NealGrosskopf.com - Blog

Web Site Redesign Props

Neal Grosskopf — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:11:28 CST

Well it's been almost two weeks now since I redesigned my website. I must say that redesigning it has been a positive experience so far. My site traffic has increased 109% percent since the redesign thanks in part to several CSS design galleries picking up my website and posting it. I submitted my site to numerous gallery sites and almost gave up. Then last Sunday I submitted it to a few more and all of them added me on Monday. I'm so proud. I also smashed a new site visits record Monday hitting 150 visits in a single day! I followed that up yesterday with 107 visits which makes it the first time I've ever hit 100 visits two days in a row.

In house news, we have a home inspection set up for Saturday, June 28th. It sounds like our house wasn't flooded at all and survived the Oshkosh flood fine. Once we get the house inspected we will probably lock in a mortgage in early July. Then it's two more months until we move in officially! (Which is at the end of August). It's so exciting!

In work news I've been super busy. It's a good thing I got my website redesigned when I did because I have no more "mental bandwidth" when I get home (to quote Jason Irish). Most the things I am working on right now aren't going to end anytime soon so this will likely be a reoccurring theme throughout the summer for me.

Oshkosh Is Under Water

Neal Grosskopf — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:10:18 CST

What a day it was. At work we had to go down in our basement from 4:30 - 5:15 due to a tornado warning. There was hail and sideways rain. Then on the way home I could barely see anything.

Once in Oshkosh it got much worse. The entire stretch of South Park and 20th were flooded. Every intersection had at least a half a foot to a foot of water. My small cavalier was struggling to make it through it. See my photo gallery for a few photos of the chaos.

Once I arrived to 24th and Main (near Arty and Ed's) the water became too deep for my car and I had to back up. At this point I felt I might be stranded here because cars my size were literally stopped in the flooded water. After waiting there for 15 minutes I became restless and headed for higher grounds on Oregon Street to take the long route home. This road was ok but once again became flooded about a mile in.

On a good note I had one of my photos shown on WBAY Channel 2. On a bad note, I'm wondering if I'll be able to make it to work tomorrow of if work is even above water right now.

I Redesigned My Website!

Neal Grosskopf — Fri, 6 Jun 2008 23:18:21 CST

Well, It's official. I've launched my new website today. NealGrosskopf.com Version 3. I started my website back in October of 2005 basically as a means to test out new web design techniques and to become a better coder. Over those 3 years I've become a much better designer and coder. I'll have to give a big thanks to Jason and Chris for nudging me to create NealGrosskopf.com back then. I wouldn't be where I am right now if I hadn't created this website.

So why did I redesign? I was growing a bit tired of the old design and my biggest pet peeve was that I lazily coded it for HTML Transitional and not HTML Strict. (A relic from Version 1 which originally didn't have a DOCTYPE at all but I added one in half way as Transitional)

Another problem I had with my old site was the home page. It felt very long and cluttered with junk. With the new design I've hid most of that clutter in the new "Actions" flyout. Simply hover over the "Actions" link and you will see all of the family clutter from before.

The biggest thing with this redesign is usability. You will find little things here and there that I added because of usability. All the section now have links on the thread title (i.e the blog title is now clickable)

Also I've added a toolbar at the top of the site which really contains the same content as the right navigation. I believe that my toolbar is probably the only one of it's kind on the internet right now. I've been to all the trendy sites and I haven't seen a single one that uses a pop down as a toolbar. The pop down idea has already been done before but usually only for jump/skip links (which is useless if you ask me)

With a new site comes some drawbacks as well. My site requirements have increased a lot. I no longer support 800x600. I have put in some measures so it at least renders properly in 800x600 but you will get some nice horizontal scrollbars. Also the site will require a standards compliant browser. It will degrade gracefully in older browsers but you're basically going to need to be using IE7, Firefox 2, Opera 9 or Safari 3 on it. IE6 does work but there are a few bells and whistles that won't quite look the same. I also haven't tested it in IE6 since I completed the shell/template.

Also the site is a bit heavier than previous ones. This is due to me creating such a complex design but being limited to the current tools available to reach that design (CSS) The other reason is due to the large background image that I incorporated which is the heart and sole of the design.

