I have started running a few promotions for SproutWorks Software. My traffic has been increasing, and I've been excited about the growing opportunity to show the world some of the software I've written.

Here is some output from my code counter program:

Total lines:
22,679
Total Pages: (12pt Times New Roman double spaced)
872.3

Sproutworks.com is operated using the SproutWorks Content Management System, which is written in PHP. SproutWorks CMS is written for PHP 4, with PHP 5 compatibility. MySQL powers the information retrieval for this site.

SproutWorks CMS contains forums, chat, account management, menus/tabs, a gallery, a news aggregator, and more. Research into PHP image processing using the GD library has produced several graphical scripts. SproutTree is currently being displayed in the background of http://sproutworks.com

SproutTree generates a drawing of a tree.

A gradient script produces interesting gradient backgrounds.

The blog directory is one of my projects I have a great deal of Interest in. In my studies of downloading and parsing web pages, I thought a blog aggregator would be an interesting project to develop. I already had written an HTML parser for my Google aggregator. This let me parse Bloggers XML feed in a few lines of code.

All I had to do was store this information and reproduce it in an organized format. I had the initial program running in not much time. I added caching to it and it performed okay for my modest hosting account. Now it is getting me more search engine traffic because it is amassing a lot of content that people are interested in.

It seems like I get good search engine rankings on a lot of niche topics, like the title of someone's blog. Usually when you are performing search engine optimization, you try to get high rankings in a few key search terms. I am getting high rankings on random terms, based on whatever the search engines get out of my site. I wish I could peer into the brain of Google and find out why it probes my site in such an odd fashion. Google likes to use GET parameters it sees on one page, then apply them to another page. My scripts don't all take the same input values, but Google hasn't figured it out because my blog displays a changing subset of my forums.

I am now starting to get incoming links to the second pages of some of the blog index. This means some search engines now are actually using some of the hundreds of extra pages of blogs they haven't been using. I don't know how they decided that everything but the first page was less informative. I heard about a Google sandbox, where a site must stay for a while before it shows up in search terms. Maybe they have multiple sandboxes per website. That would explain a few things in my site statistics.

On Wednesday I attended March Mingle at Dave & Busters in Mission Valley.

http://www.marchmingle.com

March Mingle is a large gathering of web developers in the San Diego area. I met some techies, and won a coffee mug in a giveaway. I met Bernard Wong, who presented at MSDN events the next day. I am now more interested in .NET development. I think I'll stick with PHP for my web stuff, however. PHP does what I want it to do, it does it well, it's free and widely available.

At MSDN Events in San Diego, I learned how easy it is to make a fully functional .NET application. It's a more visual way of creating an application than I'm used to. I won a copy of Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows. That will come in handy.

My first visual development environment was HyperCard, which used to come with a Macintosh. Sadly, Apple has abandoned HyperCard, which could have served the same purpose as Flash does today. It was ahead of its time, I suppose. I started making HyperCard 'stacks' when I was 13, and I made an expansive adventure game. I also took a HyperCard class at Bell Jr. High.

I just read that the author Hunter S. Thompson has commited suicide. I read 'Fear and Loating in Las Vegas' a few years ago and found it very interesting. I've also seen the movie a few times. The movie is interesting as well. I don't know much else about him.

I have been playing guitar for about 10 years now, and until today, I never bothered to set the inonation of any of my guitars. My main guitar is a lefty Steinberger GU Deluxe (http://musicyo.com). I discovered Steinberger guitars around 1999, and I ordered a black GU Deluxe. I didn't play it that much because it was a right handed guitar, but I loved it's headless tuning system. I gave the guitar to my brother a few years ago.

I've been playing the lefty Steinberger for about 2 1/2 years. The EMG select pickups are very quiet, and work well with my Boss GT-6 effects pedal. The guitar stays in tune better than everything else I've tried. Today I set the intonation on it for the first time, which is strange. I always knew that I could move the saddles on my R-trem bridge, but I didn't know the procedure.

This site is a pretty useful guide for adjusting things on a Steinberger.

http://www.musicyo.com/planet/steinberger.asp

I just had to adjust the saddles so that the 24th fret is exactly 2 octaves above each open string. The guitar comes with a mini hex wrench to move the saddles. I found that after I moved a saddle, I have to get in tune again. I tune my guitar with the tuner in my GT-6. After I adjusted the inontation for each string, the guitar sounded much better, especially since the strings are getting old.

I also read about adjusting the truss rod. I loosened it slightly, and the neck made some creaking noises.

Maybe I will even adjust the action height sometime.

Okay, I am typing this in for the second time, because last time I hit some sort of weird key combination that erased my post. Blah. You know what, I am now writing this in my email program so I can save every now and then. I had the awesome story going on too.

Last night, after attepting to sleep for over 3 hours, I finally got some sleep. A whole 2 hours. I woke up with a cool dream in my head, so I mustered the strengh to get up and write about it.

I am in a math class. I often have dreams where I am back in high scool, and I get the thought "didn't I already finish this?". This is one of those times. I am not understanding my math. My friend Darren comes home with me to help me with my math. Darren is a friend from grade school that I haven't seen since Jr. High. He was one of my friends that played 4 square during recess. He would hit the ball very fast, with a backspin. It worked pretty well as long as it landed inside the court. A lot of times it didn't, however.

