I went to bed last night and had such a good idea (IMHO) that I got back up and wrote it down: iSports - a theme for junior sports leagues and those local professional teams.

He replied in the morning that our project manager/designer, James Dalman, had already talked to him about doing that for his son’s football team. They were full-bore on the idea at that point.

Looking back, that was August 30th, so here we are one month later with an AWESOME theme for all the Pop Warner football and Little League baseball, and local soccer teams out there, all easily able to be set up with WordPress. I’ve already produced 13 video tutorials for walkthroughs to getting iTeam set up on your site, and there are a few more on the way.

The last little gravy we added, in addition to our normal arsenal of easy-to-use themes, is an image cross-fader for that home page’s feature image. All you do is add the images using our custom interface (so easy your kids can do it themselves), and choose the display options. Here is a run-down of the rest of the features:

• Post Game Video On Your Website – Upload your sports video to YouTube or Vimeo and insert it directly into the iTeam home page through our iTeam Dashboard options page
• Upload Your Team’s Logo – Our image uploader feature allows you to personalize your site with your own logo
• Showcase Sports Photos Easily – iTeam comes with a random image script that allows you to display multiple photos on your home page; plus we’ve got a Flickr photo gallery installed as well
• Post Live Games Updates – Using Twitter.com and iTeam, you can easily post live game updates to your team’s website

Download iTeam here when it releases on Monday, October 6th, 2008.

It’s a bold move; daring, but possibly brilliant before its time. Only November 1st will tell.

http://www.briangardner.com/blog/revolution-going-open-source.htm

Now, who was it that was president in 1929/1930… could it have maybe been Herbert C. Hoover? Remember Hoovervilles, Mr. Biden? I remember them from 5th grade Social Studies class, and it’s amazing, but there’s information about it on this thing called the Internet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville)

Moving right on along to the next point of idocy (my money is on Katie Couric not knowing he screwed up, just for the record) is regarding the timeline of the invention of the television. The first cathode ray tube (CRT) TV produced in America came along in 1938. I learned (again, in school, Mr. Biden) that television didn’t really start to take hold in the homes until the 50s and 60s, depending on the area of the country and purchasing ability of families. Often there were only a handful of TVs in a neighborhood in the beginning of television programming.

Oh, and just in case he was thinking about Roosevelt’s fireside chats… those were on the radio, too.

It’s about time to go to bed, but I’ll have to turn my mind off. Going back a few days, I can run down our activities.

We got up at the pre-crack of pre-dawn on Monday at 4am and got to the airport just after 6:00 for my 8:00 flight, just like I like it. After the boarding started, I took my time to stand up because of the stupid tiered boarding for Continental. First Class, First Class wanna-bes, People who paid too much, and then cripples and young-ins. THEN it was time to start loading from the back of the plane. By the time I got to board 3/4 of the plane was full, and I was 6 rows behind the wing emergency exit rows. Ridiculous!

After we backed out from the gate, the captain came on the intercom to tell us that the engine light came on when he started it up, so we were pulling back up to the gate to have maintenance run diagnostics. Thirty minutes later, we were cleared to go, hopefully with a functional engine.

We landed in Houston, thirty minutes late, of course, and boarding on my next flight was set to begin in… 3 minutes! In another concourse! First thing first, I went to the bathroom and jogged to the monorail to go to the right concourse and got there a good 20 minutes into the boarding period. I ran right up to the door with the pass scanner lady and she asked me if I was ready to board to Oklahoma City… “yeah…” So, she scanned my boarding pass and I jogged down the ramp to the civilized world’s smallest commercial jet — I’m talking Gulfstream 5000-sized — only to find that I was the first person on board!

The flight attendant asked me where I was going. I told her, “Row 14.” She wasn’t amused. Apparently, because someone before me was a moron and was trying to go to Atlanta, she needed to ask me what city I was going to. I passed the test because I can read red LED signs above doorways, and was allowed to sit down, in the last row of a 14-row jet. Wow! I had the row to myself, and was quite pleased with that, at least.

After what seemed like forever, two people boarded, and one guy kept coming back further and further. You guessed it. Our flight was held for these two from a connecting flight, and he was my row buddy, and my armrest and left rib buddy, too. He was not a wee man. Yay for football programs and what they do to physiques!

