Picture seen on the front page of Lucianne.com yesterday. More info here.

It was a long time coming, but this site is finally back up and running. Over two years to be somewhat precise. The main reason for the delay was my effort to re-design the site from scratch. The previous design pretty much looked like ass and rather than spend any more time writing for it, I concentrated on re-doing it.

I started with a blank page back in May of last year. My first idea was scrapped for various reasons after about a month and I started anew with a few goals: simple, easy-to-read layout without a bunch of distracting bells and whistles (one exception being the use of Lightbox on the About page—I couldn’t resist). I also wanted to add a sideblog called “Elsewhere” for random things I find that don’t warrant a full entry. There is also a Photo Blog, but all the credit for its design goes to Doug Bowman of Stopdesign.

Note: The separate photoblog has since been removed. All my pictures are now on Flickr

Over the course of the next six (or eight) months, the process was slow. I would tinker with the design for a few hours a night and then maybe a week would go by without doing anything at all. The long pole in the tent towards the end was creating the templates for Movable Type and then testing them out. I’m not the smartest web guy by any stretch, so ironing out the kinks took a few days. I’m also no wizard with Photoshop, so the banner image took some time, but I still may work on that a bit. So welcome back, have a look around and feel free to let me know what you think.

Allrighty. Mint is installed, runnning smoothly and telling me what I already know: no one comes around here much.

In other news, a new photo gallery is up, thanks to Dan Bowman’s superb templates.

A brand new design is in the works and hopefully, this place will be back up to speed.

Crickets…crickets…

Anybody home? Hello in there….

This is just a test entry. I’m installing Mint on my server so I can have the lowdown and all the folks not reading this site.

As much disdain I have for the Mainstream Media, I have to admit that I will miss having Tom Brokaw around. He was a nightly staple in my house gowing up for many years and the amount of time I have watched Peter Jennings and Dan Rather combined over the same time and since can be measured by a couple of one-minute egg timers.

Some of my earliest memories of sitting on the floor of the family living room building wicked spaceships out of LEGOs involve watching NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw: Reagan’s 1984 landslide, the Challenger disaster, Gulf War I and so on.

While he wasn’t the perfect example of complete objectivity (no one really is), he was significantly better than the snobbish Jennings and light-years ahead of the insufferable Rather. To me, he always seemed to be a calming presence and he didn’t inject additional melodrama during heated times. Best of luck after 32 years and thanks for stopping by every night around 5:30 to give us the lowdown.

First financial writer Ken Kurson stops by and now I find out that my brother lives next door to The Agitator. Weird.

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving.