News & Updates for May 2005

Posted my review of Airwolf - Season One. It's so great to see these old series once again. I was offered review copies for A-Team, Knight Rider, and Magnum P.I. sometime last month, but never received them. I guess they ran out or something. But anyway, lets see... I added an image gallery for my Koma review. I also made the spoiler warning I have at the top of every page blink several times in an attempt to make it stand out a bit more.

My parents came up to visit this Sunday, so that was nice. My dad brought some plants so we could fill in that muddy area around the gazebo, and I must say it looks pretty good now. That area slightly lower than the rest of the yard, so water tends to pull there. Hopefully the plants will flourish. While we were out there, we also tore down this shelter area near connected to the fence that was supposed to be used for storing firewood. Throughout the years it had leaned more and more, and patches just weren't working. Finally it got so bad that it looked like it would just topple over, and take the whole fence with it. So now I won't have to worry about that anymore. For dinner we went to Logan's Roadhouse. Mm, that was yummy.

Okay, okay, enough procrastinating, time for the bad news. I'm not going to be a daddy as soon as we thought. We lost the baby. We pretty much knew since about last week, but we never gave up hope until the doc reviewed all the tests and handed down sad truth on Friday. It definitely hurts, no doubt about it. I wouldn't have thunk it, seeing as how it was only 6-7 weeks old, but yeah, my heart aches.

Modified the forum code so that Private Message email notifications would contain the sender's email address in the Reply-to field. This only happens if the sender has made their email address publicly available (or the recipient is an administrator, meaning me). I'm not sure how well this will work out, since users will still have to log in to manage the private messages, and responding by email won't mark the private message as read or replied to. It could end up just being too confusing, but we'll see how it goes. I can always undo it. I also fixed the user profile link included in the private messages sent when someone adds you to their buddy list. For those of you who don't want the adult forums to show up in the list, you can now add the tag "noadult=true" to the url so that those forums won't be listed with the rest of the forums (example: http://www.absoluteanime.com/forum/?noadult=true).

Posted character profiles of Jin (from Samurai Champloo); Winry Rockbell (from Fullmetal Alchemist).

Read all about my trip to LA for E3, 2005. Posted an image gallery for Now and Then, Here and There. I forgot to mention that on Sunday, I got my first haircut in something like 10 years. Treese cut it to about half way down my shoulder blades. Feels nice not having all that weight on me.

Posted an anime profile for Now and Then, Here and There, which is an awesome series, by the way.

We went to get a sonogram of the baby today, and found out it's actually only 5 weeks along. Two weeks ago when we found out we were going to be parents, we estimated it to be three weeks along, but then the numbers from the blood test indicated that it was more like five weeks. So it looks like our original estimate was correct.

Posted my Assault on Precinct 13 review.

Posted an anime profile of Izcer Reborn, and posted characters profile of Iczer-3 (from Izcer Reborn); Dee Laytner (from Fake).

Posted my Quantum Leap - The Complete Third Season review. Posted an anime profile for You're Under Arrest. Added an IRC Chat Box to the forums. Changed all the series specific forums to sub-forums.

My Absolute Anime License Plate Frame arrived yesterday, and it actually looks pretty good. Now I wish I had ordered a second one for the front plate, but at the time I just didn't know what kind of quality we were talking about. I hope the other products are just as good.

Added an anime profile for Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and added character profiles for Zatch Bell (from Zatch Bell), Gordo (from Beyblade V-Force), Boris Balkov (from Beyblade), Mugen (from Samurai Champloo). Added a modification to the forum so that private message email notifications will contain the action content of the private message.

Added anime profiles for Dragon Century and Maburaho, and a character profile for Chloe (from Noir).

I forgot to mention one other thing I did on Saturday, and that was creating an Absolute Anime Search Plugin for Firefox. Just unzip the file to the Firefox plugins directory, and the search bar will have the ability to do an Absolute Anime Site Search.

Added some code to the forums that will prevent new users from including links in their posts until they have reached a specific post count. For right now, I set that post count to ten. For the previous modification that I did involving the line restrictions of signatures, I figured I would actually format it as an official phpBB mod and submit it to phpBBHacks.com, just to satisfy my curiosity as to how many other forum administrators out there hate those long signatures. It was a simple modification to implement, and since nobody else had written it I figured nobody really cared. Well, they apparently posted it Saturday evening, so it's been up for about 4 days now and has received just over 60 downloads. I was surprised, as my expectations where maybe 5-10 downloads. So I guess people do hate those long signatures as much as I do.

Sorry I didn't have more updates this weekend. I got distracted. On Saturday, I spent a lot of time playing with Mozilla Firefox, trying to find and install extensions that would bring its awesomeness level up to that of the Opera Web Browser. And while I did find a lot of cool extensions to give Firefox features which Opera lacks, there were a few Opera features that I was unable to get reproduced with Firefox.