If you like my new design there are a few inspirational websites I used as a baseline. I'll let you determine what sites those are...

There still are many things I need to do before I can call the redesign complete, but like the past redesigns, I got so anxious that I just threw it up tonight. If you run into any problems please let me know. There are bound to be a few 404 pages or 500 errors around.

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Redesign?

Neal Grosskopf — Sun, 8 May 2008 19:14:8 CST

Well, I suppose it's time for a new blog. After having another record setting month for my website in April (I hit 1,510 Visits & 3,785 Pageviews) I'm feeling a bit fatigued over the site. I've only checked my analytics a few times in May unlike April where I was checking it twice a day.

Nealgrosskopf.com version 2.x is already a year and a half old and I'm starting to feel inadequate with the design of my site. I'm also feeling ashamed that my site only validates for HTML Transitional...the mark of shame. In response to this I've started working on a new design for my site. It started with just messing around because I was bored. That changed when I took some totally awesome pictures at my Mom and Dad's house last weekend. A few pictures stood out as the best, especially this one. It's weird how I get stuck sometimes on designs unless I have a really nice image to get me going. Anyway's I sat down and created a design. I also put a lot of thought into each and every piece of the design. My current design, and specifically the home page feels a bit cluttered with too many links. I evaluated each link to see if it was necessary in the design.

One problem that I do see in the design (Chris) is that it will be larger site in file size. Some of the background wizardry stuff I'm doing is going to require non-tiled wallpaper like images. I'm considering creating a "lite version" of the design for users with dial-up (Chris) and giving them an option to always use the lite version. Either way If I finish the design, and decide to redesign it will be a long, long time before it goes live.

Okay, sorry for all you people who could care less about my website (Emily). Like I said before, last weekend I went back to New London for my Mom's birthday. It was a fun time. This weekend we're going back again for Mother's day. Emily will be spending it with her family, and me with my family (it works out that way sometimes). Also this month Emily and I have a week off of work during memorial day week. We were initially going to go to San Francisco, but after we quasi bought a house we decided we're probably better off saving our money. It feels like it's been forever since I've had time off. I guess I'm just getting tired of the same old, same old. Each day feels so much like the last, that I can remember in what order half of the oncoming cars I see on my way to work...is that weird? Lol I hope not.

Currently we're not sure what we should do for our week off. Here's a few things we debated:

Go to San Francisco anyway
Go to Minnesota to see Emily's family
Drive around Lake Michigan.
Go to Sheboygan for a few days.
Take it easy

I'm not sure what we're doing, give me some advice!

I've Finally Arrived...Again

Neal Grosskopf — Sun, 15 Apr 2008 18:42:39 CST

Well I suppose it's time for a new blog entry. Since my last post not a lot has changed. Right now we quasi own a house but we cannot land a mortgage for it until 45 days or less on the closing date. That puts us somewhere around July, so the waiting begins. Probably the worst part about that is who knows what could happen between now and then, either to Emily and I or the house. Either way if we had the house now, I suppose it would just happen to us when we're in the house rather than not so why am I stressing about that?

Emily and I have had a few weekend off now since our busy month of March where we went home every weekend. It is kind of nice to have some time off. Last weekend I feel in love with Sim City 4 again. It's such a great game. It also helps that I lost a lot of progress on several of my cities in transfer from one computer to the other so that means I have start them all over again. Yeah it's just an excuse to play, I know.

In site news...my website is freaking bumping! Ok enough with the ghetto slang, lets just say it's busy. Yesterday I got linked in from a Japanese web developer and landed 85 visits, and today I am already to 85 visits and the day isn't done. 85 is currently my record for most amount of visits in one day so I foresee my site breaking the record again today. I am very excited to become ulti-nerd-famous. What's cool about the linkin is if you look at the picture on the website, they actually took a screenshot of my CSS Diagnostics code and placed it in the article. My code is famous...sort of.

In other site news I created a bookmarket for my Open Links section. It works really slick too. It allows me to quickly add pages to Open Links without having to type an article title or description. Some sites still require typing it up, but it saves a lot of time on other sites.

Well that will about do it for this blog entry. Sorry it wasn't more exciting.

We Bought A House!

