Guitar Hero I was a lot of fun for me. I enjoyed playing almost every single song on the set list and made a CD that has just about all of the songs on it. Songs that I had never heard before are now some of my favorites:

• Heart Full of Black
• Take It Off
• Ace of Spades
• Take Me Out

When I heard they were releasing a sequel, I couldn’t wait. When they released an early song list, I was excited to see some favorites on there like YYZ and You Really Got Me. Now that I finally have the game and have been playing it for a couple of weeks, it’s been a real let down with just a few bright spots. So far I’ve enjoyed playing all the songs that I know, but the lesser known songs aren’t fun to play at all – not like the first time I played Take It Off and fell in love with it.

These new songs – like Laid To Rest and Who Was In My Room Last Night and Carry Me Home to name a few – are boring as hell. There’s not a kickass beat or rhythm or lyrics to the song that makes me want to play them over and over again. I just want to get past them so that I never have to play them again. My latest conquest, Carry Me Home, was torture on the Hard level, and not because it was hard to play (which it was… very) but because it’s an awful song.

In fact, the entire set list for Furious Fretwork are all songs that I know I’ll never play again once I beat them. Well, besides the encore which is one of my all-time favorite songs. Maybe it’s because I’m not in my teens or twenties any more and my reflexes aren’t what they used to be, but I don’t like playing a song on this game just to prove how fast I can play notes. I want to enjoy playing it.

On many of these songs, I simply am not enjoying myself. They are obstacles to getting to songs that are good.

I’m not a graphic designer by trade. I’m not an expert in Fireworks or Illustrator. Although I work with both, I have no idea how to do the fancy tricks or advanced techniques. However, I am a designer at heart, although I’ve never had any formal training – just the product tutorials. I’ve also never taken any courses in web design, color techniques or usability, but my exposure over the years to true DesignMinds (people with that certain “something” who are able to make brilliant designs) has allowed me to glean some of the basic concepts of good design.

With this in mind, I’ve got a brand new site design – again. I just get bored with my design after time goes by. This usually takes about 4-6 months with every design, and I just wake up one day, look at my site and think, “Good lord, that’s boring and old looking. Time to redesign!”

What I do is just start randomly browsing the web, looking at site designs, color schemes and new layouts. Then I pick the ones I like and use them as inspiration. Then I fire up Fireworks and Eclipse and start playing around with my stylesheets and a few graphics.

This happened yesterday and now here’s the new site design. I really like it, but I’m sure in 6 months it will look really boring and dull and the whole process will start over again.

By default, Firefox shares one session across all browser windows that you open. Unlike Internet Explorer or Netscape who both differentiate between opening a copy of a window (thus the same session) and a new window (thus a new session). I love Firefox and use it almost exclusively, but professionally there are times when I need to have two windows open with two sessions. At first, I thought that if I simply had two profiles, that’s all I would need, but it didn’t do the trick.

Then browsing around yesterday, I discovered this little known environment variables – MOZ_NO_REMOTE – that makes this magic happen. Therefore, there’s two ingredients to getting this to work.

1. Firefox profiles
2. MOZ_NO_REMOTE

To make multiple profiles for Firefox, simply run “Firefox.exe -P” from a command line. This opens up the Profile Manager. Create as many profiles that you feel you’ll need independent sessions. Then create a shortcut to Firefox.exe on your desktop or quickbar for each profile you made. Right click the icon for each shortcut and open the properties window. In the Target field you need to specify which profile to use when launching Firefox like this – “F:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -P “ProfileA”

Then just create a new environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE with a value of 1.

Then you can click each Firefox icon and you’ll have a seperate session for each of your browser windows. Have fun.

Well, after two months of getting photos of Sabrina where she’s either asleep or highly annoyed that someone is taking her picture, we finally got some of her wide awake and happy. These are from her monthly check-up visit. She’s been eating well, that’s for sure. Up to 8 lbs 6 oz now from 6 lbs when we got the referral.

Just one month until we head down to Guatemala to have our first visit with Sabrina. We’ll be staying down there for 5 days and we’re already starting to pile up on the items that we’ll need. We made a trip to Target to buy the bottles, bibs, clothes, toys and all the other accoutrements. I’m very excited about the trip and know that even though we’ll be cooped up in a hotel room for almost a week that being able to spend time with my daughter will be amazing.

Also, several members of my wife’s “secret club” will be visiting the same time that we are they all decided it would be fun to dress the kids up in Christmas outfits. Michelle bought this glittery Santa outfit for Sabrina. She should look adequately ridiculous in it and we can embarrass her in 15 years by showing it to her boyfriends.

Anyway, the relevance of the topic of this post is that in our document we received from the agency about what to do when in Guatemala is an item I thought amusing. Apparently, they request that visiting American adoptive couples should dress to a high standard so that we can eliminate the image of the “slovenly, lazy American” that apparently is rampant in poor, third-world countries. Apparently the only real requirements for appropriate dress is that we shouldn’t wear big jeans or shorts.

I’m sure that if I show up in a nice pair of shorts with a collared shirt with good shoes, I’ll be regarding as a filthy, white-trash, trailer park resident who can’t hold down a job or speak a coherent sentence. Never mind the HUGE amount of cash that we had to front for this whole process. I’m sure people who can afford this process – in cash, mind you – are truly the kind of Americans they don’t want to be seen outside the borders.

Amazing the power of Dockers.

Surprisingly, I’ve never been a fan of dress codes. In schools, at jobs, or in social settings. I feel I always dress appropriate for an occasion, but the one way to ensure that I won’t is to TELL me what to wear.

HONEYYYYYY, where are my flip-flops and wifebeater t-shirt??