GrantB.net

What in the what?
http://www.shortpacked.com/2011/comic/book-13/02-the-new-girl/osama/

Star 13 (aka *13) is now live on MySpace! http://myspace.com/star13music.

This is the new project from Jeff Scheel, frontman of the new-defunct industrial rock band Gravity Kills, a band which I was a pretty big fan of.

The official website, which is still just a placeholder, is here:
http://star13music.com.
Jeff says it should be live real soon.

You can hear the new track, a cover of David Bowie's I'm Afraid of Americans at MySpace in radio edit form, and purchase the studio track at iTunes or Snocap.

(Did you catch when I posted the demo of this track a few months ago?)

So one April afternoon I find this in my inbox from the guy who hosts this site:

Happen to have a backup of your website?

And my site was down. Dammit.

On the bright side, I did have backups. Unfortunately, they are from January 2006. Doh!

Thanks to Google and Yahoo caches (which I now love), I was able to recover all textual blog content. All of my photos are safe (the originals are stored on my laptop), but a few other not-really-important images are lost.

My Perl blog code that I wrote and deployed last September, however, is gone. I'm kinda pissed about that, but I should have known better than to not back it up.

Perl cgi sucks anyway. I've been wanting to re-do it in PHP, so now I'm doing it. Hopefully I can bang it out pretty fast.

This is certainly a surprise to many, but not a shock to all. Me and Kathy got married last Friday, February 15 in front of a judge downtown.

This date has nothing to do with Valentine's day. It is, in fact, the 11th anniversary of the day that I initially asked her out. This happened in 1997, after the Metallica concert at Van Andel arena in Grand Rapids. We were attempting to round up our group of friends in preparation for the drive home, and I found myself with her in the middle of the crowd, and I went for it. (It's important to note that this concert was during Metallica's Load tour, when they still had credibility and respect and didn't have to hire a therapist to help them work together.)

So why the stealth marriage? We've been dating for 11 years, and living together for almost 7; we were practically married already. Everytime we started talking about a ceremony, we got hung up on details that neither of us really care about. We don't have the time or the interest to plan something big. We figured 11 years was a good milestone; let's just do it and not put it off any longer. My mom still wants us to have a party of some sort, and I guess me and Kathy will consider it.

The picture that the judge took of us isn't very good, so here's a picture of us afterward as we wait to eat at our favorite restaurant.

Hooray!

At the moment, if you use IE, you will see a banner on this page that notifies you that I'm well aware that this page looks like crap to you. Yesterday, it basically said "Screw you, IE users!" Until now, I guess I was holding a hard line that if Microsoft won't support the web standards that every other browser supports, screw them and the people using their crap browser.

But I'm job hunting. For computer jobs. And I might be applying for some web-related jobs. So you might reason that I probably shouldn't be telling IE users to suck it on my home page.

This week, I'm going to try to fix the IE display. It'll be a little tough, for one because I don't have a machine that runs Windows and thus I can't test the page conveniently. It's also tough because the IE rendering engine has, since IE 3 or 4, mis-implemented key parts of CSS. Yes, even in the brand spanking new IE 7. It's something the web standards community has been complaining to Microsoft about for a long time.

So anyway, by next week hopefully this page will look okay in IE. It might not look the same in IE as it does in other browsers, but it won't look like it was designed by a chimpanzee who gave up halfway through.

Of course, if you use Opera or Firefox, you shouldn't notice any change at all.