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 30 Mar 2008 15:56:38 CST

Last week Emily found found a house being foreclosed on that she liked. Then she found that exact style house being built so we started looking for similar houses. So I contacted a real estate agent that works with Emily's sister. We then checked out several houses in the Oshkosh area that were being sold. Many of them were within our price range but were a bit towards the "high end" of it. Unfortunately the houses we liked had offers on them that looked like there were going to go through. So our night of touring homes ending sort of on a bad note.

Then Emily checked the Valley By Owner website and we found a house that was less than many of the other houses we were looking at and had everything we wanted. For the most part our only criteria was that it had to be two-stories and it had to be on the west side of Oshkosh (technically the Town of Algoma, aka not the slums of "Sloshkosh".)

So we checked the house out and a few others but decided that it was really the best house. Click to view a satellite image of the house. Also check out my photo gallery for some specs on the house and numerous images of it. All but the first image were taken by the owner and that's the best quality that they are (which is pretty low quality) so it looks waaay cooler when you see it in person.

Friday night we decided to draw up an offer on the house and Saturday our realtor made the offer to owners. After a counter offer we accepted and officially are proud home owners!

Today with my parents & Emily's sister & family we toured the house and had all the papers signed. The current home owners are building a house a ways down the road and will probably move out around August of this year, which is good since we have a bit to go on our lease anyway's. Emily and I we're pre-approved for over the house's value but we still need to find a mortgage somewhere. US Bank seemed a bit higher than we planned on paying so we are going to shop around a bit and see if we can find a better deal. Any suggestions anyone?

I guess that pretty much sums up, a pretty incoherent blog entry, eh people? Lol. Just check out my photo gallery and comment!

Lots Of Work To Do

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 16 Mar 2008 18:51:48 CST

At Emily's request I am writing a new blog. I've sort of neglected my blog lately because I am focusing more on getting traffic to my website for my Geak Speak section. It's been a pretty successful campaign too. I've had 7/12 days in March with 40 or more visitors and one day with 85! It is pretty demanding to keep the traffic flowing though. This usually requires me to add links to my article on other websites. Usually after 2 days I rarely get visits from those sites so I need to add another article to keep the flow going.

In work news I have two days off this week and one day off next week. I'll probably spend those days doing web work regardless because I have several projects to do from Jason and possibly my own paying web project to do as well. At my day job I have been redesigning huebsch.com which is a really old site of ours that we haven't redesigned since 2001.

In family news Emily and I went to visit my parents and grand parents a few weeks ago and this weekend we went to see Emily's side. We went to the New London St. Patrick's Day Parade. Maybe it's just me but I think parades are boring, especially when it's still cold out. I recall going to a Christmas parade a few years ago when it wasn't much above zero degrees and thinking how dumb it is to have a parade during the winter season. Even despite the fact that it is cold, they still are sort of boring anyways. It's sort of like sitting out on main street and watching unusual traffic drive by.

Tomorrow my friend Mike is stopping over on his way home for spring break. He told us that he wants a beef roast and mashed potatoes (which is like a delicacy at our house) so I'm pretty excited to have a nice dinner when I get home. It's also a good excuse to clean our messing apartment which never seems to stay too clean.

In random news I decided to take my old computer and turn it into a streaming media server using Jinzora. I installed WAMP on it, created a dyndns account and also created a subdomain on my site to redirect to that dyndns domain. (Chris is there a way to point my 1and1 account directly to my home web server without using dyndns?) I'm currently copying all my music onto the web server so that I can listen to it while I'm at work. (only 23 more minutes to go!) I would also like to turn this web server into a testing site for nealgrosskopf.com so that I no longer have to test all my stuff out on my live site. The problem is I will need to figure out how to install IIS along side Apache, using Windows XP Home. I'll also need to make it an FTP server so that I can upload my files to it, test them out and then push them to my 1and1 space. Well that's about all for now, enjoy!

Oh also I forgot, Please go and vote on the poll that Emily posted. We are stuck trying to figure out whether we should save our money for a house later this year or spend some of it on a vacation to San Francisco in May or just do both. Feel free to leave a comment to this blog post explaining what you think we should do because we don't know anymore.

