I finally got rid of the giant 50 lb. 21" beast of a CRT monitor and got a nice, sharp 22" widescreen LCD monitor. It's a Samsung SyncMaster 226BW to be exact, with 2ms response time and 3000:1 contrast ratio. It is sleek and sexy and matches my computer case (both colors and lights) which is a definite plus. One of the best things about this is now I have a lot more desk space, and when I say desk space, I phyically mean with my desk. My old monitor was a couple feet thick and barely allowed my keyboard to sit in front of it without pushing it off the desk. Because of that setup I couldn't write on anything plus I ended up sitting really close to the monitor. With my new LCD I obviously have a lot more room and I no longer have to sit real close. This make working on my web sites and playing video games a lot easier on the eyes.

They're back and as good as ever! One of my favorite ska bands just released another album hilariously titled Monkeys for Nothin' and The Chimps for Free. Yes, I am talking about Reel Big Fish. With song titles on this album like Another F.U. Song, Party Down, and Everybody's Drunk I knew this was going to be a good album. And after listening to it for a week solid now, I can safely say this album rocks!

I've always liked the Tomb Raider games. Sure there were a couple that were definitely sub-par, but since the beginning I've played through each one. Just last year I was scrounging through my old PC game discs when I came across the original Tomb Raider. I thought about installing it and reliving some memories, but one quick sight of those wonderful 1996 graphics and I decided against it. Well luckily I can now play through the original game again only this time in our current gen graphics with Tomb Raider's latest game called Tomb Raider: Anniversary.

A little more than six months ago I showed you guys the back end, or administration side of my site. This tool or Administration Panel is where I put together my site. It's where I moderate my visitors' comments, create and edit my articles, create and edit site pages, and edit site or personal settings. You can check out the older preview here and laugh at it's horrible design and amateurish features. I know I do.

On August 4th my favorite ska bands are coming together to put on the greatest ska show of all time! Ok, maybe not, but it'll be the best ska show I've ever seen. How do I know this? Well we're talking about Less Than Jake, Reel Big Fish, Streetlight Manifesto, and Against All Authority here. There's no doubt in my mind. I already bought my tickets because this show will probably sell out. I won't be pissed off this time when I don't buy tickets in advance and the show ends up selling out (damn you NOFX/Strike Anywhere concert!!). This time I'm prepared.

I finally integrated the anti-spam tool called Akismet into my comments system. Akismet is a third-party app that checks all comments that are submitted and declares them as either spam or not. They use their own methods to run a newly submitted comment through hundreds of tests. If the comment comes back as legitimate then it'll be posted on my site. If it's considered spam, then my site will still save it but mark it as spam so only I can see it. From there I can then go ahead and either delete it, or mark it as non-spam.

So I'm a little late. Last week on June 29th I turned 25 years old. The weekend that followed was one hectic and fun weekend. My parents, grandparents, and father-in-law came up to visit me for a couple of days. Then my uncle and his girlfriend came up to visit and get me drunk off my ass. It was great having everyone up to visit me and wish me a happy birthday.

*Sigh* For the past few weeks I've been working on a new template system for my site. The previous one I implimented was rushed and based off the Smarty Template Engine. I didn't use Smarty but tried to develop something similar to it for my site. While it did work, it was still very limited and not very user friendly when it came to creating new site templates. So I decided to scrap it and redesign my system based off Wordpress' template design. This new system I've actually put a lot of time and effort into and finally got it to my liking last night. So today I decide to go live with it and sure enough, a few thousand things break.