I’ve been up all night getting the new theme going and having occassional errors to hammer out. I got the Archives page worked out and I noticed that the first post for this blog was in January 2002. This blog is five years old. Suck it MySpace!

I tried working with Geeklog but never got it going, so I ended up with PHPNuke. I stuck with that until some bastard script kiddie from Brazil vandalized my site, then I started using b2. When development of b2 stopped, WordPress was the “official” successor, though I looked at some others as well. I even worked on my own CMS for awhile before I realized coding is a pain – I could only pound my head against the wall so many times before I decided to use what others created. Along the way I learned some PHP, HTML, CSS, and MySQL.

I’m kind of a slacker when it comes to updating the website. I updated it to WordPress 2.0.5 today, then when I logged in to the Admin panel, I saw they released 2.0.6 earlier today. It must have been a few hours after I downloaded 2.0.5.

I’m also testing out a new – customized – theme for the website, so I’m using this blockquote section to see what that will look like.

I also have a new gallery, though it only has a couple of images in it at the moment. I’m using ZenPhoto since it’s clean, lean, and is supposed to integrate well with WordPress.

If you want to check out the theme I’m working on, select Coffee Candy from the Theme Switcher. Once I have the theme the way I want it, I will probably make it the default.

I quit smoking (again) for the New Year, but it’s screwed up my sleeping schedule a bit. Although since my sleeping schedule has been pretty odd for the past year, it’s hard to tell. At any rate, I’m up late and surfing the web.

Over at the English language section of Asahi Shimbun, I saw an article on football. The headline was sort of confusing, but mentioned the Rice Bowl in a sports context, so I thought I would take a look. Imagine my surprise when I read the article and found out that not only do they have football in Japan, the Rice Bowl has been played annually since 1947, and since 1984 it has pitted the top college team against the top “X.League company team”, which I’m assuming is a pro-football team.

Imagine doing that here in the U.S. Granted, I’m not a big sports fan, so I probably wouldn’t care one way or another. But imagine the winner of the Super Bowl taking on the ranked college team (BCS is a joke anyway, since it’s not a true playoff IIRC). I would think the college team would lose, but there are some good football teams out there, so who knows.

I was surfing over at Slashdot today and noticed this post about compact fluorescent light bulbs. It’s kind of funny because I was thinking about blogging about them anyway.

I used to work at an environmental shop called the Daily Planet in Colorado Springs back in the early 1990′s. They’re no longer in business, but before they closed down, I bought a Siemens CFL for about $15. It’s a bit long compared to a normal light bulb, so it doesn’t fit in every lamp. Still, I have taken this light bulb with me pretty much everywhere I’ve lived since then and have used daily for hours on end. I figure it has to be at least 12 years old, which isn’t bad, especially when you consider it uses only a fraction of the electricity of an incandescent bulb.

A few years ago here in Indy, somebody left a floor lamp out near the dumpster. I looked at it and the only thing worng with it that I could see was that the bulb was broken and there was a bunch of jagged glass near the base of the bulb. I took it to my apartment and used some pliers to grab hold of what was left of the bulb and unscrewed it from the lamp. I put in a normal bulb and plugged it in, and it worked. It turned out it was a three-way lamp and the bulb I had in it was just a normal bulb. I went to the grocery store and looked at light bulbs and found they had three-way CFL bulbs. I think it was a GE. It’s been so long, I forgotten and the bulb doesn’t have any logos on it. Anyway, I bought it for around $15 and have used that a lot since.

The CFL in the floor lamp I have rigged to a timer. In the morning, it comes on about half-an-hour before I wake up and turns off sometime after I go to work. In the evening, it comes on around the time I get home from work and shuts off around 11:30. I set that as a sign I should go to bed, but I’m often up past that.

I have no complaints about the glow of the light. Both CFLs have a warm glow similar to incandescent bulbs. They both come on the instant I turn them on. Older CFLs apparently took a second or two to come on, but newer ones don’t have this problem. The only possible con I can think of is when the apartment is cool (i.e. in winter) and I turn on the light, each one will be sort of dim for several minutes until the bulb warms up. I think that probably has to do with the electronics, but once the bulbs warm up, there doesn’t appear to be a problem.

If you are in the market for some light bulbs, I recommend getting a CFL as a replacement. I think rather than changing all the bulbs out at once, it might be more economical to buy a CFL replacement once or twice a year until all the standard light bulbs are replaced.