Neal Grosskopf Dot Com A NG Designs Site

Well it's Halloween time once again. I've always enjoyed this time of the year because of all the great movies that are on TV, half which I already own, but like most people I watch them on TV for some reason.

Last weekend was our annual Terror on the Fox get together. Tyler and some of his friends came along. Overall it was a fun time although it seems to get more and more expensive each year. This year they had a ticket for $32 that allowed you to skip the whole line and go to the haunted house right away. The funny thing is the haunted house only takes about 15 minutes to get through. We opted for the $14 wait in line ticket which consists of standing in line for about an hour or hour and a half. I figure if you calculate the amount of time you get to spend with your friends the waiting in line ticket is a better value.

The night before Terror on the Fox, Tyler and I went to see Saw V in the theaters. For the past 5 years there has been a new Saw movie release each Halloween. At this point in the series the plot is inheritably getting harder to make sense of because of all the events that have unfolded in the prior 4 movies. Regardless I'll still go and see any future releases of the series. Look to my reviews section for a review of the movie soon.

Also, an update on my site statistics. Since October 9th, I've seen almost 10,000 visits on my site! I've also fell in love with web analytics again since I'm in the beta group for Google Analytics. The new version allows me to segment all my statistics whether it's by browser version, keyword searched, referring site etc. It's really awesome and brings a new level to "stalking my website visitors".

Well that's about all for now.

Completely ignoring the fact that I went on vacation and I am home, I going to blog about something completely different because it seems worth of talking about than going all the way to Florida for the first time.

I was nonchalantly checking my Google Analytics reports today to see how I faired while I was out Wednesday through Saturday. At first I thought there was something wrong, See below:

It almost seemed like GA lost all my prior analytics history up until a few days ago. Upon closer investigation I found out that I was linked to from one of the premier CSS Gallery websites: CSS Beauty. So there sits my CSS Browser Hacks article on the home page of CSS Beauty, how exciting! Judging by other articles on there, my link should sit there for a couple of weeks which means I should receive a fair deal of exposure over the next couple weeks.

In two full days my website has seen 2,703 visits and 3,815 page views which is close to what I have been getting in a full month. I was also featured on the home page of delicious for a brief period of time it appears because I've experienced a great deal of inbound links from the home page of delicious.com. I've since been demoted to the CSS category page and a couple other category pages.

Because I was featured on such a great site, I've also seen inbound links from all other sources. Currently subtracting traffic from search, I have 222 distinct inbound links to my CSS browser hacks page in the last 2 days. Probably the only unfortunate thing about this is my link was posted on a Friday which is usually the least trafficked day of the week for websites, so I'm curious if I will get more traffic on Monday, which is one of the more popular days of the week or if it will start to go down again.

On a side note, I'm extremely surprised my website was even able to stay up during these events since it runs off of a puny Microsoft Access database, so if Monday's traffic trends up higher my site might just go down completely.

Well that's all for now. I will post another blog Monday or Tuesday night regarding my trip to Florida. Peace.

Well not a great deal of news to report lately. I bought a new video game called SPORE. It is from the creators of The Sims and Sim City. The game is actually quite a bit of fun despite all the bad reviews it is getting from computer nerds due to the software piracy features the game has. If people could look past that they would see that it's a lot of fun.

I haven't made many updates on my website lately because I've been busy developing two other sites. My site has been getting a lot of traffic still despite the lack of updates I have been making to it. For September which isn't over yet, I've already received more than 2,000 visits to my site which averages over 80 visits per day. Not too shabby eh?

For all those wondering how our dog Blondie is doing; she is doing just fine now. We took her to the vet the other day to get some more vaccinations so hopefully she should be better from now on.

Also my trip to Fort Lauderdale is coming up soon. I would be more excited but it probably won't be that exciting. Our stupid laptop died the other day. When I press the power button all I get is a flashing red light on the console and it doesn't turn on. I've tried hooking it up to the outlet with and without the battery and it still doesn't turn on. I would be easier to troubleshoot it but I don't have any extra batteries or power cables laying around. I wouldn't care that the laptop is dead so much, but I wanted to bring that with me when I traveled so I would have something to do other than sitting in my hotel room, alone, watching cable TV.

Fin

Last night our dog started barking like crazy around 2 a.m. I did the usual and took her out to the bathroom. After putting her back in her cage she continued to bark. I tried calming her down and finally couldn't take it and moved her to the main floor. After awhile of her barking a lot there, I resorted to putting her in the garage in her kennel. At that point I couldn't here her barking anymore (it had been over an hour of this at 2-3 a.m. in the morning).

