The past two weeks have been crazy for me. A little while ago I applied at Alliance Laundry Systems through Career Builder. I wasn't sure what would come of it since I usually apply for 2-3 jobs at a time. To my surprise they called me right away to set up an interview. Since I already had the Friday off of work I scheduled it for that day in Ripon, WI. Emily had an interview as well that day in Appleton ironically. The interview went well and it seemed like a job I would do good at. That next Monday they offered me the job substantially better in pay and benefits that I have at Lakeland. So I took it!
While I love my job at Lakeland it would have taken me many more years living in Sheboygan to be where I'm at, at Alliance. I'm really excited about the job change. My official title will be Web Designer and I'll work as a part of a 4 person team (something else I enjoy a lot more than sitting alone all day). The nice thing with working in a team is there are other people who you can talk to about web design and development. When you live and breath web sites you enjoy talking geek with other web people.
So naturally the next step was to find an apartment near Ripon. Emily and I quickly started looking online for apartments in Oshkosh. Ripon is about an hour from New London and the whole point of this change was to live closer to our families so we decided that Oshkosh was a good place to live. We looked at probably 5-6 apartments. One we liked a lot but it was $200 more than we wanted to spend. Another was pretty decent but the manager didn't show us the exact style of apartment we were to live it so that didn't help. Then, our last apartment we looked at on the south side of Oshkosh which is called Lakeview Estates looked really nice. The manager showed us a really great apartment first and as we were signing the lease she realized it was taken. Regardless the other apartment we saw is almost exactly like our current apartment but bigger. Check out my photo gallery for pictures and layout of the new apartment.
So we signed the lease for the apartment and will be moving in Sunday, November 18th. Emily and I have off work for Thanksgiving week so we will be unpacking that entire week and getting settled in.
Basically the job change and move are a win-win situation. We now live an hour and 15 minutes closer to our families and friends yet we're still about 40 minutes away which gives us some breathing room, and I'll be making more a year.
As far as my website goes, most the of the web stuff I have been doing lately is related to jobs stuff. For instance I created an extended version of my resume in an html format. Also the other night I was bored and wanted to create a timeline of my work history as a web page so I came up with this dorky timeline. ...View Comments (0)
Hey there, this site is pretty old now. I've decided to leave it up as I put a lot of work into it and would hate to see it disappear.
Blog
Oct 23
Long time no blog...ok so I'm finally getting around to writing something new. I am sort of looking forward to this weekend since it is the first weekend I have been back to New London since Kate's
wedding which was in early August. That should be an good time. We are going back for our nephews birthday party (just a reminder to everyone who I have denied coming home for, yeah a 2 year old is more important that you are) well in all honestly it's no longer just my decision to go home but Emily's as well and she can yell louder than me so often times the choice goes to her. lol.
So what the heck have I been up to lately. Well I have been in hardcore web design mode lately. Check out my designs site to see some new sites on there. There is also a 3rd website I am working on and almost have a design done for and a 4th website that I haven't started designing yet. I have found a sudden spark of creativity which I desperately needed.
I have also been playing a lot of Unreal Tournament 2004 (onslaught in particular) This is a game that I typically play with friends and lasts roughly 3-7 hours. The game is fun alone but is much more fun with friends. While I was playing I was getting sick of some of the vehicles in the game so started figuring out how to edit the maps and place the vehicles that I want in the maps. This has been fun and challenging at the same time since the editor is really hard to use and is really meant for profesional game designers. Regardless I have been able to make some minor tweaks to my favorite levels that makes it much more fun to play.
Also it is Halloween time which is cool because a lot of good movies (that are edited) are on TV. I always have to laugh at myself because I will always watch movies on TV that I already own. It's silly on my part because I can watch them whenever I want and un-edited and without commercials yet I opt to watch them on TV. Does anybody else do this? There's just something about a movie being on TV that makes it feel like it's more important to watch than just watching your own copy. Also there are several good movies in the theaters or coming out on DVD that I would like to see. Saw IV is coming out in theaters. I am a bit skeptical on how good this will be since most of the main characters have been killed off already. Also there is a remake of Halloween which I would like to see, and I just recently saw 28 weeks later which wasn't too bad. Also there is a new zombie movie called Flight of the Living Dead which could potentially be good (I mean come on, all zombie movies are good people!) Well I'm rambling on enough, happy Halloween!...View Comments (1)
So what the heck have I been up to lately. Well I have been in hardcore web design mode lately. Check out my designs site to see some new sites on there. There is also a 3rd website I am working on and almost have a design done for and a 4th website that I haven't started designing yet. I have found a sudden spark of creativity which I desperately needed.
I have also been playing a lot of Unreal Tournament 2004 (onslaught in particular) This is a game that I typically play with friends and lasts roughly 3-7 hours. The game is fun alone but is much more fun with friends. While I was playing I was getting sick of some of the vehicles in the game so started figuring out how to edit the maps and place the vehicles that I want in the maps. This has been fun and challenging at the same time since the editor is really hard to use and is really meant for profesional game designers. Regardless I have been able to make some minor tweaks to my favorite levels that makes it much more fun to play.
