likely have to delete your really sweet message and cute graphic in order to get their page looking normal again. So what do we do? Change the size of course.

** Note changing size works great going smaller but will distort the image if you try to enlarge. I don't recommend it.**

Here's the original code for Alvin and his pals.

width=400 height=285 border=0>
glitter-graphics.com

I am going to delete the green to get rid of the link and I'm going to change the size numbers in blue to make it smaller. I'll cut my image in half and see what that does. Now we'll have a code that looks like this.

width=200 height=142 border=0>




Hey this did pretty good. This should fit into my comment space just fine and not mess with the overall look of the page.
As long as you're going smaller you should be okay to play around with the size dimensions. Just make sure you're dividing both number equally. Both in 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/4. Use a calculator to get the right numbers and only use whole numbers. For example the original code height was 285. Dividing this in 1/2 was actually 142.5 . As a rule of thumb if the (.) is under 5 round down over 5 round up. 5 go either way. One number isn't going to affect the overall look of the graphic.

Wrap Your Arms Around Me
Well how about just your text.
If you post your graphic code into your text you'll probably get this.

text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

The problem is there's all that funky really unsightly white space to the right of the graphic. It always defaults it to the left.
Fear not we can move it around. we can choose where we want it if we use a few more of those strange HTML tags. Here's the code for our graphic right?

width=200 height=142 border=0>


If we want to put it right we just put these tags before and after the graphic code

width=200 height=142 border=0>


We get this



Notice the little hash (/) in the closing tag. This says "stop centering everything at this point."

This is great and works well if we want to separate text by a large graphic or an embedded video or something. There is another trick that works great for smaller graphics and takes away all the icky white space.

Text Wrapping. Here's the code for wrapping our text around a graphic with the graphic on the left side of the page.

LINK or CODE GOES HERE

So pasting our new graphic code where it says to paste the LINK or CODE we get this:

text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

If you want to put the graphic on the RIGHT side just change where it currently says "LEFT" to "RIGHT" and we get this:

text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text
text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

If you want to wrap your text around a graphic or two you can always write everything you want to say first then add your TEXT WRAP coding in afterwards. You can insert your code anywhere you like in your text.
Just be careful if you put two graphic close together with very little text between them and say one wraps LEFT and the other wraps RIGHT you could have some funny formatting. If you find everything looks screwy just separate your graphics between larger blocks of text.
You can also stack graphics if you like by adding more than one graphic code between your wrap tags. Like this:

LEFT" cellspacing="2">

glitter-graphics.com

Two different graphic codes are seen, one in red and the other in green. We get this.

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

There are two graphics here. The bear and HI. To keep your graphics from lining up next to each other separate each graphic code with the line break tag

This tag is my fav because I can insert a hard line break anywhere I like. If you look at the wrapped text above you see this

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

If you were to look at the HTML code for this you would actually see this:

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text


text v text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

The
works especially well if you want a little buffer space above and below your graphics. You can add as many as you like to make your spacing wider.
---------------------------------------------------
Well I hope this helps you understand how to add graphics and how to manage them the way you like them. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.
If any HTML guru's would like to add anything extra please feel free to comment.

Until next time. Happy Blogging!!!

What Would You Do?

Please think about the following question and take the poll.

You and your family are half way through a long awaited, much anticipated vacation. Your spouse and two wonderful children are having the time of their lives. Your youngest (the 6 year old angel of your heart) laughs and giggles with amazed delight at all the wonderful things around them. Over the most amazing dinner you get a call.

It's your boss. They're calling to let you know the CEO and several major players of your sister companies are thrilled with the work you've done on your latest project. They are at the main office for the next two days and have asked if you could join them the next day. They are offering you a huge promotion to your dream job. You'll only be gone for 30 hours or so and can rejoin your family for the rest of the vacation. The only catch to taking the position is you will be required to travel out of town on occasion for 2 days to 2 weeks and your spouse and youngest hate it when you leave town for anything now.

"Down" Home

It's hard being home. When I'm away I feel free. Free to think my own thoughts, free to act the way I want, talk to whom I want, do the things I want, go where I want. I can live without judgement, without worry, without criticism, without deceptions, without sadness.

I can dream my dreams and not care what other people think or want. My dreams are mine.

I am free.

Being home I have to think what's important to other people, do what other people want, live how other people want me to. It's not easy living up to other peoples expectations and yet knowing any deviation and I fall short. I am selfish. My soul is at risk.

This is what I chose, this is the path I took, I give up one for another.

This is the sacrifice.

I am emptied to fill up others.

I give up, Me.

I am no longer here. I am no longer there.

I am no longer me.

The "Friendly" Skies

I had the pleasure of meeting two very nice young men on the flights home. Derrek was a college student/professional poker player on his way to Sacramento to see his ailing father. He had a very good head on his shoulders and was very pleasant. Somehow he manages to maintain control when playing poker and doesn't get sucked into the "addiction" of the game. He said "When you do it as a form of employment, you look at it a very different way". Smart.

From Atlanta to Tampa I sat next to a handsome young man that had just returned from 15 months in Iraq. I believe he said he was in the 82nd or 101st Airborne out of Tikrit. Luckily he and most of his battalion came home safe. His best friend from childhood unfortunately did not. He lived in Tampa and his family still do. He was coming down to visit them for four days. In February he will be transferred to Mc Dill Air force Base here in Tampa, which is Command Central for the war in Iraq. There will be no more tours for him that include sand, mud and people trying to shoot at him.

DB gave me a great deal of insight into what's "really" going on over there and how the soldiers "really" feel about the war, being over in Iraq and President Bush. He painted a very different picture than what the media portrays. I was surprised to hear that although they aren't happy with the fact Bush doesn't have an exit plan they support him. Mostly because with all the personal and professional criticism Bush is getting over the war he has the conviction to stand by his decisions and not cower to what "everyone else wants him to do". The soldiers understand they just can't pack up and come home. They would leave the country and the people in a state almost worse than during the Saddam era. Thankfully they feel they are finally making progress.

You never know who you're going to meet when you make the step to simply say "Hello". I personally don't like to pretend I'm all alone when I'm out in public. We have to remind ourselves it's a world of 7 billion people and we simply can't go about our daily lives ignoring everyone. That's one of the major reasons I keep a blog here on the web. I love all my new friends and always look forward to meeting new ones. My blog "family' help keep me sane and in touch with the real world. I'm so grateful for each one of you.

Ciao for now!