Archive for Personal Crap

Bongo the Beagle: Gone, But Not Forgotton

// August 10th, 2011 // No Comments » // General Posts, Personal Crap

With the recent redesign of Keefer Madness, it’s time to do some house cleaning of the site as a whole. Seeing as our beloved Beagle, Bongo has been deceased for a fair amount of time, I thought it was about time to archive his page from the site. Not wanting to completely destroy the page though, the contents now will reside as a post.

Bongo - Sunrise at Cocoa Beach

Since putting up this current version of Keefer Madness, I basically have the Blog now. For years, the blog has been the focus of the site, but I was reminded recently that I had lost some other areas of the site. It’s been on my list of things to do, but I was recently inspired to flesh out some of those lost pages, and what better place to start, than with Bongo.

We still miss the little guy to this day, and we are wanting to get another dog, though it hasn’t happened yet. In our search, he’s definitely been in every comparison, and we may not be able to get another Beagle—because of those comparisons. So far the Beagles we’ve met haven’t held up to the personality and cuteness of Bongo.

Regardless, read on to view the contents of what was the page dedicated to Bongo.

Bongo is our old spoiled purebred Beagle. I first adopted Bongo when he was roughly 2 years old. Bongo, then known as “Bo,” was surrendered by a hunter. Bongo’s past inspired Grinning Beagle to write a children’s book story about his past entitled, “That Dog Won’t Hunt.” Following the publishing of the book, our ol’ Beagle has been immortalized as a stuffed animal.

Loud Mouth Beagle

Bongo has had his share of ups and downs in our household. He had real issues when Amanda moved into the house, even cornering
her, teeth showing when I was away at my part time job. Amanda was scared to death of the spoiled Beagle who considered himself higher up in the pecking order than her – a relative newcomer to the pack. She basically gave me an ultimatum – her or the Beagle. In a way, Bongo, was giving the same ultimatum. But, I came up with a compromise, and ultimately, a much better solution for the whole pack – Bark Busters, an in-home dog trainer that helped us in just a few sessions, make Bongo a calmer, more confident Beagle hound.

When our current house was being built, and our old townhome had been sold, we stayed with my parents who have a bloodhound, named Sadie. Bongo was introduced into our home by the Tri Beagle Rescue, warning he was best in a single family home, and Bongo proved it as the bloodhound pupped, well hounded him. Much like his mother, Bongo can tend to get grumpy. He got tired of Sadie quickly and was ready for his new home as much as we were.

Please let me go back inside!

The toughest situation was at the current house, when our failing fence.. well failed. In the middle of the night, I let him out to use the restroom, only to after a couple minutes later realize he was gone, through a malfunctioning side gate. We scoured the neighborhood, and I was heartbroken when we couldn’t locate him. Luckily, Amanda came home later the next day early for lunch to post lost dog signs.

Hurt, he had somehow dragged himself back to our backyard and collapsed against the house. After a gutcheck moment of thinking he had collapsed and died in our backyard, the Beagle opened his eyes slightly and whined to Amanda. I don’t think either of us had been so relieved. After a rushed visit to the vet and a few days of recovery, his personality returned and our cuddly beagle was back.

A ton of pictures of Bongo can be found in his photoset in our Flickr account.

Curious Hound

Office Beagle

Amanda and I Make a Great Team

// August 9th, 2011 // No Comments » // Family, Personal Crap

Tyler, Ryan and Amanda

Our little boy, Tyler has brought so much fun and joy to out life.

But he has also demonstrated something else about our family. Amanda and I really do make a great team. Sure, we kinda already knew it prior to Ty’s birth, but he’s definitely illustrated it even more.

We’re both extremely busy at work, but we’re both lucky enough to work places that are flexible and understanding about family, but with very few occasions, even with busy work, Amanda and I have really been able to cover each other— switching out of our normal work schedules to shuttle Tyler to daycare, doctor’s appointments etc. With few exceptions, we’ve both been able to cover for the other—which in itself is amazing. With us both being so busy, it’s crazy it almost always works out that the other partner is able to pick up the slack, or at least pick up the monkey.

It’s also been nice at home— when one of us has to (or wants to) get something done, we’re always really flexible, understanding and just desiring the one-on-one time with our little guy.

While all of this isn’t necessarily uncommon in families, we’ve seen plenty of couples who don’t split the child duties or mesh so well. Consider this post just a quick acknowledgement of how lucky we are. We’ve got great immediate and extended families that all have and continue contributing to the healthy relationships we all have.

Notice Anything Different at Keefer Madness?

// August 8th, 2011 // No Comments » // Keefer Madness, Personal Crap

Notice anything different at all here at Keefer Madness?

If you’re reading this from an RSS reader, everything’s the same. But the web site has had a complete overhaul.

For years, Keefer Madness has been utilizing WordPress as its flexible content management, and will continue to for the foreseeable future. But it was time for a new theme— something to help update the visuals, but also to reflect the changes in social media and the web since I introduced the last theme into fruition.

