We weighed the anvil on the bathroom scale to find out that it weighed 195 pounds. We thought that 1-2-27 stamped on the side was the date it was made, but that turns out to be the weight in hundredweight notation. Inputting the numbers into an Internet calculator confirmed that the anvil was 195 pounds. More research suggested that this was a "London-patterned" anvil made by Peter Wright between the 1860s and 1920s, often used as ballast in sailing ships when being delivered to the United States. Dad found it in a blacksmith shop on an old farm in Boise, Idaho, in the late 1950s.  It's at least 100 years old since it was on the farm for 50 years and he had it for 50 years after that. An anvil collector would pay anywhere from $400 USD to $1,000 USD.

When I was a little child, I sat on the anvil one night to watch Dad work around the garage. I was rocking back and forth when I fell off backwards. The back of my head stuck the lawnmower blade, leaving an inch-long scar that I didn't know about until I got a crew cut as teenager, and I blacked out. The next thing I remembered was waking up in the truck with my parents as  pulled up to the hospital. Then I blacked out for good when I was put on the operating table and a gas mask was put over my face. I woke up in a recovery room that had six tables. The only other patient was a Hell's Angels biker with a broken arm and stitches for multiple knife wounds who was handcuffed to the table. That was the beginning of a very interesting childhood for me.

Ever since then I wanted to have that anvil, which was customary handed down from father to son through the ages. Dad knows I want the anvil but he haven't given it to me yet and keeps mentioning that he wants to sell it. I think he fears that I'll stop visiting him if I took the anvil home. Not true but I'm not pressing him for it. I did made it very clear that the anvil was the only possession that I wanted from him if he kicks the bucket. My brother can have everything else. Knowing my luck, I'll have to pry the anvil out of his dead hands when the time comes.

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One of my all time favorite Christmas songs is "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer" by Dr. Elmo that came out in the early 1980's, which became popular on the country radio stations before breaking out into the mainstream.

My mother hated that song because she believed that everyone thought the song was about her.  We told her that wasn't true.  If the song was about grandma drinking too much beer, that would've been a different story.  Rarely did my mother drink the eggnog that was spiked with either brandy or rum.  Merry Christmas!

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The redesign of my business website was released on Black Friday.  The content that used to be on that website was moved to my author website for a shorter domain name, leaving an empty, neglected shell. Which was fine since I had no traffic for that website to care about.  For this website and the author website, the business website was a link in the copyright notice.  But the redesign had a significant impact for this website, which has always been an unholy mess since I started working with HTML in 1997.

First, a portfolio showcase for my brilliant game designing talent that went nowhere when I worked in the video game industry.  Second, an extended programming project when I took programming classes at San Jose City College from 2002 to 2007.  Third, a personal blog when I switched to the Joomla! 1.5 CMS in January 2008.  I have only one-third of the content from my legacy website converted over.  (A task that I hope to finish one of these days.)  When I developed my Show Twitpic module for Joomla, download and forum components were added.  If that wasn't bad enough, I've done some things wrong in setting up and maintaining Joomla for the long haul.

Nice mess, eh?

With my business website having no significant content, I did a clean installation of Joomla and selected the Demi template from PraiseJoomla to rebuild from the ground up.  Although none of my websites has a webcomic, the information on Webcomics was quite useful.  Especially the articles on tweaking an existing webcomic website for presenting a clean user interface.

The first half of this redesign was creating a generic business website presentation with graphic buttons and RSS feeds for the other websites, an about page, and a contact page.  The second half was removing the download and forum components for my Show Twitpic module from this website to add significant content to my business website.

The Show Twitpic module is still the only one available on the Joomla! Extension Directory to display pictures from Twipic.  My approach to software design is to develop something that everyone is not doing to create something unique.  While everyone is programming to display pictures from Flickr (which is easy to do), I made one for Twitpic (which is harder to do).  When I finished adding some significant new features in next month's update, I'm planning to branch out by creating a similar modules for Twitgoo and yFrog (which are both harder to do than Twitpic).  I'm also considering doing a component version to display pictures on a page rather than a box.

The biggest advantage of the redesign is figuring out the demographics for the blog and software.  I had known for a long time that I had a significant international audience for this website.   I couldn't tell for what exactly from the server log breakdowns presented in the website back end.

As a writer, a few of my recent acceptances had came from Canada and Great Britain.  Some American writers find more success internationally than they do at home.  If I have a significant number of international readers for my blog, I need to be more aggressive in submitting my works internationally.

As a programmer, I had to fixed bugs related to the presence of international characters in the Twitpic RSS feed.  If I have a significant number of international users for my software, I will need to figure out the localization issues that I been putting off since I have no clue if a foreign language is being presented correctly or not if they're using a non-Latin alphabet.

I also created a separate Twitter account for the business website (cdrassoc) to separate traffic from the shared blog/writer websites (cdreimer).  HootSuite allows me to figure out the demographics from the URLs in my Twitter postings that drive traffic to my websites.

This website is long overdue for a redesign.  Something I'll be thinking about very hard next month before I do anything.  Unlike my author and business websites, I got significant content to take into consideration.  I also need to finish converting the legacy content as well.  If I decide to go ahead with the redesign, New Year's weekend is probably when I'll shut the website down, tear everything down and put it back together like Frankenstein's monster.