I've Finally Arrived

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 2 Mar 2008 20:56:59 CST

A little bit ago I posted an article in my geek speak section of my site titled CSS Diagnostics - Find Depreciated Elements Using CSS. I've seen very little written about it via a few quick web searches so it was something that I figured might peak other's interest. Boy was I right, according to my horrible inaccurate but useful "views counter" I'm already up to 300 views on the article. What's even cooler is another blogger gave me a nod in his latest entry titled "Really cool CSS diagnostics script." When I get mentioned in other people's blogs I feel like I've officially arrived.

It feels really good to get some attention for my CSS skills. Of all the various facets of web development and design, this is the specific area I've chosen to specialize in. My dream, is to one day become a famous blogger, speaker, writer, advocate for CSS, and to travel around the country giving speeches on it and writing books. Of course that is probably far fetched and I should just stick to my second dream of being the head of a web department consisting of 10 or more people and living in a parade of homes style house. For the time being I'll continue to push out new articles that hopefully are useful to people and write boring blogs for my family and friends to read.

In other news, this weekend Emily and I went back to New London. I haven't seen my parents since Christmas which feels like a horribly long time. My house is completely covered in snow, in fact probably the most snow I've ever seen there. Also Emily was sick last week and now I'm sick. I have a really bad cough and I sort of feel dizzy all the time. Not much fun.

This weekend my parents bought me an acoustic guitar for my birthday (which is coming up in March). Check out my wallpapers page for some close up shots of the new guitar. I've played it a bunch since I got it and it's nice to have during apartment living.

Well that's about all for now, hopefully I'll start feeling better.

Crazy Winter

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 16 Feb 2008 16:58:30 CST

Gez, this has been a really crazy winter hasn't it? Apparently in Madison they have already broken the record for most snow in a single season. Last week we got so much snow in Ripon that after work the snow plow decided to plow the streets right before we got out of work. What resulted was snow well over my tires and car door so I had to resort to digging my car out with a shovel I had in the trunk. I think in the process I managed to mess my back up so I'm sitting here today writing this with a hot pad on my back. I ended up sleeping on my back the entire night last night. (Yes I realize now that I am officially old just for the fact that I am even capable of sleeping on my back) It appears that more snow is on the way tomorrow and Monday so hopefully I won't have to dig myself out again

I other news, a site I was tasked with redesigning at work has finally gone live. Check out http://speedqueen.com/. It's not my favorite design I've ever done but it is cool to see something I created go up and it's valid html 4.01 strict! Come to think of it this is the first design I've done for an employer to go up. Before I left Lakeland I had been working on a redesign but it looks like Jason Irish will the one to accomplish that great task. It is sort of fun to work at a place where they have numerous web sites rather than just one. As a web designer it gives me that many more opportunities to do some design work. It seems that good design jobs are hard to come by now days too. I rarely see a worthy job posting of a design job in my Careerbuilder emails. It's almost always a job titled web designer yet they want you to code in PHP for nine hours a day or something like that. (hint hint Chris, you got the easy life in that respect)

Emily always wants me to mention her in my blog and I must admit that she gets neglected in that category. This weekend we are both bored and looking for something to do so anybody else who is also bored (and you must be if you're reading my blog) let me know. Hopefully my back will start feeling better so I can be a bit more mobile.

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Much About Nothing

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 10 Feb 2008 19:24:58 CST

Well it's been awhile since I've blogged. To be honest I haven't had much to say but I feel like the old post has been up for too long so here we go...The few weekends have been sort of busy. We did the parade of homes twice, I went to a monster truck rally with Tyler and watched the movie Untraceable with him as well.

I think the primaries are coming up in Wisconsin and I'm wondering whether or not it really matters for me to vote. The only reason I wanted to vote was to make sure the less capable Democrat got the party nod so they would be more likely to loose, but now with Barack and Hillary that isn't really necessarily anymore. Unfortunatley the stealth Libertarian Ron Paul is or will drop out soon so it's back to voting between a douche and turd sandwhich.

Ok, so that's probably all the more political I'll get here so don't worry, but that South Park episode is really, really funny.

Parade of Home 2008

Neal Grosskopf — Sat, 28 Jan 2008 20:18:45 CST

Parade Of Home 2008 Well it's late January, the Packers lost (we didn't see that coming) so the next natural thing to do is go to the Fox Cities Parade of Homes. Emily and I went last Saturday to check out all the cool homes. This year there seemed to be more homes that are larger in size compared to previous years. Of course we really only went to the big ones, but then again we do that every year. Check out my photo gallery for some pictures.