Wow, this is getting long, and I’m not even there yet.

We arrived 30 minutes late, but Nathan was an hour late arriving from South Carolina. Once we were all present and accounted for, we had to hit McDonald’s before I died of starvation. A double quarter-pounder with cheese, fries, and 2 drinks later, I felt human again, and we got moving on to Lake Murray park, where we had a cabin reserved for 2 nights.

I can’t really say much about what went on… “what happens in Oklahoma, stays in Oklahoma,” but I can say that we are all, without exception, very excited about the near future, short-term goals, and long-term prospects that we really dug into over hours and hours of debates, brainstorming, and two coups against Cory’s previous ideas. He’s cool with it, but it sure was fun to convince him that we were right.

Without a doubt, Beautiful and I made the right decision for me to leave CAE USA after 3 years that looked like they were going to lead me on to a career with them. Ultimately, our faith is in God and that we’re going to be taken care of, but it sure doesn’t hurt to have affirmations like what our team put together this week. We are all putting everything we have professionally into making this work, and there isn’t a slacker in the bunch, not even a bit. Every day feels like a blessing to get up and do exactly what my gifts and interests are, from the comfort of our own home, wearing whatever I want, eating whenever I want, and making a REAL impact on the day to day operations that people notice.

There won’t be a time, at least for a very long time, where what each thing our core team members do accomplishes a task or goal we need to complete a project or reach a new level of design, development, innovation, and support. We are right where we want to be!

Stay tuned for more as we develop more.

Wonderful wanted to point out that I have two mice sitting in close proximity for easy access to either computer’s functions.

I want to point out the receding hairline and the thinning hair all over. Getting close to 30 now… it’ll almost all be gone by 35, mark my words.

This is my second course with this professor, so I came in knowing this about him, but now they have no excuse. For my Summer semester British Lit 1900-1945 class, I started reading the first story and realized that he just stands up there and talks about every important paragraph, sentence, motif, character, and author style that we need to know. Why read the stinking books? I have a life, and a busy one at that. I’m not going to waste my time reading the thing if I’m just going to be spoonfed directly from the maker of the exams.

So, for 13 weeks, two nights per week, 4 hours per night, I sat there and worked on websites and recorded his lecture while taking sparse notes and got an A-. I have no plans on changing my tactics this semester, and I am not sure why no one else can see this pattern after three 3-hour classes with him. These are juniors and seniors with 100+ credit hours. Can’t they see a free ride when they get one? As long as you can write coherent sentences and regurgitate his major points, you score easy points.

That’s all I have for now… gotta load up Word and get the notes file ready for class.

No, seriously, this was a truly HUGE spider. I was sitting at the coffee table looking at e-mail Sunday morning when I hear a very loud, insistent, “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!!!!!!” I looked over at her, as any wonderful husband does when his wife begins to freak out without any husbandic action (new word - use it, love it, spread it). I saw her eyes fixed at the top of the wall above our breakfast bar and saw the biggest spider I had ever seen outside a plexiglass box at an animal attraction.

I dutifully watched it as she got the flyswatter, because I sure as heck wasn’t going to be able to get this thing taken care of with a napkin. It was as big as her hand with its legs spread out. I had to get the barstool close enough that I could get a shot in without sending it scampering behind the hutch. My aim was true, and bits of legs went flying and it didn’t move again.

Here’s a photo journal of the event, with the last photo being my iPhone for scale (note that its remaining legs are pulled way in).

PS - Sorry about the huge file sizes, but I’m testing out the gallery feature’s meta data and didn’t want to lose the camera info.

This time, though, I figured the best answer was to say, “an iPhone.” End of discussion, right? The first generation iPhone is only a year old and required a two-year agreement. If I waited until the 3G version, then I just got it and would be a pretty big moron for 1) ditching it so fast when it’s one of the most advanced phones available and 2) paying to cancel the service after having it for just a couple of months. No, not the end of his discussion. He said something about T-Mobile but we were already 20 feet away.

My question is this: Is there anyone who has EVER bought a cell phone from a mall kiosk?

Did you just say, “yes.” Alright, I’ll forgive you for being weird, but was it because a salesperson approached you in any manner?

I didn’t think so.