FIXED!

My website is back! :) YAYY!!

Problem with my website

Yesterday, at one point, my new blog replacement website, Life After WoW, got a corrupted file and now will not load. We are trying to figure it out and have a ticket out to the tech at our hosting site and I hope very much to get it back online asap. Very disturbed and unhappy atm.

My New Blog Home!

Well, it's not completely finished but there are a few new posts and it's ready to look at!

I hope that you will all come and visit my new blog site!

Life After Wow

Where Did I Go?!

Sorry about my absence...it's been a number of things:

1. I got very depressed about everything weighing down on us and that makes it hard to have any enthusiasm to post anything.
2. I'm building a new template in Joomla for my blog and although it's nearly complete, I've been running into some problems. At this point, I haven't figured out how to properly link my dropdown menus through Blogger, so I may just temporarily just link to my new blog site and figure it out later.
3. I haven't been posting because if I post here I'll just have to bring the posts over to my new site.

I'll provide a link to my new site sometime today! I hope you like it!

Rainy Day Blues

With the nonstop rain, the full moon, and feeling worried about our future, Steve and I have the blues. It really helps to listen to our Glenn Harrold hypno-therapy, but no matter how much positive therapy we get, we've been feeling pretty depressed for the past couple of days. We need to stay positive so we can learn this new technology and create portfolio pieces but it can be hard.

Things to be happy about!

We're not in Japan!
I saw our elusive chickadee at the feeder today for about one second!
I finished my Joomla training and helped Steve build a website!
We're healthy and doing fine.

Full Moon!

Last night Steve took the camera out onto the back deck and took a lot of pictures of the moon while it peeked in and out behind the clouds. Of all the pictures, I couldn't decide which of these two I liked better. The moon isn't technically full until tonight so maybe we'll get something even nicer!

I really like the moody quality of this image with the clouds swirling by.

This image shows the moon more clearly and it's nice too!

Laughing Outloud at Poor, Poor Alexandra Wallace

Ok, there was a student at UCLA who decided it would be a really bright idea to post a video blog about Asians in the Library. Apparently, she was just about as offensive as you could get, even going so far as to parody-mimic the Chinese language. I read that she'd pulled the video off a day later when reports of her video exploded across the nation and world. I assumed there would be no trace of the video, but I should have realized that people would repost it for everyone to watch. You'll find a link above if you'd like to see for yourself.

Now that I've seen this video for myself, I'm blown away and yet, it makes me laugh at just how stupid she is. What a moron. The news report I read quoted some of the things she'd said and I made a mental image of a blond bimbo...lol...I guess I was right. (Truthfully, I am actually showing myself to be prejudiced too by automatically assuming that a stupid person at UCLA who would do such a thing would be blond with a large rack...but give me a break--UCLA is overflowing with Barbie clones! I couldn't BELIEVE it when I walked about campus once.)

Today I read that Alexandra Wallace has left UCLA because of death threats and because she had been "ostracized from an entire community." She has apologized for offending Asians and said the video a mistake, but my question is, WHY would anyone make such a horribly offensive, racist video commentary in the first place?

If you look on YouTube, you'll find lots of responses to her video. I especially liked these two:
Asians in the Library Response Video
Ching Chong! Asians in the Library Song

Although she had absolutely no idea what she was doing, I'm really not surprised that she has been forced into hiding. I hope that all of the morons in the world watch that video and find out what happened to her afterwards. I hope she doesn't get killed, but sadly, I'd say she is in danger.

Our Raptor Came By For a Visit!

Steve ran up to tell me there was a surprise outside to see, so we ran down and creeped into the kitchen to look out. Sitting on a power box was our Sharp-Shinned Hawk, hanging out in all of its majesty! Behold!

Isn't this a gorgeous bird?! It's very relaxed here, fluffy and with one foot tucked up under its feathers! Aren't we lucky to see this beauty again!

Japan's Nuclear Plant Turning into a Disaster

I've been watching the news and it's just getting worse. (By the way, I know that those of you who are reading this are probably saying, "DUDE! I can read this stuff for myself!" But this is also a journal for myself, and I want to put my feelings down about what's going on.)

Early reports suggested that problems with the power plant wouldn't approach that of Three Mile Island, and most certainly not Chernobyl. Well, as the days go by and the issues have mounted, they are now saying it's on par with Three Mile Island. Experts in the field said days ago that this crisis could never approach the disaster of Chernobyl. I wonder if they are right.

In SF Gate today they reported, "Nuke crisis raised: Level 5. Japan's nuclear safety agency ratcheted up its rating for the Fukushima crisis, reclassifying the nuclear accident from Level 4 to Level 5 on a seven-level international scale. The International Nuclear Event Scale defines a Level 4 incident as having local consequences and a Level 5 as having wider consequences. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was rated as 7."

I am simultaneously not surprised and horrified to find out that Japan has been understating the problems they've been having. Furthermore, reacted slowly and kept everyone in the dark, purposely. Then we come to find that their facilities were not prepared for a disaster like this. They've been negligent for YEARS with all kinds of serious problems that have not been addressed or fixed. They knew it and didn't say anything. They are finally being forced to admit that they've had many grievous problems and that they weren't prepared for this disaster. That's great.