Unlike previous years Emily and I are actually thinking of purchasing a home this year or next year. We'll most likely live in Oshkosh, and hopefully on the western side of town. All signs seem to point to buying a home this year with the real estate industry being the way it is as if Xenu were telling us to buy a home. (I'm not a Scientologist, I just find it extremely funny).

So what else is new? Lately I have been listening to Pulley non-stop. I'd like to get my hands on one of their cds but they're hard to find. I've also went ahead and created a new section of my website called Geek Speak for all three nerdy readers of my website. The point was to separate the family and friends from the tech people since I don't want to blog both in the same place. If you're into tech stuff more, add that to your rss feed reader rather than my normal blog. The section is basically a fork of my blog system, so if you find any errors in it, it's my bad coding.

At work we're redesigning a website, which I'm excited about. Even though it will be a lot of work, it's nice to clean up and fix a very disorganized web site. Ironically I felt I had the Lakeland website almost to that point but, of course I'm onto other crazy sites.

Also Emily and I are 95% sure we are going to San Francisco this May (during memorial day week). Here's a list of some of the things we are going to do/visit:

If you've played any videogames in your life (i.e Grand Theft Auto, almost all these places should look familiar) Well that's about all for now.

If You're Going To San Francisco

Neal Grosskopf — Wed, 18 Jan 2008 20:07:43 CST

A new blog post due to demand . As you can tell I made it back from Chicago ok. Overall it was a great trip. Life is going good right now, I mean the Packers beat the Seahawks and the Giants beat Dallas. What more could you ask for? Well I guess you could ask for the Packers going to the Super Bowl and Winning it - lets just make it there first.

As of late I've been receiving a lot more visits to my website. I suspect this is due to the fact that I posted a few links to my site on some more popular web design websites. This has kind of opened my eyes to posting relevant links to my site more often. I always add my home page to these sites when I'm replying to a comment on them, but posting a link internally that is related to the topic seems to draw more visits than normal.

The problem with this is I don't have a lot of relevant "web stuff" on my site. Because of this I am considering creating a new section on my site, very similar to my blog, that focuses only on web related stuff. I subscribed to many rss feeds of other renowned web designers and I would someday like to be renowned myself. This requires getting people to sign up for my blog rss feed (which I recently added more features to).

At the same token I don't want to alienate my current site users (mainly family and friends) so I will keep my blog as is and in the current format. Stay tuned for this new feature, which shouldn't take long to create.

In other news, tonight Emily and I discussed taking a vacation this year. It is mostly because of me since I've been pushing for it so hard. I've always wanted to go out west. There are three areas of interest to me:

At some point in my life I would like to visit these three locations for various reasons, most dealing with corporations and national parks. It seems that San Francisco has, per square mile, the most interesting things to see of the three. Emily and I are considering taking a week long vacation there sometime early this summer. I think that would be fun and give us something to look forward to for this year. Anybody else have any cool destinations they would like to go to?

Work is going good lately. I've been doing a bit more web design lately and that it what I am happiest doing. In a week or so I'll throw a link up with some results for that. Also my good friend Jason Irish who was the former webmaster at Lakeland College and is the guy I replaced, has come back to Lakeland and taking over my old job. I think he is the best guy for the job, and it makes me feel a bit better (having left there) knowing that he is taking it over. Jason has been picking my brain a bit to catch up on a few of the changes I made while I was there.

Well, that's all I got for you for now...Go Packers!

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Adventure to Chicago

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 10 Jan 2008 21:36:23 CST

Now blogging from Chicago Illinois. Right now I'm in a hotel in Chicago on business for work. It was quite a journey down here. I managed to make the trip without making a single wrong turn. I had some free time tonight so I decided to walk around the downtown area a bit. The weather wasn't really the type that would make you want to walk around but I did it regardless since I probably won't be in Chicago for a long time. My first visit was a few blocks over to the Sears Tower. Check out my photo gallery to see some pictures of it and some pictures from the top of it. The trip would have been more fun with another person but I had fun by myself regardless.

