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June had been a crazy busy month, so it’s time to speed-post a few things. First up…

Dawn and Chris tied the knot earlier in the month. The wedding was…Catholic…but whispers of spaghetti monsters and big Jesus hugs helped pass the time for us pagans in the back pew. Everyone was looking sharp, and Dawn and Chris looked completely happy and content.

The reception was very nice with good food, good musicians, and of course more shenanigans. The official festivities ended fairly early in the evening so we decided to have an impromptu afterparty on our deck. There were probably 10-12 of us (including the bride and groom) and we drank and laughed deep into the evening. It was a great time (exhibit A – check out the ladies having fun with crazy hats).

(Hate to have two posts like this back to back, but sometimes that’s how the chips fall)

1921 – 2010

Warren was Grampa Miller’s brother. A solid family man, active in his church, and a heck of a singer and bell ringer. We only saw Warren (and his late wife Ruth) on rare family occasions, but they good people. Among the memories, I’ll never forget their kind congrats at my college graduation party that they delivered to a video camera so cautiously they might have been defusing a bomb. Obituary

1972 – 2010

Five days ago, Bob celebrated his 38th birthday. Sunday night he died suddenly from a massive heart attack.

Hard to believe it’s been five years since we lost Corrie, and now another from our close high school group is gone. We had so many great times just doing mindless things teenagers do to manage the awkward claustrophobia of high school. Cracking open my old yearbook, I’m reminded that he left me a full page of script. Amid all the inside jokes and well-wishes for life at OSU, are these words which seem so fitting in return:

I guess a lot of things happened this year, probably more than anyone expected. You’re going to be missed a lot around here. Nobody will have anybody to “rumble” with while you’re gone.

So, rest well sir. You were a great friend and from what I understand, a great family man. You leave behind two cute kids, and my heart goes out to them. I do hope they will remember you well. I will.

The blog was quiet all through February because I just finished a big change to what makes the site tick. Google recently announced that they’d stop supporting blogs like mine this month (edit – now extended till May), so it was time to move to new digs (sort of). I started using Blogger, one of the first (and free!) blogging platforms, around seven years ago, long before it was bought out by Google. One thing that drew me to blogger was their FTP option, in which you use their site for authoring, but then everything gets pushed to your own server. I prefer the full control that hosting all the files on my own server assures me. Blogger’s free hosting is awesome for those that need it, but since I already have a server I prefer dealing with stats, ads, backups, etc. the way I want.

Google was good to leave us FTP bloggers alone when they bought Blogger, but they are finally moving on and soon will be requiring all content to reside on Googles servers. They say FTP bloggers only comprise 0.5% of their user base (which seems REALLY low) and it’s holding them back from introducing new features. Fair enough, it’s been a good (and let’s not forget, free) run.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve picked up and moved to Wordpress. Like Google/Blogger, WP offers a hosted solution, but instead of the FTP option you actually load the open source wordpress application on your site. Setting up the php engine was pretty  simple, but it took some time to touch up all the posts I exported from Blogger and make a WP template to match the design I was using. But I’m liking it. With WP you really have control of everything under the sheets,  and because it’s open source (and very popular) there are tons on plugins and published techniques for tweaking away.

Of course, one big plus about Blogger is Google’s seemingly infinite (and again, free) bandwidth, so I’ll continue to host DuctTapeServer content there. As I’ve seen in the past, one good flood from Engadget can render my server useless for a day (and taking down client sites with it).