The first is a feature where you first fill out some information on a specific menu in the browser, such as your name, e-mail, and phone number, and then when you start to fill out a form on a website Opera drops down a little box under the form field containing the information you previously entered, but filtered by whatever you have already typed in the form's field. This is a very handy feature, and I was able to find a similar extension for Firefox, except that the extension inserts a graphic image next to the forum field and you must use the mouse to click that image to get your list of fields. Besides being inconvenient to keep switching over to the mouse when filling out a form, those graphics it inserts mess up the intended layout of the page.

The second feature is Opera's web password management system, called the Wand. When you submit a web form that contains a password field, Opera asks if you want to store it, as does Firefox. Assuming you say yes, when you later return to that page, all that's required to log in is either click the Wand icon or hit Control-Enter. Firefox's password management system is almost as good, but you still have to find and hit the forum submission button each time in order to log in. Once you get used to the convenience of the Wand, it's hard to go back.

The third feature deals with tabs and windows. In Firefox, you can have multiple copies of the browser running, and each one can have tabs. This is also true with Opera, but in Opera uses a multiple document interface. This means that each tab isn't just a tab, but a separate window inside the browser, which can be minimized, maximized, resized, tiled, and the like. Usually I keep all them maximized, but there are times when I want to tile two windows next to each other, and you just can't do that with Firefox unless you open another copy of the browser.

Another thing that got me distracted was CafePress, where you create a store and then put your images on a whole bunch of various items. So I fiddled around with that, eventually making four different items with the Absolute Anime logo. I did both white on black and black on white versions, but the basic store won't let you do more than one of any item type, so I created two created stores, the White on Black store and the Black on White store. I think the items actually look pretty cool, but then I'm just going off of the pictures, I haven't actually bought any of them yet. If someone does, let me know how they are.

Okay, so that's what I did on Saturday, then on Sunday we went to Lithia Toyota to see about buying a new Toyota Highlander for Treeses. Although her Bronco is much more comfortable for her than my low-sitting 2000 Toyota Corolla, we decided that it would still be a better idea to get an new SUV first rather than a new car, since her Bronco is already 11 years old while my Corolla is only 5. Plus, her back seat isn't sectioned, it just stretches all the way across the vehicle, so we didn't feel too safe putting a car seat back there. Oh yeah, and then there's the whole gas-mileage issue. The Highlander is one of most fuel-efficient SUV's on the market. Anyway, we had an appointment with a guy named Forest, but he quickly handed us off to a guy named Matt as another appointment of his showed up.

Matt was a cool guy and took us around to look at everything we wanted to see. Yeah, I know they're supposed to do that, but I mean he did it without trying to sell us on anything. He even took us in the back so we could see one of the hybrid Prius cars that they had sold. Let me just say that style-wise, a Prius would not be my first choice. Anyway, we pretty much found exactly what we were looking for right on the lot. It was a 2005 Highlander (as we were expecting), and besides being the right color, it had all the features she was looking for and none of the features she wasn't... oh, except it didn't have leather seats. The price seemed fair, and we got great financing, way better than we expected.

While we were there looking around the lot, we came across a used "Super White" 2005 Toyota S... and man did it look cool. It was "Super White", with a rear spoiler, tinted windows, 15-inch aluminum wheels, front fog lamps, and smoked headlamps. On the inside it sported a dark-gray cloth interior, chrome accented interior trim (including the pedals), a leather-wrapped steering wheel (which was slightly smaller than average), cruise control, side impact airbags, and even a CD player. Matt opened it up for us so we could check it out while he went to do something. We were both surprised by how much higher the seats were than in my 2000 Corolla CE. Unlike my car, she was very comfortable sitting in this thing.

Yeah, so we ended up buying it. Now, I'm not the kind of person that buys vehicles based on style or power, I go for efficiency, so I almost feel embarrassed driving it because it looks so cool... and not very economy. But it actually gets really good gas mileage, same as my previous Corolla, so I think I'll an get over it. Plus, it was a great deal, being a practically new car at a used car price. And again, we got better financing than we expected. We traded in my car for the down payment, and we've already found someone who wants to buy the Bronco.

Now if my wife's health would just improve then we'd be in business. Her pneumonia seems to be coming back, so today she got a home IV put in her arm, which she's needed to administer a new shot, twice a day... and that's in addition to the other blood thinner shot she has to take twice a day. Man, can she get a break here. The doc gave her a home IV because he didn't want her staying in the hospital, for fear that she could get even sicker. One thing's for sure, we need to do whatever it takes to get her better right now.