My first sign of food-poisoning delirium was clicking on the hotel TV and seeing Florida State playing basketball. The second sign was the fact they were actually WINNING. By the time I saw there were real, live spectators in Leon Civic Center, I was checking myself into the hospital.

The ACC is gonna be crazy this year, and I can’t wait! Add in that Dook is sucking wind and you’ve got the mix for a topsy-turvy basketball season.

I reckon someone ought to keep his weblog running well past football season…

I grabbed breakfast at the airport before boarding my flight to San Diego. Bad idea. 🙂 The “Western Wrap” I purchased at the Green Leaf restaurant near the Southwest gates gave me no shortage of grief for the seven hours I spent on a plane today. Flat out laid me low. Only now am I feeling human again.

I recommend you steer clear of that place if you’re in a bind and need food before flying. Ugh.

Now it’s off to find some peanut butter and jelly for sandwiches. That’s about all I can stomach right now. For real.

Today is my wife Kelly’s birthday. Every day, I am reminded of how lucky I am to be her husband. In spite of the travel that’s been keeping us apart, we’ve grown closer in the past few months, laughing and working and parenting with increasing ease. Each day I respect her more.

Kelly is everything I could ever ask for in a wife, and more than I could imagine. I love you, sweetie!

I’m off this week to California to help with bidness. This time, I only booked hotels with free Internet access. I’ll post some entries when I get the time, but don’t be surprised if the page goes quiet for long stretches. I’ll check in when I can.

I’m having a blast being around my family. Can’t remember when I had four days together when I wasn’t working. Awesome.

The weather was so nice yesterday morning (75 degrees, at one point), that the girls and I went to the park and had fun just chasing each other around. I guess we were making the most out of the last bit of warm weather we’re likely to see here for a while.

Tonight I’m taking my wonderful wife out to dinner for her birthday. Again, I can’t remember the last time we had a date like this. We’re both looking forward to it!

I hope to find some time this weekend to whittle down this huge pile of paper on my desk. Fat chance of that happening, though.

If I find the right moment, I may post some thoughts on my career which have been bubbling around my head lately. Or, I may not.

A project that almost got completed last night was the addition of a decent photo gallery to this page. I tried Drupal‘s, gallery.module and image.module, but gallery crapped out on me and image doesn’t exactly do what I want done. I am leaning now towards the perl-based IDS, as seen on my friend Tanner’s website. Ultimately, I’d like to simply drag-and-drop a folder onto my fileserver and have it appear as an album in the gallery. IDS seems to do this. Why the others don’t, I have no clue. Seems so simple.

Got to get crackin’ on the list of things to do. I’ll check in later with more thoughts.

Though my friends have called this my “ranting page,” I really have a heck of a lot to be thankful for. I have a wonderful, happy family: loving parents; happy siblings; a loving, supportive wife; and a bright, adorable daughter.

In spite of the frequent travel, I am having fun in my new job, where no two days are the same. I have lots of friends who I’m grateful for.

In a few minutes, we’ll be off to my parents’ house for a day spent celebrating family. It’ll be an absolute blast; so much fun that I’ll wonder why we don’t express this love more often.

Life is too short not to enjoy every minute of it. Take some time today to consider the ways in which you are fortunate.
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Yesterday, I had some fun revisiting a favorite site of mine, the Internet Ray Tracing Contest. It’s a site to which people submit their ray-traced creations for voting. There are many mind-bending submissions, all of which were created entirely via computer, and some of them breathtakingly realistic.

One of my future hobbies (always in the future, alas) is to learn how to become a ray-tracing artist. For now, I’m just a ray-tracing groupie.

Spend some time clicking through the site. You won’t be disappointed.
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I’m looking for some audio editing tools for Linux to do a little work on a fun project. If you’ve got some pointers for me, please post them with comments. Thanks!

Dang it! I hate it when I get a good idea, but due to my laziness I don’t ever do anything about it. Someone will actually ACT on something I also thought up and then I feel like a stoopid-head for not implementing it myself. Happens all the time.

This time, my idea for a government-only auction site has made headlines in the N&O. A site called GovDeals.com has recently signed up many municipalities, stolen my thunder, and rained on my parade, to boot.

Both of my faithful MarkTurner.net readers know I’m a junkie for government auctions. I can be found about once a month over at the N.C. State Surplus Property Warehouse on Chapel Hill Road, looking for (and usually finding) bargains on computer parts and whatnot. While I’m always happy to walk away with a $5000 printer for fifty bucks, I can’t help but feel that there must be a better way for the state to get better prices for its surplus equipment. That’s where my idea of a auction site began.

When most folks and businesses need to unload stuff, they head to EBay. Governments can’t do that because of the stigma associated with EBay. Yet an EBay-type site provides just what government auction needs: a larger number of bidders than their current auctions can provide. This equates to higher bid prices, which means the government gets more of its money (and more specifically, YOUR money) back.

I’m glad GovDeals.com is in the game. I’ll be watching them closely to see how they implement this. I only wish I had gotten off my keister and done it myself.

One day I’ll learn the difference between “creating an idea” and “creating the thing the idea represents.”