Also it is Halloween time which is cool because a lot of good movies (that are edited) are on TV. I always have to laugh at myself because I will always watch movies on TV that I already own. It's silly on my part because I can watch them whenever I want and un-edited and without commercials yet I opt to watch them on TV. Does anybody else do this? There's just something about a movie being on TV that makes it feel like it's more important to watch than just watching your own copy. Also there are several good movies in the theaters or coming out on DVD that I would like to see. Saw IV is coming out in theaters. I am a bit skeptical on how good this will be since most of the main characters have been killed off already. Also there is a remake of Halloween which I would like to see, and I just recently saw 28 weeks later which wasn't too bad. Also there is a new zombie movie called Flight of the Living Dead which could potentially be good (I mean come on, all zombie movies are good people!) Well I'm rambling on enough, happy Halloween!...View Comments (1)
Oct 06
Well the weekend is finally here. Hopefully everyone has some fun plans for this weekend and aren't too bored. For this weekend Emily's Mom & Grandparents are coming down to Sheboygan to visit. Not really sure what we are doing all day but that should be good for Emily since she hasn't seen her family since Kate's wedding, which is over two months now. Come to think of it I sort of miss my own family (And I thought I was independent). Life has been sort of the same ol' same ol' for the past few weeks. I wake up every day and go to work for 8 hours come home, do the same crap, and repeat again the next day. One sort of new thing in my life is Emily and I got a new Xbox 360 just in time for Halo 3. Make sure to check out my Halo Statistics on my website to see how well Emily and I are doing in ranked matches on Halo 3. Also check out an image of our new xbox in the photo gallery. I will probably do some sort of review of either the Xbox 360, Halo 3 or both in awhile.
Regarding new things on my website I am very, very happy to announce that anybody who has registered on my website can now add a picture to their profile. If you go to the message board and view some posts now you will notice images next to people's name on the left. I of course already have an image since I created the darn thing. People who haven't registered or haven't added an image will have an ugly default image (suckers). If you would like to do this here's how:
Regarding new things on my website I am very, very happy to announce that anybody who has registered on my website can now add a picture to their profile. If you go to the message board and view some posts now you will notice images next to people's name on the left. I of course already have an image since I created the darn thing. People who haven't registered or haven't added an image will have an ugly default image (suckers). If you would like to do this here's how:
- Click here if you are logged in
- Click here if you have registered an account already
- Click here if you don't have an account yet
Sep 22
Hi all! I've just made some sort of large changes to the template of my site so I figured I would write a blog about it.
I was getting sort of bored with how my site looked before so I figured I would try to make it look a bit better.
Hopefully any of you who visit my site will think the same. The two big changes I made were changing the background
image to a striped looking one and then making the header of my site taller to compensate for the background image.
I've also changed the drop shadow effect on my site so that it uses a transparent png file. The problem with doing this is that Internet Explorer 6 doesn't support transparent png files and the hacks to make it work don't allow a tile effect of it. What I had to do was create completely different images for those using IE6. What this means is any of you who are still using IE6 (Kate, Sarah, Chris etc.) will have to download a 56kb file for the background rather than a 1kb file for users of Firefox, IE7, Safari etc.
Otherwise it seems like a really nice day outside so that's all I have for now, don't want to waste too much more time on my computer today. Adios!...View Comments (1)
I've also changed the drop shadow effect on my site so that it uses a transparent png file. The problem with doing this is that Internet Explorer 6 doesn't support transparent png files and the hacks to make it work don't allow a tile effect of it. What I had to do was create completely different images for those using IE6. What this means is any of you who are still using IE6 (Kate, Sarah, Chris etc.) will have to download a 56kb file for the background rather than a 1kb file for users of Firefox, IE7, Safari etc.
Otherwise it seems like a really nice day outside so that's all I have for now, don't want to waste too much more time on my computer today. Adios!...View Comments (1)
Sep 17
I was checking my site statistics the other day and noticed that I have finally passed an entire year since keeping stats. I decided to put
together a quick summary of statistics for nealgrosskopf.com for an entire year.
This sums up an average user on my site:
- From America
- Uses Internet Explorer
- Uses 1024x768 Screen Resolution
- Uses Windows
- Usually only visits home page
Visits
4,759 Visits
12 Visits / Day
Top Day for Visits
Thursday, July 12, 2007 - 33 Visits
Pageviews
37,175 Pageviews
Top 10 Countries for Visits
- United States - 4,631
- Canada - 23
- Netherlands - 18
- Italy - 12
- Germany - 12
- Australia - 10
- United Kingdom - 7
- Uruguay - 3
- Sweden - 3
- India - 3
Top Day for Pageviews
Saturday, September 15, 2007 - 391 Views
Browsers
- Internet Explorer - 81.49%
- Firefox - 15.49%
- Safari - 1.34%
- Opera - 1.07%
- Mozilla Compatible Agent - 0.25%
- Konqueror - 0.13%
- SuperSpamBot++,gzip - 0.13%
- Netscape - 0.11%
Operating Systems
- Windows - 96.62%
- Macintosh - 2.96%
- Linux - 0.29%
- (not set) - 0.13%
Screen Resolutions
- 1024x768 - 81.80%
- 1280x768 - 6.70%
- 1280x1024 - 3.05%
- 800x600 - 2.96%
- 1280x800 - 2.67%
- 1440x900 - 0.78%
- 1152x864 - 0.44%
- 1680x1050 - 0.36%
- 1280x854 - 0.27%
- 1600x1200 - 0.23%
Top 10 Keywords Used to Come to my Site
- "neal grosskopf" - 131
- "emily noordmans" - 68
- neal grosskopf - 50
- nealgrosskopf.com - 38
- jack handy quotes - 32
- jack handey quotes - 20
- www.nealgrosskopf.com - 17
- nealgrosskopf - 14
- jack handey gold hammer - 5
- jack handey hammerdog - 5
Top 5 Pages
- Home Page - 13,121
- Message Board Home - 2,245
- Gallery Home - 769
- Reviews Home - 418
- Openlinks Home - 328