I spent about a hour at the Sears Tower and after that I wondered around a bit more past my hotel. Then it started raining a lot harder so I decided to go back to my hotel. Chicago really is like another universe compared to the places I'm used to (like Appleton, or Oshkosh). Downtown there are thousands of people walking around in a big hurry. Most people seem sort of unfriendly. You can occasionally see a homeless person which is weird, considering their surrounded by rich people in pea coats.

I would have been nicer to have an extra day or two to visit all the things there are to visit around the city but that will just have to be another vacation. Well I'm about out of things to talk about.

New TV!

Neal Grosskopf — Fri, 6 Jan 2008 20:42:32 CST

Well, I've finally entered the digital age of Television. I must say I don't see how I "put up" analog all these years. This weekend Emily and I went out TV hunting. We started out Friday night at some local stores in Oshkosh. Most the sales people there sort of got me up to speed on what I would want in a TV and what I wouldn't want. I really wasn't looking to buy a TV from them especially since they were overpriced, as compared to a larger store like Best Buy or Circuit City. I came to the conclusion that I wanted a TV that was 1080p, I wanted a 42 inch, and I wanted a LCD TV. I've read several things about plasma TVs, such as screen burning and shorter life span which LCD do not have. Of course plasma have a slightly better picture but if the TV is going to die twice as fast, what's the point?

Emily and I did some research when we got home. We narrowed it down to a few different TVs at Best Buy. Ultimately we decided on a Philips 42 inch LCD. The TV met all the standards that we wanted and it had one thing that no other TVs had. Abilight. Yes the lovely back lit feature that as far as I know only Philips offers. What it does is projects the color currently displayed on the TV set on the back wall behind the TV. It even display specific colors that are currently on the TV. It is a really cool effect when all the lights are turned off and makes the TV look really slick. Its definitely gives the TV an edge when your trying to choose between two exact TVs.

The picture quality on the TV is really good as well. Unfortunately we don't have digital cable so we can't enjoy HDTV quite yet but we bought a HDMI cable for our XBOX 360 so all our games are now in HD and we can also play DVDs right out of the box on the 360 in HD. Playing Halo 3 is really beautiful in HD. You can see things that you couldn't see before since the picture is so clear. Also watching movies on the TV seems like a new experience because of the picture quality.

Because our living room has a new TV, our old one got moved to the bedroom and the 19 inch in the bedroom is now mine to play with in my computer room. I hooked the TV up to my NVIDIA GeForce 8500gt and I can use it as an extended desktop. Now I can watch movies on the secondary display while I do other things on my other monitor. I'm currently watching the ABC presidential debates on it on YouTube. (Ugh, Hillary Clinton, who is clearly a cyborg sent from the future)

In other news I'm going to Chicago this week. Wish me luck! I'll try to remember to bring my camera so I can take some pictures and post them on my website.

Also I've added a new feature to my site. You can now change the width of the site to a wide layout, which can be found in the right nav. If you have a wide screen like I do at work, then it is nice to have since it seems so small. How about them Packers everyone?

To Boldly Go Where No Christmas Has Gone Before

Neal Grosskopf — Sat, 28 Dec 2007 18:29:36 CST

Christmas is finally over. Hope everyone survived it. Emily and I went back to New London to her side of the family for Christmas. Tomorrow we go back for my side. I'm not going to lie, it hasn't been a very exciting Christmas this year. It is most likely due to the fact that I am getting older, and the older you get, the less exciting it gets. It seems like every year there is a theme to the presents that I get. Last year it was German related stuff. This year it was Star Trek related gifts. I got a Spock Christmas tree ornament. A Star Trek poster and a Star Trek encyclopedia. Beyond that I can't even remember what else I got. I still have Christmas to go with my side of the family which may yield some different results.

Christmas to me seems sort of like an inconvenience. You go and spend $50 on a gift for somebody hoping it is what they want and they spend $50 on your hoping to get what you want. Often times it isn't what either person wanted. I think it is more logical to just keep your $50 and get whatever it is what you want, wrap it up, and open it with family. Otherwise it's just a big scam to get together with your family for another holiday. Christmas isn't really about celebrating Christ anymore anyways. It's barely even about Santa Clause. It's more about fueling the economy one last time before the beginning of a new fiscal year. It's the American way.