This new theme, is called Irresistible—one of the many free themese over at Woo Themes. The theme, in conjunction with WP-Lifestream allows a quick and easy way to hook in feeds from social networks and the like, and it really cleans up my homepage.

The homepage’s excerpts of the latest posts also will hopefully act as a motivation to write more in-depth and useful posts. Life sometimes gets busy, and I get lazy, posting sometimes nothing more than a single line of text and an off-site link. I’m going to try to do better with that. I’m not promising they’ll all be gems, but going to try to compose longer and better articles as much as possible.

Not only did it allow me to overhaul the visuals, it also allowed me to remove a lot of the plugins I had running on the backend. I’ve noticed the site getting slower with age, and this was my first step. The next may be to cull old and unread posts, though I’m working with my web host provider to see if there are other things I can do first.

While I’ve still got a little polish and the like to do, I’m pretty happy with where the site is at here in 2011 and this new (to me) theme. Let me know what you think of it, and thank you for continuing to read and browse our site.

New Swing Set for Tyler

// July 29th, 2011 // No Comments » // Family, Personal Crap

New Swing Set for TylerSo I’ve spent the day at home while a nice and robust swing set was being assembled in the back yard. (BTW, it’s amazing how much I can get done from the home office without that little monkey around, and just music or TV as background noise).

Thanks to generous donations to the Tyler Swingset fund by both sets of grandparents, Tyler’s got a heck of an early birthday present. The swing set is installed and looking good!

He’s still at daycare, but we’re looking forward to him getting to play on it tonight and this weekend.

Video: 00Monkey: Forever is Never Long Enough

// June 4th, 2011 // No Comments » // Funny Stuff, Personal Crap, Video

So this week I’ve been playing around with iMovie, and absolutely love the new trailers you can make with them. They’re easy, fast, and I love the final product. Check out 00Monkey: Forever is Never Long Enough. I’ve done four of these trailer below, and I believe you’ll be seeing Tyler starring in a few more 00Monkey trailers.

Video: A Little Racing With Centerline Co-Workers at Rush Hour Karting

// June 1st, 2011 // No Comments » // Personal Crap, Video

After a pretty hectic, tiring and stressful week last week, it was really great last night to do some laps around Rush Hour Karting’s indoor track last night. Thanks to everyone at Centerline for setting it up and to all those who participated. BTW, love what you can do with iMovie in just a few minutes.

Why We've Come Crawling Back to Cable

// May 10th, 2011 // No Comments » // Personal Crap, Tech, TiVo Bytes, TV Talk

Today marks the first time in nearly a decade where I didn’t have at least one TiVo active in the house. Last Sunday, we re-subscribed to the more-than-basic cable — back to Time Warner’s digital cable tier. While the cost savings of just paying for the basic level of cable were great, we came crawling back for a number of reasons:
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Happy 5th Anniversary to My Beautiful Wife

// February 11th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Personal Crap

Happy anniversary to my wonderful wife, Amanda! She takes care of her two boys wonderfully all the time and we appreciate and love her for it!

New Blog Posting Strategy That Really Works For Me

// February 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // Keefer Madness, Personal Crap

These last few weeks, I’ve been able to sort of build a backlog of posts both here and especially at my other blog, Keefr.com (My more technical Web Design/Development blog focusing on all kinds of acronyms like xHTML, CSS, jQuery). While what I’m doing is pretty common sense stuff, I’ve been really satisfied with the flow its given my dual blogs. With my new job, I’ve been pouring all over new stuff daily about jQuery, CSS3 and HTML5 specifically, and it’s given me a bevy of links worth sharing and offering some occasional insight. Collecting all these links and articles, has allowed me to schedule out daily posts sometimes for up to a week in advance. While most of these are exciting and interesting to me, and hopefully to those reading, there’s really no timeliness tied to them. So I can schedule them for the next available day.

But then, when something timely happens, I am able to interject either an additional post for a given day, or insert one into that series of scheduled out posts. I’m sure all kinds of other bloggers and even media outlets work like this, but it’s just been a recent realization/execution on my part.

Hopefully, even with some crazy busy days and weeks, being able to have ready-to-go content will keep everyone happy. Like I said, this isn’t rocket science, but it’s been very satisfying to be able to get both blogs the past couple weeks into a routine of daily posts. At least a daily posting has always been one of my goals — both to give people a reason to keep coming back to the sites, for search engines to have new stuff to eat up, but honestly, overall, it’s just been for my own personal satisfaction.

New Chapter Tomorrow

// January 12th, 2011 // No Comments » // Personal Crap, Work

So while I don’t like to make it a habit to job hop, an opportunity came up that made sense for me to jump from iContact after only nine months. I’d say the job market is starting to pick up here in Triangle of North Carolina. I’ve been getting a lot of calls and inquiries about web developer positions.

But the one I jumped at was working with my best friend. We’ve worked before together and meshed really well. Looking forward to that, and in more of an agency setting again.

More info on this in a bit… Thanks for everyone’s support in the past, in he present and in the future.