Last night I finally got my brand new Scion xD RS 1.0 from Scion of Wallingford (which really is the best Scion dealer in the state, if not the country).  Here is a picture of it:

The scion xD not only looks amazing, but it gets great gas mileage, has a nice stereo and has a lot more kick than my old 01 Honda Accord.

Some of my personal highlights are integrated Ipod connectivity with audio controls on the steering wheel (works great with my Iphone too).  Comfortable bucket seats and key with locking button on it (I know that is pretty standard, but this is the first car I’ve had with it).

Here is the official list of extras that come with the limited edition RS 1.0: DAMD body kit, RAZO shift knob, Different hubcaps, spoiler, TRD lowering springs, orange accented interior fabric and an orange accented dash.  I think that is everything.

At the dealer, I was getting all sorts of looks and people kept telling me how awesome it looked.  Also wondered what kind of car it was.  They hadn’t seen it before because it is a limited edition Scion xD and very few are made.

I am very happy with the car and it is all paid for : ]  a great feeling.

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Indiana Jones 4 is out!  Yeah!!  Can’t wait to see it.  I think Kat and I are going to go tomorrow night…but I seem to be catching a cold at the moment so who knows.  Also I found out today that I have Monday off from work because of the holiday.  I completely forgot so that was a bit of good news.

So I’ve been with dreamhost for a while now and they have probably the best service I’ve ever had from any company anywhere…but the unfortunate thing is that my sites go down at least 3-4 times a month, usually for an hour or more due to database connectivity problems.  As a result I have decided to change hosts to downtown host.

This brings a bunch of headaches with it.  Because dreamhost is my domain registrar, I have to transfer all my domain names (including this one) to godaddy.com.  I don’t know why I just didn’t purchase the domains there in the first place.  Probably because I was REALLY inexperienced when first building webpages.  Anyway, two of my domains transferred right away (with some headaches) but this one and the domain for my fiancee’s site were too new to be transferred, so I got to wait on them unfortunately.

My new host also has to transfer my entire site to my hosting account.  This shouldn’t be a problem though based on the reviews I read about them on webhostingtalk.  They usually transfer sites in hours.  Especially if they are small like mine are.

Now why choose downtown host?  Well, I actually got to experience it first hand with someone I was helping set up a site.  Their ftp was very fast and the site never went down once while I was working on it.  Good enough for me.  They also had a lot of shining reviews on webhostingtalk.  I’ll let the blog know when I change (in case people ever read this).

Today while helping my professor with her production company’s website, I found a great plugin called TinyMCE Advanced for Wordpress.  It is basically the same as the visual editor in version 2.5.1 of wordpress, but adds a TON of new features to the already existing ones.  It also allows you to create your own customized blog editor menu with drag and drop interface.  Very impressive, I must say.  So far no problems.  I wanted it because of the lack of table support in the default editor, which was a problem for me.  A lot of my posts use tables to layout the message easier and this was a must have.  Too bad there isn’t an easy div editor for wordpress.  Then I could go 100% table-less.

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And boy am I glad. Plans for this summer include:

• Working a lot more at my job
• Hanging out with my fiancee
• Making MONEY!! Which I love of course : ]
• Going to see some really awesome movies (Indiana Jones, Batman Dark Knight and maybe a few others)
• Going on vacation to Cape Cod
• Some freelance opportunities
• And a really cool Joomla project

I also have to catch up on my large collection of video games which I have stacked up in my room.  It’s kind of depressing that I have so many left unplayed.  Some even have their packaging still on them.  My fiancee is bugging me to let her play them…but I have a thing about letting other people play my games first.  I know I will end up watching her play them and I will no longer have any interest in it…which would defeat the purpose of me buying to to begin with.

My fiancee is trying to learn CSS and XHTML so she can make more money at her job.  She wants me to teach her…and I will of course.  Hopefully I can pack some more information into her honeydew melon head.  Here is a picture that easily describes what she looks like (and her name is Kat by the way):

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Today I just finished editing all the fine details on my new website here and it looks great if I do say so myself.  I also had a lot more websites that I had created than I realized (even more to come when I finish one at work soon).

So, onto some cool stuff.

I recently went to Ironman.  You know, that little movie starring Robert Downey Jr.?  So I went in not expecting much more than a crazy amount of special effects (which would have probably satisfied me) but what I got was a lot more impressive.  An actual GOOD superhero movie!!!  Not to mention a good MARVEL superhero movie hahaha.  I know that is kind of a shocker, but man it was good.  I liked it way more than the Spider-Man movies.

One thing that really astounded me though was the CG work done for Ironman’s suit.  It looked just so amazing…and it had all these really cool transformations that I could never dream up in a million years as a 3D artist.  Here is a really interesting read about the technical difficulties in creating the CG suit and the “practical (real) suit” in the movie: Link

Anyway, the movie was fantastic and I recommend everyone go out and see it if they haven’t already.

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I just wanted to share this really amazing and easy to use gallery script.  I am going to be putting it in my new website using a wordpress plugin that uses its scripts.

The name is highslide and it has several uses.  It allows for easy display and cycling of pictures and images you post in your pages.  You can cycle through different pictures with the keyboard and even move the display boxes anywhere you want.  The display boxes have a number of different graphical effects including drop shadows and glows.  He also includes some really great ajax popups that you can embed html content, flash content, ajax content and iframes into.  For a demo of all these features, go to the official website here.

There are a number of wordpress plugins using this.  I’m not sure if they all work, but here are all the ones I found on a quick search of the extend category of wordpress.org:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=highslide

Aside from highslide, I found a pretty cool article about creating attractive and well designed blog post headers or just website headers in general.  They have a pretty large list, including one example from one of my favorite blog designs "veerle’s blog."  You can check out the article here.

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