NealGrosskopf.com - An NG Designs Site

May 8

Well, I suppose it's time for a new blog. After having another record setting month for my website in April (I hit 1,510 Visits & 3,785 Pageviews) I'm feeling a bit fatigued over the site. I've only checked my analytics a few times in May unlike April where I was checking it twice a day.

Nealgrosskopf.com version 2.x is already a year and a half old and I'm starting to feel inadequate with the design of my site. I'm also feeling ashamed that my site only validates for HTML Transitional...the mark of shame. In response to this I've started working on a new design for my site. It started with just messing around because I was bored. That changed when I took some totally awesome pictures at my Mom and Dad's house last weekend. A few pictures stood out as the best, especially this one. It's weird how I get stuck sometimes on designs unless I have a really nice image to get me going. Anyway's I sat down and created a design. I also put a lot of thought into each and every piece of the design. My current design, and specifically the home page feels a bit cluttered with too many links. I evaluated each link to see if it was necessary in the design.

One problem that I do see in the design (Chris) is that it will be larger site in file size. Some of the background wizardry stuff I'm doing is going to require non-tiled wallpaper like images. I'm considering creating a "lite version" of the design for users with dial-up (Chris) and giving them an option to always use the lite version. Either way If I finish the design, and decide to redesign it will be a long, long time before it goes live.

Okay, sorry for all you people who could care less about my website (Emily). Like I said before, last weekend I went back to New London for my Mom's birthday. It was a fun time. This weekend we're going back again for Mother's day. Emily will be spending it with her family, and me with my family (it works out that way sometimes). Also this month Emily and I have a week off of work during memorial day week. We were initially going to go to San Francisco, but after we quasi bought a house we decided we're probably better off saving our money. It feels like it's been forever since I've had time off. I guess I'm just getting tired of the same old, same old. Each day feels so much like the last, that I can remember in what order half of the oncoming cars I see on my way to work...is that weird? Lol I hope not.

Currently we're not sure what we should do for our week off. Here's a few things we debated:

• Go to San Francisco anyway
• Go to Minnesota to see Emily's family
• Drive around Lake Michigan.
• Go to Sheboygan for a few days.
• Take it easy

I'm not sure what we're doing, give me some advice!

....View Comments [8]

Apr 15

Well I suppose it's time for a new blog entry. Since my last post not a lot has changed. Right now we quasi own a house but we cannot land a mortgage for it until 45 days or less on the closing date. That puts us somewhere around July, so the waiting begins. Probably the worst part about that is who knows what could happen between now and then, either to Emily and I or the house. Either way if we had the house now, I suppose it would just happen to us when we're in the house rather than not so why am I stressing about that?

Emily and I have had a few weekend off now since our busy month of March where we went home every weekend. It is kind of nice to have some time off. Last weekend I feel in love with Sim City 4 again. It's such a great game. It also helps that I lost a lot of progress on several of my cities in transfer from one computer to the other so that means I have start them all over again. Yeah it's just an excuse to play, I know.

In site news...my website is freaking bumping! Ok enough with the ghetto slang, lets just say it's busy. Yesterday I got linked in from a Japanese web developer and landed 85 visits, and today I am already to 85 visits and the day isn't done. 85 is currently my record for most amount of visits in one day so I foresee my site breaking the record again today. I am very excited to become ulti-nerd-famous. What's cool about the linkin is if you look at the picture on the website, they actually took a screenshot of my CSS Diagnostics code and placed it in the article. My code is famous...sort of.

In other site news I created a bookmarket for my Open Links section. It works really slick too. It allows me to quickly add pages to Open Links without having to type an article title or description. Some sites still require typing it up, but it saves a lot of time on other sites.

Well that will about do it for this blog entry. Sorry it wasn't more exciting.

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Mar 30

Last week Emily found found a house being foreclosed on that she liked. Then she found that exact style house being built so we started looking for similar houses. So I contacted a real estate agent that works with Emily's sister. We then checked out several houses in the Oshkosh area that were being sold. Many of them were within our price range but were a bit towards the "high end" of it. Unfortunately the houses we liked had offers on them that looked like there were going to go through. So our night of touring homes ending sort of on a bad note.