Ok I'm done ranting. In other news I'm sorry to announce that I have a cell phone now. Emily and I went to Verizon and got two new phones. They are a LG Chocolate. My overall experience with the phone is negative so far. It seems that the cell companies go out of their way to include features on the phones but make you pay to use any of them. It's like having a computer with everything you want on it, but to use anything you have to pay a $1 each time.

Also being a fairly advanced computer user, things or methods that would normally work on a computer do not work on cell phones. One would assume, if they place an MP3 file on a SD card on the phone in the "sounds" or "music" folder, it would be available to use as a ring tone. It doesn't. One would also assume that if you have an external card, that the phone would save your contacts and all your information on that card as well as the phone for backup and to use externally. It doesn't. You would also assume that if you live withing a few miles of numerous cell towers, your reception would be crystal clear. It isn't. Yeah. As sad as it is to admit, the iPhone is probably the most suitable cell phone there is for me. You know more of a PDA, less of a phone. But Macs still suck!

Work is going good. I've been in a fierce battle with Web Trends. I think so far I am winning then battle. It seems like when I figure out how to do something, it goes ahead and ruins something else. It's been sort of fun messing with it lately, even when I'm somehow taking down various IT resources for the whole company in the process. I will say it's probably one of the least intuitive software packages out there right behind the Unreal Tournament level editor.

Well that's all for now.

Blog From www.NealGrosskopf.com - 12/13/2007 7:49:46 PM

Neal Grosskopf — Fri, 13 Dec 2007 19:49:46 CST

Greetings and salutations everyone! Boy was tonight a funny night. Emily and I received a rather authentic looking certificate/prize in the mail from Ramada� Plaza Resorts (Orlando/Ft. Lauderdale Vacations) stating that we had "won" a $1,600 off a Carnival Cruise from Florida to the Bahamas. Having peaked my curiosity I called the 800 number to see what was up. I got Jack Dillard, Senior Yada Yada President for Ramada at 7:00 P.M Eastern Time. (The guy works late).

Jack was offering us a "Big Gay" honeymoon package for an 8 day get-a-way to the Bahamas for $399 per person. He noted that if this was too much he could lower the price to accommodate us. I kept trying to get him to tell us how much it would cost us but he didn't tell me the $399 thing until 30 minutes into the phone call. Unfortunately for him, Emily and I were researching the whole deal and found out that it was just a big let down. People stated that the service sucked and they ended up paying $2,600 even after the $1,600 taken off in the end. Visit that previous link to see the complaints about it. (I simply don't have enough time tonight to type every single one of them out).

So what happened? I inquired if we were going to get lectured on our vacation about time shares and he replied changing "time shares" into a short morning having to visit some place and waste our time. I was suspecting that there would be alot more time share crap than that. After 30 minutes of waiting he told us the price and wanted our credit card number. Oh I also forgot to mention that he told us we HAVE to buy our tickets tonight and that we can't decide later. Let me repeat, we had to pay tonight. This is the part that worried me the most because it was a pressured decision. Pressured decisions are usually how you get scammed. At that point I hung up our cell phone.

He immediately called back and told us that we were "mean for hanging up on him and that this deal was so great....He then told us that "if we don't have enough money in our poor little account, he can lower the price more." What a dick! Poor little account my ass! Truth is we could have afforded the stupid trip, it was that we didn't trust him!

I figured by posting this online, I can maybe save a few more people 30 minutes of their time on the phone with an aggressive sales person.
Right? I propose that anyone who visits my site call this number 1-954-455-3211 and ask for Jack Dillard. Then prank him and hang up.

In better travel news I'm going to Downtown Chicago January 10th and 11th! Why you ask? Because I am being sent for a Web Trends class for work. While Web Trends isn't my favorite activity, traveling somewhere to get better at it is. There is also a possibility that Emily would be able to come along as well and we could check out the city for a day or two after it all. Yay!
Fin.

