England Pictures

Hello all –

The pictures from our England trip are now up at http://gallery.jawlz.com in the ‘trips’ section. Lauren’s also working on write-ups of the trip, which she’ll be posting at her blog, Anglophile in LAmebeliмебели пловдив in the coming days. I’ll see if I can’t get them reposted up here at jawlz.com as well.

I’ll also likely work on a writeup of the trip, which will hopefully be completed, and then optical communicationsfree video poker how to play backgammon no deposit bonus online casino 888 no download casino play roulette craps game black jack download american roulette play video poker baccarat free casino game no download online casino free money on line casino wagering roulette online online casino betting free online casino slots free craps лаптопbest casino roulette gambling internet casino gambling uk best casino online full pay video poker no deposit casino code best craps game black jack tournament best online casino site craps online game newest online casino free slots no download play blackjack online free dueces wild video poker black jack gambling online video poker game free casino cash no deposit video poker tutorial play free video poker how to win at black jack casino roulette casino guide how to win at roulette rules of craps casino game online real money backgammon baccarat casino online free video poker game play free video poker video poker odds video poker tournaments posted here for all to read.

In the mean time, enjoy the pictures!

Upstairs Balcony….

A few pictures of it with the shade cloth, new table, new chairs, plants, and new paintings.

Gallery

So, I haven’t been up to nothing after all. I’ve been working on a new online photo album for the past few weeks. Most of the time has been spent uploading pictures, though some time was also spent getting the album software up, picking the pictures to put into it, resizing them (all 1200 x 900, plus smaller versions) and doing a few touchups. Right now there are a little over 650 pictures up there.

I hope to have this updated in the coming weeks to work seemlessly with the blog part of this site, so that I can put album features into the blog posts, and blog features into the picture posts, and have a single logon for both the blog and the album. We’ll see how that goes.

In the mean time, the album is up here. I’ll also add a link in the ‘links’ list to the right.

The page layout and theme will probably be changing a bit too, as it’s very basic right now, but the bulk of the work in getting the basic setup and in uploading pictures is done, at least.

Enjoy!

Camping!

Lauren and I went camping this weekend in Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara. We met up with our friend Hovhannes, who we know from UCLA. A more detailed description of the weekend’s events to follow, BUT, for now, the pictures from the trip (un-photoshopped or correct or edited or etc) are up at a new jawlz.com test gallery, which you can get to by clicking here.

Right now the gallery is in its default mode after installation, so it’ll likely be changing and/or becoming more integrated with jawlz.com’s main site once I find a free weekend with which work on it. Once that happens, more pictures will be uploaded as well – I have about 8 gigs sitting on my computer, all neatly organized into folders for years, months, and activities during those years and months. Should I manage to get the gallery system to my liking, a bunch of that will be uploaded.

In the mean time, enjoy the pictures!

Seats…

Seats for the London Chargers/Saints Game are gotten. We’ll be at the little red dot in Block 118, row 19.

Wembley Stadium Seating Chart

London….

Leaving October 22nd. Returning November 1st.

Rough itinerary is:

Leave Oct. 22nd. Arrive Oct. 23rd
23rd through morning of 27th: London
27th-28th (one night): Oxford
28th-29th (one night): Gloucestershire and Bath
29th-1st (three nights): back in London
1st: Return to California

PLUS, I was selected in the NFL UK lottery to buy tickets to the game (so no scalping or expensive club seats will be needed); they go on sale on May 29th at 10:00 am, but I think that’s GMT, which means 2:00am for me. No sleep for me next week!

Seat Relocation

Old View:
Old View

New View:
New View

:D

AT&T U-Verse + repaired xbox 360 = vacation day

As several of you probably know, I’m dropping cable and trying out AT&T’s new Uverse, which is a fiber-to-the-node system (they run fiberoptics to a node on my street, and the subscribers have lines run from that node to their homes). I should be getting the same internet speed that I had with cable, but about twice as many high-def channels on TV (including the NFL Network; Time Warner’s takeover of Comcast in Los Angeles and subsequent dropping of the NFL Network right at the start of last year’s NFL season is what made me originally dislike Time Warner). All this is about $20 less per month than Time Warner was charging. Good deal.

It is being installed as we speak. Also, since I’m at home today, I was able to accept a UPS delivery of wine and a FedEx delivery of my repaired xbox 360. Just in time for a potential Rock Band party on Saturday. Hooray!

xbox 360, RROD.

:(

Now begins the 3-4 week waiting period during which I have no working xbox 360.

New project: Get xbox media center working on the old xbox, so videos and music can still be streamed from the computer!

Update on the Site Update!

Obviously, things look a bit different here than they used to! I just completed a major update of the software that runs behind this blog (I haven’t done this for something like a year, so it was pretty overdue). In the process, the way that Jawlz.com used to ‘look’ was temporarily lost. So, for the time being (possibly permanently, depending on how people like the new look of the site), this is how jawlz.com is going to be looking. I’m going to see if I can cut down on the number of months shown on the ‘archive’ section of the sidebar, as that looks overly long and cluttered to me.

In any case, the big update means 2 major things:

1) Less Spam. The spam blockers I’d been using had caught over 18,000 spam posts to the website and the minichat since I installed them, but more and more spam has been getting through lately. The spam blockers have now been updated to newer versions should be more effective.

This should *also* be the case for the minichat – I now have the ability to ban ip addresses from posting in the chatbox. Depending on how many or how few ip addresses are sending the spam, this could prove to be a complete, be-all and end-all solution to the spam problem there. This will probably be a 2-3 week process, however, as I’ll be adding the spammers’ ip addresses to the ‘blocked’ list when they do get spam through.

2) A brand new Jawlz.com forum system. This one is more similar to the original Jawlz.com forums in the way it looks, but it is built into the actual blog itself, so you won’t need separate sets of user names and passwords. One works for all. The new forums are MUCH, MUCH more functional than the stopgap ‘integrated’ forums that have been pretty much unused since I replaced the original forums with them.

To get to them, click on the “Jawlz.com Forums” link at the top of the page.

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And…. that’s it for now. Feel free to let me know what you think!