Then Emily checked the Valley By Owner website and we found a house that was less than many of the other houses we were looking at and had everything we wanted. For the most part our only criteria was that it had to be two-stories and it had to be on the west side of Oshkosh (technically the Town of Algoma, aka not the slums of "Sloshkosh".)

So we checked the house out and a few others but decided that it was really the best house. Click to view a satellite image of the house. Also check out my photo gallery for some specs on the house and numerous images of it. All but the first image were taken by the owner and that's the best quality that they are (which is pretty low quality) so it looks waaay cooler when you see it in person.

Friday night we decided to draw up an offer on the house and Saturday our realtor made the offer to owners. After a counter offer we accepted and officially are proud home owners!

Today with my parents & Emily's sister & family we toured the house and had all the papers signed. The current home owners are building a house a ways down the road and will probably move out around August of this year, which is good since we have a bit to go on our lease anyway's. Emily and I we're pre-approved for over the house's value but we still need to find a mortgage somewhere. US Bank seemed a bit higher than we planned on paying so we are going to shop around a bit and see if we can find a better deal. Any suggestions anyone?

I guess that pretty much sums up, a pretty incoherent blog entry, eh people? Lol. Just check out my photo gallery and comment! ....View Comments [1]

Mar 16

At Emily's request I am writing a new blog. I've sort of neglected my blog lately because I am focusing more on getting traffic to my website for my Geak Speak section. It's been a pretty successful campaign too. I've had 7/12 days in March with 40 or more visitors and one day with 85! It is pretty demanding to keep the traffic flowing though. This usually requires me to add links to my article on other websites. Usually after 2 days I rarely get visits from those sites so I need to add another article to keep the flow going.

In work news I have two days off this week and one day off next week. I'll probably spend those days doing web work regardless because I have several projects to do from Jason and possibly my own paying web project to do as well. At my day job I have been redesigning huebsch.com which is a really old site of ours that we haven't redesigned since 2001.

In family news Emily and I went to visit my parents and grand parents a few weeks ago and this weekend we went to see Emily's side. We went to the New London St. Patrick's Day Parade. Maybe it's just me but I think parades are boring, especially when it's still cold out. I recall going to a Christmas parade a few years ago when it wasn't much above zero degrees and thinking how dumb it is to have a parade during the winter season. Even despite the fact that it is cold, they still are sort of boring anyways. It's sort of like sitting out on main street and watching unusual traffic drive by.

Tomorrow my friend Mike is stopping over on his way home for spring break. He told us that he wants a beef roast and mashed potatoes (which is like a delicacy at our house) so I'm pretty excited to have a nice dinner when I get home. It's also a good excuse to clean our messing apartment which never seems to stay too clean.

In random news I decided to take my old computer and turn it into a streaming media server using Jinzora. I installed WAMP on it, created a dyndns account and also created a subdomain on my site to redirect to that dyndns domain. (Chris is there a way to point my 1and1 account directly to my home web server without using dyndns?) I'm currently copying all my music onto the web server so that I can listen to it while I'm at work. (only 23 more minutes to go!) I would also like to turn this web server into a testing site for nealgrosskopf.com so that I no longer have to test all my stuff out on my live site. The problem is I will need to figure out how to install IIS along side Apache, using Windows XP Home. I'll also need to make it an FTP server so that I can upload my files to it, test them out and then push them to my 1and1 space. Well that's about all for now, enjoy!

Oh also I forgot, Please go and vote on the poll that Emily posted. We are stuck trying to figure out whether we should save our money for a house later this year or spend some of it on a vacation to San Francisco in May or just do both. Feel free to leave a comment to this blog post explaining what you think we should do because we don't know anymore.

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Mar 2

A little bit ago I posted an article in my geek speak section of my site titled CSS Diagnostics - Find Depreciated Elements Using CSS. I've seen very little written about it via a few quick web searches so it was something that I figured might peak other's interest. Boy was I right, according to my horrible inaccurate but useful "views counter" I'm already up to 300 views on the article. What's even cooler is another blogger gave me a nod in his latest entry titled "Really cool CSS diagnostics script." When I get mentioned in other people's blogs I feel like I've officially arrived.

