GrantB.net

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.

WizardWorld Chicago 2007 was in August this year, and again I took pictures of all the crazy costumes. And now, 4 months later, I'm finally putting them up!

As an aside, I've been playing with the Python Imaging Library, which is a really handy way to edit images once you figure it out. I wrote a couple scripts that will resize, make thumbnails, and copywrite-stamp the images really quickly. I'll post the scripts soon, after I've had a chance to clean them up a bit.

Anyway, back to the pics. Unfortunately, I went on Friday, not Saturday, which is much busier and probably had many more costumes to snap. But hey, I got what I got.

I only got one celebrity, Michael Madsen, who you might have seen in Kill Bill 1 & 2. There were other celebs, but for some reason or another, I didn't get them.

I think there was a Fett family reunion nearby or something, because damn were a lot of Mandalorian Armor costumes. As usual, the Star Wars contingent was well represented and of a high quality that implies too much money was spent. But then again, that's what makes the pictures not suck.

The other highlights for me were Dr. Weird (Aqua Teen Hunger Force) and Wario. Those are bold choices gentlemen, and you've executed well.

Anyway, enough exposition. Here's the pics:

Michael Madsen	Michael Madsen
Jawa and Boba Fett	Jawa has glowing eyes	Smile everybody!
Some Mandalorian	Which one do I shoot?	Darth Maul and Jango Fett
Obi-Wan's soulful cousin?	X-Men's Storm and White Queen	Video game soldiers
Dr. Wierd. Hats off to this guy, seriously.	Wario. Nice work, man.	Venom
The fittest amateur Superman I've ever seen.	A pretty good Robin	???
a T-shirt that grabbed my eye	Some booth babes.

A GrantB.net exclusive! (I think)

Jeff Scheel, lead singer of somewhat-defunct industrial rock band Gravity Kills, has a new project coming up soon, to be dubbed Star13. And I have a demo!

It's a cover of David Bowie's I'm Afraid of Americans (from Earthling, one of my favorite albums).

This is (in his words) "only a very rough demo". Jeff says that it is not finished. A final version will "go to radio in about 2 months".

Download this track here!