Darren and I are walking up the hill to my mother's house. It seems like it's farther than it is in real life. When we get there, I am playing an electric guitar. I am playing a right handed guitar left handed (I am left handed). I am playing some pretty melodies, the kind that I am usually too lazy to learn how to play. Plus I am playing them 'upside down', in guitar terms.

Now we are in the computer room. My brother is upstairs in his room, and he yells about the guitar being too loud. I'm not even using an amp. My mom comes in, and she has this computer game that's supposed to help me with math. She shows me how to play. There are a bunch of sqaures arranged in straight lines, and she clicks on the corner squares to make the attacted line dissapear. Sometimes there is a spider inside a square, then she has to also click on the spider before erasing the line. I say "anyone can figure out 90 degree angles, maybe if they had a hexangonal grid or something".

Next thing I know I am in the dining room, and my mom has this motivational speaker guy to help me with math. He has blond hair and always seems too happy. He has me fill out a survey on a computer. I forgot what the questions were, but it seemed like a scam to me.

The next thing I remember I am in this motorized cart thing going up a hill. My brother is in the passenger seat. It's on a track, and I am in some sort of game. Apparently I have to stop the cart using the brakes at some point. That guy tells me to stop, which I do. I stop at 99 out of 100, which means I win. The guy says I just won my team a cruise. Next thing I know I'm on a cruise ship with my team and that guy.

Something about him compells me to jump off the ship. As I am falling, I notice that I am in between 2 ships. I plunge deep into the water. I start running out of air as I struggle to reach the surface. I hear the guy tells my teammates to come rescue me. It seems like I've been forced into some sort of happy cult, and I want to get away from all of them. I swim towards a wall. I skirt along the wall. Some girl is behind me, she's coming to capture me. Somehow I manage to climb along the wall like spider man. There are a couple windows in the wall. There is an office worker in a window. I tell her about this crazy guy that is after me.

Now I am in a building, running through hallways. I run up a bunch of stairs and into this room. I figure that guy will never find me in here. Next thing I know, there he is. I run down some stairs, and he is still here. In desperation, I jump from a great height to meet my end. But I fall slowly. Someone catches me, and that guy is there. "I can't even die?", I think. "I must be in hell".

I wake up an throw my blanket off me. I realize I am back in real life.

I got a OX3+ digital microscope for Christmas. It's pretty fun to play with. I was taking pictures of a CD and I found a tiny green bug walking on the CD. I put it in a observation container and took some pictures of it. I can even see its brain if I focus the right way. I'll make a gallery of my microscope pictures sometime later.

So I signed up for a Feedster account to try it out. I happen to have created an RSS feed of my blog a little while ago, so I am adding it to Feedster. Here goes!

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

I am redesigning the web page for San Diego Coalition To Stop the Genocide in Sudan.

It was a good excuse to start a new design from scratch, and I am also helping a worthy cause.

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I have been having problems with being logged out after posting something here. I am trying to get to the bottom of it. I made a small change, but it will take a while to see if it works since the problem happens intermitantly.

Yesterday Dani and I went to my mom's house around 7 PM for an Amnesty International Meeting. My mother is the coordinator for the Scripps Ranch chapter. Twice a year they write letters to prisoners of conscious, which is what we did last night. I wrote two very generic letters.

One was to an American that was solider who was deployed to Iraq. After a 6 month deployment, he came back on a 2 week leave. He decided that the war was wrong and that he would not go back. This action landed him a year in a military prision after he was sentenced for desertion.

article

I wrote another letter to a guy in Syria that's in prision for downloading some articles from the Internet. Apparently the Syrian Internet doesn't promote free speech. Here in the US, usually the worst thing that could happen is getting sued by the RIAA for participating in a growing trend on rampant music piracy.

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In other news, Dani pointed out that the water I gave her from my mom's water dispenser was brown. She wanted to know if she was going to get sick. I assured her she wouldn't, I have drank the water from the refridgerator on several occasions.

I noted that the water could have been in there for ten years, since no one gets water from there. I drained the water into a tupperware container. The first couple fills had a brown tint, and it slowly became clear again. Next I decided to tackle the ice cube dispenser. The ice had specks of rust all over them. I dumped the container into the sink and melted the ice with hot water. The bottom of the container was covered in brown sludge. It came off pretty easily. It seems to all have come from the spiral piece of metal that churns the ice to make it come out. I wiped off most of the rust and put the whole thing back in the freezer. I turned off the ice maker since my mom doesn't use it.

Poor Macy hurt her left paw the other day while she was chasing rabbits. She got her dewclaw stuck in something and tore it out a little. Now she is bandaged and is hopping around.

Last night I had a dream I went to church with my brother. I was dressed in a big light blue robe with a white ruffled collar. I felt like it was bringing undue attention to me. Some other people were dressed this way as well. I was in the pews, fiddling with my compact flash card. Somehow I broke it in half. I was relieved that it was only a 32M card and that I still had a 1G card.

From the night before:

I am in a car, Dani is driving. She has some vanilla pills in a bottle. She says she got them from a pet store. I wanted to try them so she put some pills in a glass of milk. It tasted like a vanilla bean frappachino. We are driving in Scripps Ranch.