Now that they've finally admitted that they have a serious problem, Japan is allowing outside nations to help. Things will hopefully begin getting better in the coming days; I hope they will soon be able to reduce the amount of radioactive particles being released into the environment.

Looky Who We Have Here!

I saw a Nuthatch on the feeder and grabbed the camera. In the time it took for me to raise it up, the Hut-Hut Bird left and a SCRUB JAY landed! YAYYYYY!!!!

Isn't this a magnificent bird?! They are much larger than Juncos and finches and much noisier too. I have a tough time getting pictures of these birds too because like Nuthatches, they fly in, nab a seed, and zoom off again. I was lucky to get such a nice, clear image!

How could I resist taking this picture? And it may be the clearest close-up yet!

Movie: WALL-E

Gotta love Pixar for slick animation. We hadn't seen WALL-E until now and it was a very nice surprise, full of laughs and wonderful moments. To be honest, I don't think it was quite as awesome as some of their other movies but it was really good. My only real issue was that I am used the usual Pixar film where you meet and get to know many characters extremely well. This movie focused on just two characters with a number of sub-characters to fill in here and there; WALL-E, of course, was the spotlight most of the time.

That being said, WALL-E was an AMAZING character. From my point of view, it appears that they took all the effort used in other films for fleshing out a host of equally-weighted co-stars and they poured it all into WALL-E's personality. He basically couldn't talk, so everything needed to be conveyed by gesture, sound, and expression. The cool thing about this is that it occurred to me that little kids would be able to understand this movie easily because there is so much less language than other films. I loved WALL-E and I thought they did an incredible job with him!

I was pleased to see that WALL-E got the Academy Award for Best Animated Film (though it really didn't have much competition with only two other entries). It was a fine film, but I would have to say that if it were compared to other Pixar films, I expect it wouldn't be at the top of the list--only because the other films had more characters you got to know better. I just wanted MORE!

At the end of the movie, we noticed that the film was dedicated to Justin Wright, and we wondered who it was. I looked him up on Wikipedia and found a very touching story about a man who died doing something he loved. I feel sad that this talented man died at such a young age, but how lucky he is to be immortal because his work will be loved forever.

I'm having fun being a geek! :)

I'm almost finished with my Joomla training, and then I'll build a website using one of their templates. It should be easy and lots of fun! :) I'll post my practice website when I'm done with it and you guys can check it out!

It's pretty exciting to me that I will be able to build a website by myself. Joomla allows you to create websites without being a programmer, which is very cool. I mean, I know how to build a basic website with html code, but nothing like what Joomla can do. It's pretty awesome.

Steve is busy working on PHP and SQL...those are database and back-end website programming stuff that lets you put shopping carts and custom forms in a website. He's having a great time too!

It's funny...when we decided to stop playing WoW, we felt a little lost and our confidence was shot. But since we decided to get back into design, we are having so much fun and feeling so much more confident about the future!

Power Plant Workers are Abandoning the Site?!!!

Associated Press has released this information: Japan suspended operations to keep its stricken nuclear plant from melting down Wednesday after surging radiation made it too dangerous to stay.

On SF Gate, a U.S. nuclear expert, David Lochbaum, said he feared the worst, commenting, It's more of a surrender. It's not like you wait 10 days and the radiation goes away. In that 10 days things are going to get worse. It's basically a sign that there's nothing left to do but throw in the towel.

140,000 people in the area have been ordered to stay indoors. Tokyo, which is 150 miles away, is beginning to detect radiation. People there are beginning to buy food and water in a premature panic.

This feels is very ominous and extremely scary to me. Some of the rods are suspected to have partially melted, there has been another fire, and they have not been successful at lowering the water temperature to stop the progress of damage.

What exactly does this mean???? Apparently there are a lot of people from many countries working very hard to come up with a solution, but in the meantime, the fears are that there's been a breach and a lot more radiation is leaking out.

I'm worried for Japan and I'm worried for the environment.

Woo Hoo! Our Web Design Site is LIVE!

Would you like to see?! :)

Keep in mind that this is a work in progress and the websites shown are mock-ups, meant to show prospective clients some ideas of what we can do for them. We will be adding more content as it's created, and soon the websites we build for clients will replace our mock-ups!

True Vision Design

More Progress!!

Steve and I new have a bunch of website mockups for our portfolio, and he spent most of yesterday putting together a Flash presentation of our work. It looks GREAT! Once it's ready to publish I'll put a link here and you guys can take a look! :)

I've been spending hours and hours working in Photoshop doing website design and having a BLAST! It's so much fun to fool around with images and text and making everything look just right!

I'm also learning Joomla!! Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. It's so much fun and easy to work with! I can't wait to start building websites with this powerful tool!

Spring Chickens!

Ok, ok, they aren't chickens and I don't care! I love to call birds "chickens"! In fact, one of my parrot's nicknames is Chicken!

I took some more pictures of the cutie pies at the feeders!

Look, look! It's a Hut-Hut Bird! I finally got a picture! Nuthatches are really hard to photograph because they zoom in, dance down the side of the feeder, grab a seed and zoom off again, and they are usually in a place where I can't get a picture! "HUT-HUT-HUT-HUT!"