Assuming, of course, I don't put it off for another year.

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When I took the week off between Christmas and New Year's, I expected to use the free time to go on a creative binge of writing, painting, drawing, and perhaps some programming. Didn't happen. Christmas shopping—better late than never—took up a whole day. My Dad spent three days snoring away in my green chair when we weren't visiting family in Gilroy for Christmas Eve and Morgan Hill for Christmas Day. My six-month-old great-nephew made off like a bandit when he got 40 Christmas presents that took three hours to unwrap, overwhelming his parents by the generosity of family and friends. A somewhat gloomy Christmas as most of my family are unemployed and/or concern about losing their homes because of the subprime mess. A friend and I saw a couple of movies (Sweeney Todd and Alien Vs. Predator Requiem), went shopping for a new hard drive for his system and installed Windows XP (which isn't on my top ten list of fun things to do during the holidays). I went to the DMV to take my driving test to get my driver's license for the first time. (No, I didn't grow up on the East Coast.) When most of the week came and went, I had to face the consequences of being a very creative person this past year.

Clutter. Lots and lots of clutter. Not just ordinary clutter—artistic clutter.

When you're a writer, you need a place for your manual typewriter (yes, I'm ancient), laptop, laser printer, and the creative output of drafts, revisions and letters. When you paint or draw, you need a place for your brushes, paints, pens, and the creative output of canvases, panels, tablets and sheets. When you're a programmer, you need a place to stack all those doorstoppers—programming books—that you keep promising not to buy another one until you read the last dozen or so. (This also applies to a backlog of fiction and non-fiction books that I haven't read yet.) When you take several semesters of an all day Saturday class in ceramics, you bring home lots of small pieces and several big pieces weighing 25 pounds each, left over clay, and a clay-crusted toolbox.

I spent New Year's Day going through the clutter scattered in my apartment. I got a four-drawer commercial filing cabinet to toss paperwork into. Re-arranged my desk, table and computers with all that cabling into a more functional layout. Cleared out space in my closet to store blank paper and canvases. Straighten out my shelves so I can store the small ceramics with the books, and cleared some floor space for the larger ceramic pieces. Put all my painting supplies on the top of the book shelves. Everything else I didn't need got tossed out into the recycling dumpster. I went from clutter to organized clutter. It'll probably take me the rest of the year to re-organize the organized clutter into something less than clutter. Since then I been pretty good about keeping the clutter organized and my living space tidy.

The most important area today is my writing table. I replaced the manual typewriter (piece of junk) with an electronic typewriter (very nice). Organized my working folders to be underneath the table, and everything else went into the filing cabinet. The clutter that normally drifts over from the kitchen table either stays there or goes into the recycling bin. Writing is becoming a second full time job when I'm not working at a help desk to fix broken users and consoling hurt computers. I got 16 short stories circulating for publication, editing a short story and a novella, more ideas in the pipeline, and my first novel that I'm planning to write from April's Fools Day to New Year's Eve. This year should be the year that I get published and start my five year journey into becoming a full time writer.

Website Updates: When I get the clutter on my hard drive organized, I'll start updating the website. Since this is the tenth year of my website, I should probably get that straighten out soon so I can have a tenth anniversary redesign. I'll probably be blogging a bit more since this is a platform to show off my amazing writing talents.

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This past Black Friday was a Wii-less one.  Granted that I initially went into work to find out that I wasn't needed after, and my friend and I didn't start prowling the stores until noon.  If any Nintendo Wii consoles were available, they were long gone after 5:00AM.

First stop was Circuit City where we picked up "From The Earth to The Moon" DVD box set for $15 USD (normally $60 USD).  No Wii was to be found there.  We told one guy in line that we were searching for the mythical Wii-beast, and he mentioned that he got his months ago — through a friend at EA.  Uh, huh.  When I was a lead tester at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, two different owners, multiple identity crisises), I won a Playstation 2 shortly after they came out at the company Christmas party, and sold that to a friend unopened for $200 USD since she wanted one really bad.  I didn't want one since I was the Nintendo guru at the time.  That's how video game company connections usually work.

The parking lot at Fry's Electronics in San Jose was more interesting with three idiots for every open parking spot in front, and no one trying to park out in back.  Go figure.  Inside we were greeted with with a sign in the video game department: "Wii Sold Out" We didn't buy anything since the line to the cash register was two hours long.  The sign at Best Buy at Santana Row wasn't any better: "Wii No Longer Available" The mythical Wii-beast of Black Friday eluded us among the many boxes of the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 that no one seem to want.

I would like to buy a Wii on Amazon so I can get triple points on my Amazon credit card, where 2,500 points will get me a $25 gift certificate for Amazon.  (Most of my book and video game shopping is done through Amazon, so a $25 gift certificate every now and then is a sweet moment to buy an overpriced tech book.)  I been checking their site frequently during the holiday weekend to see if the Wii was available.  I'd heard rumors that were available in small lots that quickly disappeared if you weren't looking at the right time.  Still no luck there.  I don't need a Wii badly enough that I'll pay $600 USD to a third-party seller.

Since I told all my relatives that I was looking for a Wii, maybe the mythical Wii-beast will make an appearance for Christmas.

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