It feels really good to get some attention for my CSS skills. Of all the various facets of web development and design, this is the specific area I've chosen to specialize in. My dream, is to one day become a famous blogger, speaker, writer, advocate for CSS, and to travel around the country giving speeches on it and writing books. Of course that is probably far fetched and I should just stick to my second dream of being the head of a web department consisting of 10 or more people and living in a parade of homes style house. For the time being I'll continue to push out new articles that hopefully are useful to people and write boring blogs for my family and friends to read.

In other news, this weekend Emily and I went back to New London. I haven't seen my parents since Christmas which feels like a horribly long time. My house is completely covered in snow, in fact probably the most snow I've ever seen there. Also Emily was sick last week and now I'm sick. I have a really bad cough and I sort of feel dizzy all the time. Not much fun.

This weekend my parents bought me an acoustic guitar for my birthday (which is coming up in March). Check out my wallpapers page for some close up shots of the new guitar. I've played it a bunch since I got it and it's nice to have during apartment living.

Well that's about all for now, hopefully I'll start feeling better.

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Feb 16

Gez, this has been a really crazy winter hasn't it? Apparently in Madison they have already broken the record for most snow in a single season. Last week we got so much snow in Ripon that after work the snow plow decided to plow the streets right before we got out of work. What resulted was snow well over my tires and car door so I had to resort to digging my car out with a shovel I had in the trunk. I think in the process I managed to mess my back up so I'm sitting here today writing this with a hot pad on my back. I ended up sleeping on my back the entire night last night. (Yes I realize now that I am officially old just for the fact that I am even capable of sleeping on my back) It appears that more snow is on the way tomorrow and Monday so hopefully I won't have to dig myself out again

I other news, a site I was tasked with redesigning at work has finally gone live. Check out http://speedqueen.com/. It's not my favorite design I've ever done but it is cool to see something I created go up and it's valid html 4.01 strict! Come to think of it this is the first design I've done for an employer to go up. Before I left Lakeland I had been working on a redesign but it looks like Jason Irish will the one to accomplish that great task. It is sort of fun to work at a place where they have numerous web sites rather than just one. As a web designer it gives me that many more opportunities to do some design work. It seems that good design jobs are hard to come by now days too. I rarely see a worthy job posting of a design job in my Careerbuilder emails. It's almost always a job titled web designer yet they want you to code in PHP for nine hours a day or something like that. (hint hint Chris, you got the easy life in that respect)

Emily always wants me to mention her in my blog and I must admit that she gets neglected in that category. This weekend we are both bored and looking for something to do so anybody else who is also bored (and you must be if you're reading my blog) let me know. Hopefully my back will start feeling better so I can be a bit more mobile. ....View Comments [3]

Feb 10

Well it's been awhile since I've blogged. To be honest I haven't had much to say but I feel like the old post has been up for too long so here we go...The few weekends have been sort of busy. We did the parade of homes twice, I went to a monster truck rally with Tyler and watched the movie Untraceable with him as well.

I think the primaries are coming up in Wisconsin and I'm wondering whether or not it really matters for me to vote. The only reason I wanted to vote was to make sure the less capable Democrat got the party nod so they would be more likely to loose, but now with Barack and Hillary that isn't really necessarily anymore. Unfortunatley the stealth Libertarian Ron Paul is or will drop out soon so it's back to voting between a douche and turd sandwhich.

Ok, so that's probably all the more political I'll get here so don't worry, but that South Park episode is really, really funny. ....View Comments [1]

Jan 28

Parade Of Home 2008 Well it's late January, the Packers lost (we didn't see that coming) so the next natural thing to do is go to the Fox Cities Parade of Homes. Emily and I went last Saturday to check out all the cool homes. This year there seemed to be more homes that are larger in size compared to previous years. Of course we really only went to the big ones, but then again we do that every year. Check out my photo gallery for some pictures.

Unlike previous years Emily and I are actually thinking of purchasing a home this year or next year. We'll most likely live in Oshkosh, and hopefully on the western side of town. All signs seem to point to buying a home this year with the real estate industry being the way it is as if Xenu were telling us to buy a home. (I'm not a Scientologist, I just find it extremely funny).

So what else is new? Lately I have been listening to Pulley non-stop. I'd like to get my hands on one of their cds but they're hard to find. I've also went ahead and created a new section of my website called Geek Speak for all three nerdy readers of my website. The point was to separate the family and friends from the tech people since I don't want to blog both in the same place. If you're into tech stuff more, add that to your rss feed reader rather than my normal blog. The section is basically a fork of my blog system, so if you find any errors in it, it's my bad coding.

