As some of you may know, I was contracted a few months back to author a jQuery book for Apress. However, the timing involved in the project, along with some personal things I had going on really kept me from being able to fill the obligations at the time. I was able to output about a chapter and a half before deciding to abandon the project altogether in favor of expanding clientele, and getting a better wrap around my knowledge of jQuery prior to undertaking such a daunting task. (Especially for a first time author).

Hot off the press from: torrentfreak.com

In an response to the new wiretapping law that was introduced in Sweden this week, The Pirate Bay will ask international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden, to protect their customers. In addition, the BitTorrent tracker will add SSL encryption to their site, and roll out a new VPN service.

I've spent a good deal of time contemplating my future, and after some careful consideration, I've come to the conclusion that I really need to take a big chance for once, and make plans, and bring to fruition something I would have never considered before.

Luckily with my mode of work, I can work from anywhere, anytime, and accomplish the same thing. I can sit in my dark dungeon of an office, or I could sit at a Starbucks, OR, why the hell couldn't I sit at a coffee shop in Amsterdam, or London, or Paris, or Rome??

I've personally been running into issues on my server lately that would for some still unknown reason crash Apache at some point during the night, and I'd have to find out when I first loaded up one of the sites on the server the next morning, then manually start Apache back up, and it had become quite tiresome. So I've done some investigating on how I can set up a shell script to check to see if Apache is currently active, and if not, restart the service.

I've been working on finishing up a personal drupal project at Poodle Breeder Source.com, and have been working with Drupal on this project. This will be one of many Drupal projects I've done over the past 6 months, and I really love the flexibility of Drupal, and the large amount of modules that are already up and running.

However, I've been Extremely Disappointed in the capabilities for e-commerce with the system.

This past weekend, I had a mind to dive into a new game after a couple month vacation from my exploration of the World of Warcraft universe, I was staring blankly in front of the PC game rack looking for some good choices. I saw lots of options, but stopped dead when I saw the box for Bioshock from 2kGames. I had a friend show me some trailers and gameplay videos for the game a few weeks back, and it looked like it would be a great one to check out. I had also read an article the day prior related to the newer games coming out marked as "Games for Windows" and how those were designed for Vista machines, and how much the gaming experience was going to change, blah blah blah...

So anyway after a minor traffic jam getting home, and a lengthy install process, I was ready to fire up the game for the first time, and what to i see to my surprise???

I recently ordered a new print of a design I threw together for a 2 sided, glossy business card. I was sent a link for OvernightPrints.com by a friend, and decided to check them out. I've never had a ton of luck with getting my card designs cut properly. Kinkos is notoriously the worst of any print shop I've ever used, and since all of my card designs have elements going fully to the edge of the card, every card looked different, off-center, etc.

This article is outdated, but still applies to the old version of himerus.com located at http://himerus.com/old/. Some of the thoughts here carry over to the new design, as it carries over a large amount of alpha-layer transparency.

When I first began this project to create my blog, I didn't have a real direction to know if there was any particular feature/design challenges that I was hoping to learn, or implement. It became clear after just a couple of hours in Photoshop that I had a layout that could potentially get some nice reviews... but the longer I played with the layout, the more transparent things became...