Luckily I was able to head out a little early yesterday to sort of make up for it some, but today is already swamped and my schedule booked all day even though I just got started!  Tomorrow we’re having a joint birthday party for myself and two of my other friends so that should be pretty fun.

Hopefully i’ll find more time to write on the blog next week, but I have at least noticed that the spammers are in full force.  I’m getting somewhere around 10-15 spam comments a day lately and even some spammed user registrations.  Luckily Akismet is awesome, I don’t know what i’d do without it de-cluttering the comment moderation queue for me!

On one of the trains there was this crazy old guy who was talking about how “He’s still here, and those other guys are all buried in Central Park and they can’t shut him up.  It’s all a conspiracy!”.  He was ranting and raving and half of the train were getting a good chuckle out of it because he would think somebody was talking to him and then start yelling back at them how they couldn’t take him out and he was still alive.  The dude had to be at least 80 years old but he was really scrawny and mean looking.

In another subway station, we actually saw an older lady decide she was hot and she would just walk around without a shirt on.  Let me tell you that was a harrowing experience and makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have just gotten Knotts berry farm tickets from Trusted Tours and Attractions instead!  At least I wouldn’t have been scarred for life by seeing half naked 90 year olds in the subway in New York!

If you don’t want to be scared witless and maybe have even more fun, try checking out New York tours or signing up for the Trusted Tours Newsletter.  Right now if you sign up you can get in a drawing for a $150 Magellan’s Gift Certificate!  The next time you are searching for online travel guides, don’t look any further than Trusted Tours and Attractions.

Also I was able to tweak some of the logic code that figures out the parcels to handle even more cases such as deeds in which people are mixing up the cardinal directions and abbreviating them sometimes and not abbreviating them other times.

DeedCAD 1.1 with full demo capability is on track for release within the next week and then hopefully will be taken to a conference at the end of September to show it off!

DexKnows is an awesome online directory service that can help you look up anything in Chicago that you might want.  If you check out the screenshot below you can see what the directory looks like:

As you can see, it lists the results alphabetically and has the phone number and some details about each company.  There is also a way to rate companies so that you can find the companies that you want to do business with based on the reviews of other people.  If you don’t need any plumbing services, check out the Chicago Phone Book instead!

..you do a bunch of work and think everything is just perfect and then one minor problem means you have to re-do all of that work over again?

I’ve had a lot of those type of days lately so it can get pretty frustrating.  Luckily, i’m at least making some progress on some of the issues finally so hopefully things will get a little bit easier from here on out.

In other news i’ve been reading some negative reviews of Babylon A.D. saying that it is really just a poor imitation of Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, a movie I thoroughly enjoyed so I may not bother to see it and instead wait to Netflix it on DVD since I don’t mind snagging bad movies to watch that way.

The basic package is $499 one-time fee and the premium service is a $1399 one-time fee.  You may think that this is expensive but this is actually as cheap or cheaper than some of the out-sourced coding i’ve hired to have websites done in the past.  What is even better is that ALL of Network Solutions’ designers and copywriters are US-based so you don’t have to worry about the language barrier being in the way of getting the design you want done in reasonable timeframe.

Network Solutions’ packages include such things as search engine submission, design help, implementation, free images, flash video and multi-media content, actual site creation, site review and delivery.  The experienced teams handle everything for you so that the lazy people like you and me just have to grunt in a committal fashion and point to what we like and they will make the magic happen as they put your site together quickly and with a lot of quality.

So, if you’ve been looking for a new site to be created or even a re-vamp of an existing site, look no further than Network Solutions site design services.  They’ll even host it for you for an affordable fee and throw in a free domain name if you purchase a year of hosting in advance!

The trailer looks pretty interesting but they are obviously doing things over the top as usual with driving cars backward to steal gas from a gas “land-train”.  The whole idea seems a bit improbable, but hey, it’s a movie and we’re supposed to suspend disbelief right?

I know they’ve already got my $8 since I usually enjoy most Vin Diesel movies and am looking forward to seeing Babylon A.D. when it comes out next week.

Whatever your interests clicksmart makes finding the right person for the job easy!  Another neat thing that Clicksmart does for you is to pre-certify a lot of the people listed on their site so that you know you are finding the right people - those who are highly qualified and capable.  This takes some of the guesswork out of using an old-fashioned method of finding people such as the Yellow Pages in your local phone book.  The Yellow Pages can’t recommend who you should go with, they just provide lots of advertising to businesses.

The entire southeast has been under a drought for several years now so any bit of rain we can get is wonderful.  What is nice about the rain that we are getting here at least is that it is fairly steady but not too much in a short time-frame to cause any problems with flooding.  Further south in Georgia I hear they are getting a lot more and having some flooding issues but we are lucky so far.  I know Tropical Storms and Hurricanes affect a lot of people in negative ways, but the remnants usually help a lot with the rainfall totals and we actually haven’t had any good ones come through the last few years which hasn’t helped the drought any.