At work we're redesigning a website, which I'm excited about. Even though it will be a lot of work, it's nice to clean up and fix a very disorganized web site. Ironically I felt I had the Lakeland website almost to that point but, of course I'm onto other crazy sites.

Also Emily and I are 95% sure we are going to San Francisco this May (during memorial day week). Here's a list of some of the things we are going to do/visit:

• Painted Ladies
• Chinatown
• Transamerica Pyramid
• Lombard Street
• Coit Tower
• Golden Gate Bridge
• Golden Gate Park
• Segway Guided Tour
• Napa Valley
• Trolly
• Ocean (Sunset)
• Alcatraz
• Computer History Museum
• Silicon Valley

If you've played any videogames in your life (i.e Grand Theft Auto, almost all these places should look familiar) Well that's about all for now. ....View Comments [0]

Jan 18

A new blog post due to demand . As you can tell I made it back from Chicago ok. Overall it was a great trip. Life is going good right now, I mean the Packers beat the Seahawks and the Giants beat Dallas. What more could you ask for? Well I guess you could ask for the Packers going to the Super Bowl and Winning it - lets just make it there first.

As of late I've been receiving a lot more visits to my website. I suspect this is due to the fact that I posted a few links to my site on some more popular web design websites. This has kind of opened my eyes to posting relevant links to my site more often. I always add my home page to these sites when I'm replying to a comment on them, but posting a link internally that is related to the topic seems to draw more visits than normal.

The problem with this is I don't have a lot of relevant "web stuff" on my site. Because of this I am considering creating a new section on my site, very similar to my blog, that focuses only on web related stuff. I subscribed to many rss feeds of other renowned web designers and I would someday like to be renowned myself. This requires getting people to sign up for my blog rss feed (which I recently added more features to).

At the same token I don't want to alienate my current site users (mainly family and friends) so I will keep my blog as is and in the current format. Stay tuned for this new feature, which shouldn't take long to create.

In other news, tonight Emily and I discussed taking a vacation this year. It is mostly because of me since I've been pushing for it so hard. I've always wanted to go out west. There are three areas of interest to me:

• San Francisco & Northern California
• Seattle, Washington
• Utah & Northern Arizona.

At some point in my life I would like to visit these three locations for various reasons, most dealing with corporations and national parks. It seems that San Francisco has, per square mile, the most interesting things to see of the three. Emily and I are considering taking a week long vacation there sometime early this summer. I think that would be fun and give us something to look forward to for this year. Anybody else have any cool destinations they would like to go to?

Work is going good lately. I've been doing a bit more web design lately and that it what I am happiest doing. In a week or so I'll throw a link up with some results for that. Also my good friend Jason Irish who was the former webmaster at Lakeland College and is the guy I replaced, has come back to Lakeland and taking over my old job. I think he is the best guy for the job, and it makes me feel a bit better (having left there) knowing that he is taking it over. Jason has been picking my brain a bit to catch up on a few of the changes I made while I was there.

Well, that's all I got for you for now...Go Packers! ....View Comments [6]

Jan 10

Now blogging from Chicago Illinois. Right now I'm in a hotel in Chicago on business for work. It was quite a journey down here. I managed to make the trip without making a single wrong turn. I had some free time tonight so I decided to walk around the downtown area a bit. The weather wasn't really the type that would make you want to walk around but I did it regardless since I probably won't be in Chicago for a long time. My first visit was a few blocks over to the Sears Tower. Check out my photo gallery to see some pictures of it and some pictures from the top of it. The trip would have been more fun with another person but I had fun by myself regardless.

I spent about a hour at the Sears Tower and after that I wondered around a bit more past my hotel. Then it started raining a lot harder so I decided to go back to my hotel. Chicago really is like another universe compared to the places I'm used to (like Appleton, or Oshkosh). Downtown there are thousands of people walking around in a big hurry. Most people seem sort of unfriendly. You can occasionally see a homeless person which is weird, considering their surrounded by rich people in pea coats.

I would have been nicer to have an extra day or two to visit all the things there are to visit around the city but that will just have to be another vacation. Well I'm about out of things to talk about. ....View Comments [0]