Posted on: January 20th, 2010 by Famous Phil

Hi, and welcome to the new FamousPhil website!  It isn’t actually all that new, but it is a major revision of my website.  This has been coming now for at least the past 5 months because I completely hated the colors that I chose for the overall site theme.  I can’t believe that I thought mixing all sorts of colors would even remotely look good. Anyways, I fixed it and I feel that the site looks better.

So what exactly changed?

I changed the color scheme a little bit and this is what you will likely notice the quickest.  I decided to go with a traditional blue theme using the same blue that I selected before, but this time with a color guide.  For anyone in need of finding colors that go well together, I strongly recommend: http://colorschemedesigner.com/.  That site helped me a lot!

In addition, FamousPhil now validates to XHTML Strict 1.0, it used to validate to XHTML Transitional 1.0.  This is basically technical language saying that FamousPhil is guaranteed to look the same on all compliant browsers that can display this website.  This was very difficult to achieve considering the old website base uses many elements of XHTML transitional that don’t exist in strict.  Regardless of the difficulty, I managed to get everything updated and working well   You may ask why I didn’t choose HTML 5 (I know one person who did), and my reasoning is, its standards aren’t fully established yet and aren’t mainstream enough for my personal preferences.

Finally, the major component that I really wanted to fix for a long time has happened.  On my end, FamousPhil now has a real content management system.  I wrote a theme for Wordpress (thanks to John) and I now use Wordpress as my content management system.  Doing this has made my life much easier since changing the site has gone from manually editing source code to “drag and drop”.  Hopefully I can continue to make my sites easier to manage so I can perhaps find more free time in the future

Thats all for now.  I still need to do some blogging on some important issues, but that will come someday in the near future

Tags: color scheme, design, famousphil, validation, xhtml
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Posted on: January 1st, 2010 by Famous Phil

At the time of beginning this post… it is 12:01am Eastern Time, January 1, 2010.  My first words are: Happy New Year! and Happy new decade!  Hopefully this decade will bring a lot more fortune than the last one   I just want to quickly look back on the last 10 years of my life and the funniest videos of the year that I’ve found.

Ten years ago from today, I did not know much about a computer.  I can assure you that I did not know how to turn one on, and I only had a slight clue about what the internet was.  At the time, I had high hopes of becoming an electrical engineer and I loved playing around with circuits.  I was also much younger and had a lot to learn (obviously).  I also wasn’t entirely sure about what all the Y2K stuff was all about, so it didn’t really affect me.  Finally, a last tiny tidbit… I have spent *every* new year of my life in my own bedroom here at home.  I might be a few feet off from the same position each year, but I’ve basically in the same spot.  This is only the third year of my life that I’ve been up to witness the new year come in.

So, how does it feel?  I doesn’t feel any different… its just another day.  For some people, its an iconic day I suppose, being a new year and all, but for me, nothing has really changed.  I will continue to live and will continue to do what I do every day.  The only difference is, I will have to get over the annoyance of not remembering to write 2010 on any documents I create for at least the next few weeks (probably about a month or two in reality).

2009 brought me 8 hard drive failures in various machines that I’ve worked on, 2 being my own.  It also brought some bad fortune with the passing of my grandmother.  On the brighter side, it brought Windows 7, Microsoft Exchange, XM Radio, 2 new Laptop computers, a new server, and the magic of Verizon wireless high speed internet here at home.  It also brought me a wonderful job at my college and lots of new knowledge about computers.  Overall, 2009 for me was a decent year, especially considering the killing I made on Ebay selling Michael Jackson dolls (I sold quite a few within the first day after his death).  Of all the stuff that 2009 brought, perhaps the biggest was a new and improved FamousPhil.com.  Within the next few weeks, FamousPhil.com will change slightly again to become more smooth in color transitions

In 2009, I watched a lot of amazing video.  I think its time to share some of the more memorable youtube links of the best videos I saw in 2010!  I’m also going to leave this blog post here.  I hope that your 2009 was as enjoyable as mine and that your 2010 brings good tidings   Enjoy!

Ancient Modem that still works (seen on Yahoo for several weeks back in June, 2009)

World’s Fastest Speed Reader reading the original Health Care Bill – Cavuto (Fox News)

Glen Beck – Turtles on TV (You may have to get half way through this partially edited clip)

Next up is from a movie that was hilarious (Monsters vs. Aliens).  I also liked High School Musical 3.

I discovered something about geiko!

And finally, the video that combines it all together perfectly!

To another great year!  Thanks for stopping in!

Tags: 2009, 2010, Happy New Year, New Year, video
Posted in My Site, Personal, Student Life, Technology
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