Congrats, Patrick Henry Panthers Geography Bee Champion Max Peters!

Congratulations to my son, Maximilian Eliasz Peters, who became the Patrick Henry Geography Bee Champion last week in a school geography bee.

Max was an underdog going in, but boned-up on his geography enough to pull-off the victory and become the school champion.  Unfortunately,  I was not in attendance,  as I had to work.  Even his mother had to leave early, because she gives violin lessons and had one scheduled when the final round  went a little longer than she was expecting.  But grandma was there to watch her youngest grandson go on to victory.

We are so proud of our son, I cannot tell you.  And he will never know how much, because if I patted him on the back any more we might bruise something.  Although the entire family is proud of Max, we will never be able to communicate how proud because if we did he would wind-up with a swelled head.  So we try to be a little cool about it with him.  But it is hard.

Max never reads any of my blogs, though.  So he will probably never notice this post of me bragging about him.

Unfortunately,  despite the fact that my entire family has smart phones equipped with really good point-n-shoot cameras, it seems no one took a picture during the bee.  So if anyone has one, please send it to me via Doug-Peters.com.  I thank you in advance.

Max should be done with his state finals exam for the championship in Aberdeen, by now (he took that test today). I believe the top scoring 100 school champions will go.

There are ADS in posts on My WordPress.com Blog, Now?

HOLY CRAP!

I came back to post on my blog and I find out that WordPress.com now posts ads in My blog?  

I’m done.

F U WordPress!  I’ll transfer My domain name back to my own service at DomainHostmaster.com and put up a Blogger site.  

YOU ARE GOING TO SPAM MY BLOG WITHOUT PERMISSION WHEN I AM ALREADY TRYING TO SUPPORT YOU WITH THE LITTLE BIT OF BUSINESS THAT I CAN AFFORD? 

Progress for the sake of Progress?

WordPress is certainly changing…  and just like with Blogger I am not happy with the changes.  

It isn’t a big deal, I can still find myself around the interface and all, but it’s all very unfamiliar and unfriendly to me.  I liked things as they were and moving the OS all around and putting the same options in different places just is not even intuitive.

Don’t get me wrong, as a designer I recognize that we should push the boundries of design.  But when you have spent some time away from the blog and return and everything is different and you have to look around and think when everything was second hand, and you posted freely before, you get a little put-off by all this user interface magic.

There is nothing new here, it is all just changed around.  WTF?  How is that beneficial?

Then, because I am so miffed and disturbed by all these changes on what was a friendly place to go post on my blog…. I left for a while, again.  But wanting to revisit and update My blog I return and everything is different in the blog dashboard/control-panel YET AGAIN?  It hadn’t really been all that long?  

I’m starting to get dizzy with these non-improvements.  The new blog entry editor pops ABOVE the blog?  Ad you only have a tiny window in the editor, with no chance to update the text field window gadget?  That seems a bit backward to me.  Everyone uses text fields that you can drag around and make larger, now.  And if you “pop-out” the editor window, it is still the same size.  You can make the window itself larger, but the text field size won’t budge!?  WTF?

C’MON MAN!

This is a joke.  Stop trying to be pretty, WordPress, I want functionality.  I just so happen to hate tiny little text field windows unless I can drag them farther open.  But look, this is not a step forward, it is a step back.  

Why do I even bother?

Happy Easter, Everyone!

I won’t get a chance to say this again before Easter, so…

Happy Easter, Everyone!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Everyone!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Everyone!

I hope you enjoyed or are still enjoying your Christmas Holidays.  I’m back at work, so I’m just puting up this note because I had been enjoying my holiday season up til now, and just realized that I had forgotten to say anything until now.

I am currently working on some new How-To articles and videos and learning how to use Flash to my advantage in my website designs.  Since Google is now able to spider Flash, it can no longer be ignored.  Certainly it requires a little extra effort from designers to make the material helpful to the search engines, but no more than alt tags for images.  Heck, Google could never spider images, either.

Also note that Google’s YouTube allows you to add textual content to video, now.  So if you help it along, Google can index your videos as well.

And this is going to change everything.  So I am trying to get caught-up on all of this.

Take Care!
Happy Christmas & Merry New Year!

-Doug

Getting Started…

This is my first post. Whoopie!

I’ve inserted and twisted the key.  The blog is alive, watch out! 😉

I’m setting everything up at the moment. Give me a bit, I was actually headed to bed when I decided to sign-up and started configuring and customizing the basic blog to my liking.