I thought this might have been the first sighting of an American Goldfinch that hadn't quite molted to its bright coloring. However, upon closer inspection, I can see it's a Lesser Goldfinch, shown here with a Junco. There's nothing "less" about this bird, they are just beautiful!

This is a female (left) and male Lesser Goldfinch

Would you just take a look at this handsome boy?! Very soon now, the Juncos will migrate to their summer homes, so I want to enjoy them while they're here!

Here is a House Finch, gobbling seeds!

This is a Lark Sparrow. I'll try to take a better one soon; these birds are rather plain looking, and against the feeder they are not very easy to see.

Movie Bomb Squad: A.I. and Uptown Girls

OMG, QUICK! Toss these pieces of crap out of the nearest window!

We watched about half of A.I. before stopping in disgust when it became increasingly and unnecessarily mean-spirited with no end in sight. Nods to Haley Joel Osment's (Sixth Sense) excellent performance, rotten tomatoes at Spielberg for making a movie that thrives on the misery of its main character. I found out how the movie ended and I'm only sorry we watched as long as we did. I really don't know how people can stand watching movies that are based on gratuitous suffering.

Uptown Girls was a mindless, moronic film overflowing with horrible acting and a totally stupid story line. Completely unbelievable, idiotic, illogical and annoying, we also hated all of the characters. Although we really admire Dakota Fanning's acting, her script was just awful and sorry but we wanted to throw her out of the nearest window along with everyone else.

Movie: The Bucket List

Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman together in one movie and directed by Rob Reiner? PURE WIN! What a GREAT MOVIE! What a tear jerker! What a wonderful story.

Morgan's and Jack's characters meet up in a hospital in the cancer ward and become friends. When both are given the dreaded 6-12 months sentencing after their treatments, they make a list of things they want to do before they die, and we get to go along for the ride. With the wrong people, this movie could have been a saccharin sweet, emotion button-pushing piece of schlock, but it wasn't. It was super in every way. Check it out!

Japan Disaster and my reaction

Smoke seen from another explosion from the power plant in northern Japan.

Another explosion and now radiation is leaking out and becoming a hazard...

The Chief Cabinet Secretary has made this ominous warning: Please do not go outside. Please stay indoors. Please close windows and make your homes airtight. Don't turn on ventilators. Please hang on your laundry indoors.

People have no food or water or power. Elderly sick have been left to die in hospitals. Thousands of bodies washed up on shore up and down the coastlines. Now, they face radiation poisoning.

This disaster has affected me a lot more than I would have expected. I think about it all day. Looking through images, I found this image showing before and after at Sendai. It's just so horrible.

Steve and I were talking about why this is affecting us so much more than other tragedies in the recent past, like the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean which claimed more than 230,000 lives. (click on the link for an article from National Geographic) Or the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. (click on the links for Before/After galleries)

We think part of it has to do with the fact that we don't play WoW anymore. We have more attention for things like reading the news and seeing what's going on in the world.

Also, almost every new camera out there can now shoot video, and cameras shoot much higher resolution images. The internet is better than ever at allowing people to communicate quickly, so there is a lot more information. More than any other non-local tragedy, this one really seems to be right in my face. It's impossible to ignore.

One last thing: tsk, tsk to people like Gilbert Gottfried and 50 Cent who were so totally out of line to make jokes about Japan's disaster. I'm very happy to know that Gottfried lost a job over his insensitive Tweets. Once he realized he might have made a very poor judgement call, he pulled the commentsm but not before Buzzfeed got them first. 50 Cent later apologized for his insensitive remarks but why would ANYONE say something so awful in the first place? It really boggles the mind.

Can you even understand this? Those are all cargo containers, which stand about 7 feet tall by about 20 feet long. Do the math. I can barely wrap my mind around this reality.

A Note to WoW Detox Visitors!

I just wanted to say hi and thank you for visiting my blog! You'll notice that I have moved on very successfully from playing WoW, so there aren't many posts about the game these days. I am now concentrating on brushing up on my design skills as my husband and I head back to our print and web design careers and are planning to leave our failing company and begin a new web and print design company.

Please feel free to leave comments or questions about your gaming addiction--I'd love to help if I can!

This blog is now more of a public journal of my daily adventures, so you'll find posts and pictures about my daily routine and about movies I've watched and things I'm thinking about. Hopefully it's interesting! If you leave any comments I'll see them and will reply to them as well.

For those of you who have been able to stop playing, CONGRATULATIONS!! It's not easy to do and you should feel really proud of yourself. For those of you who are trying to stop but are having trouble, please leave me a comment if you want, maybe I can give you some advice.

I would like to think that I'm making a good example of a success story. I don't have any desire to play anymore and believe me, I was seriously addicted to WoW. I can safely say I'll never play WoW again. All I really needed to do was to STOP and STAY AWAY for a while and it was enough.

There really are so many great things to do with your time. Personally, I don't even play computer games anymore except for Spider Solitaire. It's just so much more fun to do ANYTHING else! :)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my blog! And good luck to each of you!