Last Saturday, my parents went out to do some clothes shopping. I didn't feel like going, so I stayed home with my brothers and sister. We got McDonald's for lunch, and they got my order wrong. How strange! McDonald's would -never- do that! They gave me a Big Mac instead of what I ordered. Over the countless times I have eaten there and the fact that I worked at the Big M Supper Shop for nearly five years, I have never desired to eat a Big Mac. Much to my surpise, it was edible. I won't say it tasted great, but it was OK.

A few days ago, I cleaned my room. It was getting too messy for me to look at. It looks much better cleaned.

My sister gave me her birthday wish-list. It's coming up in a few weeks. I'm probably going to get her a CD player. She's been wanting

Something humorous to check out --> Top 10 Linus Crashes & Top 10 Blue Screens of Death (BSOD's)

My latest coding projects have involved PHP. I was working on my brother's guestbook ( http://philiplance.is-a-geek.com/guestb ... stbook.php) because it was getting spammed a LOT. The funny thing was that they were posting HTML code. They all used a div tag and styled it to be hidden! How strange. Anyways, I added my own unique captcha system (without session ID's) to defeat automated submissions. Spammers also get a nice little message.
The other project concerns bbcode. What is bbcode? Click here. I've extenively modified the code listed at the wikipedia page. It supports many more things. It's still a work in progress. If my other computer's on, you can access it at http://stephen.calvarybucyrus.org:1000/ ... e/test.php.

Anyways, off to watch TV for now. CYA.

The weather certainly has changed from summer! The trees are eliciting shades of orange, yellow, pink, and red. With that turnabout comes the cold weather. It's been much cooler lately, and frost is making its entrance.

I've been playing around with my blog setup for the past couple days. Notice the different colors and style! I like the blue theme. I hope to put a fresh face on my website's homepage soon. It needs a new layout.

Another major goal met was getting my room clean! Seeing all that mess really started to bother me, so I finally got it taken care of.

Right now, I'm working on upgrading our web server. Yes, the one you're viewing this page from. I have a 1.2 gHz AMD computer that's getting XP on it right now. If it shows itself more stable than the current server (Win98SE), then it gets the job!

Sometimes, it's quite ironic that people think a pastor's life is a cakewalk. They think he spend a few hours a day in his office, gets his sermons off the internet, and plays games a lot. That couldn't be farther from the truth!
I'm finding out how busy the little things can keep you. My dad (http://calvarybucyrus.org/pastor) has been giving me more responsibilities as youth pastor. I'm working more with children now. Though it gets busy, it's fun.

My todo list getting quite long! I guess that's from spending too much time on the little binary box!

This year is just flying by! It'll be 2007 in less than 100 days! Nine months are down and there are three to go.

Early in September, my sister flew back to Florida for year two at Pensacola Christian College (http://www.pcci.edu). She is already getting extremely busy as the homework and class projects stack up. I remember that feeling almost all too well. :) She switched her major from criminal justice to missions this year.

On September 18, I got hired in at Baja. I've been working the past three months there with the temp service. So I move from $9/hr to $10.48/hr for starting wages. I'll move to $11.02, then to $11.59, to $12.18, and be making $12.75 next September! It's really a pretty good job. I'm enjoying my bank account balance rebounding up and up! College drained it pretty good.

I'm getting my hopes up for winter! It seems to be coming fast. The weather forecast (weather forecast) predicts that there will be frost on the ground tonight! The low is in the 30's.
No, I don't like winter's cold weather, but I do like snow! I hope December 18 greets Bucyrus, Ohio with a foot of snow. Then I'm going to get a big snowblower and we're going to make a snow fort again.

Philip's last soccer season is going alright. He has a game today that I'm going to. That'll be fun.

I went to Pennsylvania for the first time last month. The college I went to (http://mbcaf.org) has Alumni fellowship meetings 3 times a year, and this one was in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. We had preaching services in an open-air chapel that was originally a horse house (I think). I enjoyed seeing my friends from college (Jon, Josh, Justin...) and spending the night there.

Anyways, that's all for now, folks!

Wow, it's nearly been three weeks since I posted last! Where does all the time go?

For three weeks, we had a French boy at our house. His hometown is Niece (not sure on the spelling). He was like a foreign-exchange student, but on summer break. It was very interesting hearing his French accent pronouncing English words, especially when reading the Bible. Anyways, we had a fun time with him and he enjoyed his stay. Anna and Philip got to do things with him. I couldn't do too much because I had to work. Bummer!

I've had much computer frustrations recently. Arrrgggghhh! At times, I just want my computer to become a boat anchor. I have a 120GB hard drive with my entire digital life on it. It stopped working. After much headache, I set the jumper on it to slave (it previously had no jumper) and it revived. Lesson to you kiddies: always back up information you don't want to lose! I think this hard drive is on the fritz, so I bought a 250GB hard drive with an external USB casing for it for $70 after rebates.
Excellent computer deals --> TigerDirect

Today, I bought a Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB MP3 player. It's really cool! With no moving parts, it plays music for 18 hours on 1 AAA battery. It plays music, records voice, FM radio (and can record it), and can record from line-in (like from a CD player). It only cost me about $70 at Wal-Mart - yes, I supported Communism and some Chinese sweatshop today.
Link --> Creative Zen Nano Plus

Tomorrow, I'm leaving at 8:00am with my dad to take my sister to the Akron-Canton airport. She's leaving for her second year at Pensacola Christian College (Pensacola, Florida). It has been nice to have her here for the summer. Later in the afternoon, our church youth group is going to the Columbus Clippers baseball game. They are the AAA baseball team of the New York Yankees. My family is going there to root for the opponents, the Toledo Mudhens. They are the farm team for the 1st place Detroit Tigers! It should be a good game.

This week at work has been the shortest yet at only 40:35. The paycheck might not look to good, but it's way better than my checks from McDonald's.

Haha!

Take this test. It's pretty funny.
It's supposed to tell you at what age you're likely to die.



Actually, click here --> http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_dead.php.



Here's another test. It'll take you about 5-10 minutes, and is hilarious is you've ever been called a "nerd" or "geek".

I scored 93%. Check it out --> http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_nq.php.