Ever since Patrick had his done, I’ve wanted one. What, you may ask? My own icon. And now I finally have it. Paul over at IconizeMe finally started accepting orders again and I got mine in right away.

I was surprised how fast he turned it around. Based on email timestamps, I submitted my original photo around 1430 CST, Paul sent a confirmation email around 1800 CST, and I had the finished icon set (8.5″x11″ vector based PDF, 128×128 pixel gif, 2550×3190 pixel jpeg, Windows .ico and .icns file) by 0202 CST. I wonder if the guy actually sleeps.

Now I just have to figure out to do with it — although I have a couple ideas.

or were the Superbowl ads just kind of lame? Sure, Coca-Cola introduced a couple new ones (and recycled an old one). Go-Daddy had a new one. But other than that, everything was either the same old ads we’ve been seeing, or just lame. I actually had to look at the list to remember them all, that’s how blah they were.

OK, the GM robot one was pretty good too — but only in an 80′s retro movie kind of way. (“No dissassemble!”)

And the game itself kind of sucked. Not that I’m a football fan in the first place, but how good can these teams actually be when they each gave up a touchdown in the first 10 minutes of the game?

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally redesigned the site. I’ve also put a bunch of new picture sets on-line.

This is the 6th major version since I put up my first Web site in 1994 (1995?) and represents about 140 hours of work over the last several months. Much of that was spent rejiggering the templates and testing testing testing (cross-browser compatibility is not fun.)

The original site was a ˜ through my Internet provider at the time. Since then I’ve gone through many iterations, including one for my (long abandoned) Web design consultancy.

Over the years I’ve had:

• The original ˜ site.
• A revamp of the original site, still a ˜. Mostly this brought some cohesiveness to the site as a whole.
• The Web design consultancy — Phosphor Images — aka “Green Sock-Hop” because of the headline font I chose.
• The “Yellow Blog” site. This is where I first started doing what would become blogging. (Not that I was a pioneer. There just wasn’t a special word for it back then.)
• “Red With Bubbles” that was here yesterday. Sick of hand-coding the each page, this is where I started using Movable Type to drive the main content areas.
• This version, affectionately called “Blended Elephant,” where the biggest change, content-wise, was to move the story section into the Weblog engine.

I’m hoping that I can find copies of the front pages from each version so I can post them for everyone’s enjoyment and amusement.

FYI: A ˜ (tilde) site is one where you’re basically a subsection of someone else’s site, typically the ISP. In my case that was http://www.visi.com/~michaela/, which I haven’t used in at least 60 Internet years. More info via Wikipedia.