I went to write the update today and I noticed that we had half of December still kicking around on the main page here and it had already been in the archives as well. So I got rid of that so the page takes a little less time to load now. Somebody should have told me, I meant to do that a long time ago. I moved early January while I was at it to clean things up a little. Boy do we have a ton of stuff in the archives. It must take people hours who are reading through that stuff.
Nate called this morning and woke me up with the news that the NASA Space Shuttle Columbia burned up on re-entry over Dallas, Texas. I was five when the Columbia first went into service in 1981 and I remember getting up really early before kindergarten to watch the first shuttle lunch on the news. It was very special to me as a small child. That was the beginning of the new era for the US in Space. Prior to the shuttles, we had done very little since the Apollo missions and space exploration had not been very exciting since the moon missions of the late 1960’s. The Columbia has always been something special to me – and now it and its crew are gone.
Josh and Joanna are still here this morning. We watched the news for about an hour this morning before showering and heading out to Stella’s for some brunch. We had a good time at Stella’s, the food is always incredible, but Josh wasn’t feeling very well so we ended up coming back to the house instead of going out wine tasting. Josh took a nap for a couple of hours and then he and Joanna headed back to Rochester. At least we think that we managed to get Josh’s computer fixed before he left. Hopefully he will be able to use it now for the games that he bought it for.
I spent most of the evening working on teaching myself PHP and MySQL. I have been learning quite a bit and my Multimedia DataBase (i.e. movie and CD listings) is coming along really well and I hope to have it fully online very soon. It is online right now but it is still in the test stages so I am not releasing the address for it yet. Maybe in a week or so, I will have it done enough for you to check out. I am very proud of the work that I have been doing, I have been learning tons about making web based applications.
Loopy is still out of work but is hopefully about a position in Rochester. He has been putting in tons of work on a couple of video game projects. He has gotten an amazing amount of work done (since he rarely has to leave the house) and has been learning tons and tons about how to program video games. His main project right now is making a Metroid clone for the Game Boy Advance. He has already written a game for the Game Boy Color.