About an hour later I came back down to check on her, only to find she had puked and pooped in her small kennel. I took her out of her cage and let her roam the garage and in a few minutes she pooped in the garage as well. By now she had been acting really strange, and all disorientated. I went back to bed with an hour to go before waking up for work.

During our usual morning routine she ended up pooping blood on the bathroom floor. Emily ended up taking her to the vet and the vet suspected it was the Parvo Virus, which is a virus that kills roughly 90% of puppies that become infected and are not treated and about 80% of puppies infected at all. The symptoms continued for most of the day and she has been acting more normal again but still hasn't been acting the same. To top all of that off, she swallowed half of a small bone tonight as I had her out going to the bathroom.

The vet did call back today telling us that the test results for Parvo were negative, meaning according to the test, she isn't infected but there is the possibility of the test being wrong since she could be in the early stages still.

Parvo sounds like a really nasty virus, almost the AIDS of animals if you will, with such a high mortality rate, so our dog could potentially die this month. Dogs that are infected with it can be hospitalized for 2-4 days hooked up to an I.V. and all sorts of other equipment but at the same time, that could cost $1000+ (probably much more).

I guess as I disliked taking care of the dog when it wasn't sick and all the stuff it destroyed, but I still feel bad now that it is sick and I don't want it to die.

I'll post a reply to this blog tomorrow if she has improved at all. We're going to take her back to the vet tomorrow if she hasn't improved. Hopefully poor Bondie gets bette : (

I just booked plane tickets to Fort Lauderdale, Florida today and I'm being sent there for a conference for work on October 8th - 10th. This will be my first time navigating airports on my own and flying on a plane on my own. The only other time I've done the whole "airline thing" was when my parents and I went to Mexico when I was younger. It will definitely be an adventure much like going to Chicago was earlier this year.

One of the cool things about going to Florida is the location. The hotel I'm staying at is right on the beach, and I could have swore I've drove by my hotel in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City or at least something very similar to it. I've posted a few links below for all to see my exact location. The street view one gives a really interesting picture of the place:

• Street View
• Map View
• Satellite View

Despite the scenery there are a few drawbacks to this trip:

1. I'm going alone, without Emily and I've learned from my Chicago trip that traveling alone is boring and lonely. It would be fun to go with Emily.
2. I'm going to a location that has an active hurricane season during October and I'm 100 yards from the ocean.
3. According to Wikipedia Fort Lauderdale has the second highest AIDS rate in America.
4. According to Wikipedia Fort Lauderdale was voted "America's top gay resort area"...lol.

Okay, call me closed minded, or whatever you want, but at the end of the day, I'm still a gun toting redneck hillbilly from Wisconsin so I'm allowed to find 3 & 4 somewhat amusing. Personally #2 worries me the most since there seems to be an endless stream of hurricanes in the past few years and I'm yards away from the ocean. On the other hand I should be able to snap a few nice photos of the sun rising over the ocean (blasted west coast and their ability to take sunset photos rather than sunrise). Despite some of the negative things I'm still excited to go!

In other news my website was rocking and rolling yesterday. I reached a new high for visits in one day with 184 visits mainly because I was linked to from a German web designer on an article I wrote called CSS Hacks. I haven't even bothered writing any new tech articles lately because the CSS Hacks article has really been bringing in the traffic.

In site news I've updated my wallpapers page because it was taking forever to load. I was at a family friends house this weekend and took some really awesome photos so make sure you click through that section of my website.

In house/puppy/etc. news unpacking is pretty close to finished. I still don't completely feel like I live here though. Our puppy Blondie is also doing a wonderful job at destroying things in our house. Since we got her I've felt a bit more stressed out than normal partially because of all her accidents and having to wake up numerous times to take her out and it has caused some tension between Emily and I.

Also Emily and I bought a cheap desk to use for a computer in our upstairs living room only to find out once we had it assembled and everything that my stupid secondary computer is dead. The darn thing won't even power on! I've tried different power supplies on it and I've checked all the cables to make sure they're in all the way. My conclusion is that the motherboard is dead which sucks because it's probably not worth replacing a motherboard on a 2 year old $200 eMachine. I currently have my junker 7 year old Gateway standing in for the eMachine but it won't be the same. So much for the computer desk...

Fin.