Blog From www.NealGrosskopf.com - 12/4/2007 10:14:29 PM

Neal Grosskopf — Wed, 4 Dec 2007 22:14:29 CST

I have spent a lot of time working on my site since I last blogged. As of late I haven't been giving my website very much attention but I have finally been thinking up some ideas to do on it. Last week I added several new wallpapers. They are under the objects section and are of my totally awesome guitar. I had picked up my guitar for the first time in a long time and decided tat I ought to take a few pictures of it and see if any turn out nice. I was surprised that many of them turned out really cool.
After that I added a feature to the message board that allows you to preview a thread without having to view the entire thing at once. Just hover over the grid of threads and click the down arrow. This will show a preview which is the first post within that thread. It's something that I haven't seen done anywhere else so for once it's an original idea of my own (yeah I know there aren't many of those left anymore),
Next I updated my right side bar which you may notice looks a bit different. Although nobody but a few web geeks will care, I added a view source button so that people can view the source code to my website. If anything I'll use it the most for testing purposes but once again, this was sort of an original idea that I thought up that I haven't seen used on any other websites. (as you can tell my goal in life is to contribute at least one good idea to web design that other people will copy)
Last but not least I added a tag cloud, which is a visual listing of all the tags on my website. Out of all the things I've updated I'm most proud of this since many large sites have them and I managed to create my own. If you add any tags to my site they will show up on that page now and the more times the tag is used, the larger it will become.
In other news I am attempting to tag every Star Trek epsisode (79 in all). This will involve watching all 79 and taking notes while I watch. I figure it's a good excuse to watch them all again. I'll be looking for very specific things within each episode and things that could possibly happen in several episodes. An example might be Spock using the vulcan nerve pinch (which he probably uses in at least 30 episodes). Once I'm all done I will probably create a subdomain on my website and design a complete new template (for the hell of it) and then have a giant tag cloud and episode guide for all 79 episodes.
Did I mention I'm a nerd?
So what else is going on in life? I am finally getting settled in and getting into my groove. At our apartment our stupid dishwasher doesn't work and our landlord is isn't making it a very big priority which after two weeks is starting to piss me off.
Work is going ok. I'm doing a bit more work than normal with Web Trends which is a overly-complicated program for statistics of websites. Apparently there is a new site coming up which is probably my favorite thing to do (is start a site from scratch)
Well that's all for now!

Blog From www.NealGrosskopf.com - 11/23/2007 4:54:17 PM

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 23 Nov 2007 16:54:17 CST

I should probably start out and mention that I've moved! I live in Oshkosh now and no longer in Sheboygan. I've seen my friends and family more in the past week than I have since I lived in Sheboygan for the past several months which is pretty sad. It's nice to finally be able to see people without having to drive 2 hours one way and 2 hours back. A lot of people from the Fox Cities like to rip on Oshkosh as the crappy city of the group, but personally, I think it's a major improvement over Sheboygan. Sheboygan has Lake Michigan and that's about it. Oshkosh has Lake Winnebago AND all the same stores and stuff as Sheboygan and is only a short trip on the interstate to Appleton which has pretty much every cool store you can think of.
Unpacking has progressed pretty well and we have most the stuff we use on a daily basis unpacked already.
Today was the crazy Black Friday sale. I headed over to Best Buy last night around 11 and met up with Tyler, Mike, Nick and Nick. It was pretty damn cold last night, probably one of the colder sales I've been to. It seemed like the people at the sale this year were more annoying than normal. We had a large pack of guys ahead of us who decided to do stupid cheerleading cheers at 4:00 a.m. Also while we were grilling out the whole line decided to move up and about 20 people budged ahead of us. We did however regain our position in line.
Like every year I had my eyes set on more storage capacity. I was hoping to nab a 1 tb drive but settled for a 500 gb drive that is cheaper. 500 gb should do the trick for the time being anyways. I was also trying to be a bit more conservative with my money this year. I also bought a 100 pack of DVD-Rs which should last me quite some time. Check out a few pictures of my stuff in my photo gallery.
Like almost every year I was less than 5th in line to check out yet 50th in line when entering the store. The only people ahead of me were Tyler and a guy being stupid who sat in line the whole night only to buy a candy bar from Best Buy. This year Emily also went shopping (with the girls) to the outlet mall in Oshkosh. She bought a bunch of cloths.
Other than that stuff is going good. Emily and I start our new jobs next week and we are both excited to do that. This is Emily's first full time job in awhile so it will be more of a change for her. Until next time...see ya!

Blog From www.NealGrosskopf.com - 11/3/2007 3:23:32 PM

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 3 Nov 2007 15:23:32 CST

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.