Movin' on up...

Well, folks it's official...my days at CMC are numbered. 5 to be exact. :-) While the benefits at CMC are really great, I'm just not happy with the job and when you dread coming into work everyday, all the 'perks' tend not to matter as much.

Anyhow, I'll be working in Reston for a communications firm doing web development. I couldn't be happier about the position, it's pretty much exactly what I was looking to do. And they seem to be pretty happy with my skill set so it all worked out well!

Say hello to Sweetie...

Welcome the newest member of the McCullough clan! This is Sweetie, Tyler's new pet. :-)

Yes, I've been blogslacking...

...so, I'll just run down last week in a nutshell here. Wednesday night the band played at Six Flags in Largo, MD. It was our first amusement park gig, and our first superhero audience...


Then we played our 3rd Annual Harley Davidson Memorial Day Open House on Saturday. Wow, the 3rd year we've played it...how time flies! No Cher or Madonna look-a-like's this time around, but they did have a guy juggling fire.


Two gigs in a week (or even just one weeknight gig) was a bit much for me. So, the long weekend was definitely a good thing!!

Go to Red River Gorge...

Believe me, the 9.5 hour car trip is well worth it!!! Here are the pics. We had such a great time. We stayed in a nice little cabin (which worked out quite well considering the alternative would've included setting up camp in the rain...). And we got extremely lucky with the weather. Despite the rain upon arrival, it was perfect weather the whole weekend.

Day One - We went to a climbing area called 'Roadside Crag'...ah, but don't let the name fool you, the area was really beautiful and thankfully, no cars anywhere in sight.

Day Two - Climbed in the 'Torrent Falls' area. This was really quite impressive (as you'll see if you glance at the pics). It's actually private owned land (how'd you like to have that as a backyard?!).


Anyways, it was a really good day. I climbed my first lead (although I did top rope it first...yes, I'm a big ninny). :-) And I climbed my first 5.10a (yeah, yeah....on top rope). Andrew lead this route (amongst the many others), which was really impressive!


Day 3 - To cap off the trip we hiked up to Natural Bridge. It was a nice wind down and again, beautiful area. And sure enough, I manage to not hurt myself the whole trip but of course I whack my knee on a huge, obvious tree stump on the way to the car. Go figure... :-P

Off to Kentucky...

Well, folks...Red River Gorge is awaiting. I'll be back in full posting force on Tuesday (with pictures to boot).

PS - Have a good trip too, Jason!

In case you were wondering...

< < < WARNING: GEEK POST > > >

I just got off the phone with a person who wanted some fairly extravagant features on a website, and figuring that some of you may one day toy with the idea of building a website in the future (or having someone do it for you)...I thought this may be a helpful post.

First thing...there are sooo many different methods to building a website. You can have a full Flash website (typically lots of bells, whistles, animation) but you'll never get anywhere with search engines and it's a pain to update. But done well, Flash sites can be really cool. Then you have tables, frames, and CSS (and no, building a site off Geocitie's Sitebuilder doesn't count!). Tables are by far the most traditional method, and as far as I know, most used. Frames are just a bad, bad idea for so many reasons but I won't get into that. And CSS is the relatively new and, in my humble opinion, best method. Less markup, easy updating. :-D I build (most) my websites using CSS with Flash elements. To all the table freaks, I have no issue with them...I just happen to think it's purpose should be for tabular data and not layout.

May sound okay, but then you have all these different browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape) and platforms (PC/MAC) and guess what...they don't all render code the same way. So, after a day of slaving over every pixel getting everything where it should be...the website may look perfect on all your browsers but on Explorer (who's support of CSS leaves alot to be desired) looks all funktified (that's an Amanda word, by the way).

Well, that just the "tip-of-the-iceberg-overview" of the front-end portion of building a website. Not even covering javascript, web standards and accessibility...I figure I've already made your head hurt :-)

I've lost my mojo!...

So, I think it's fairly safe to say that I'm now 0-3 with my interviews. This is new ground for me, my previous record being 2-1 (and the 1 didn't even count since they were looking for a writer, I assume they were on crack when they called me in). However, as one put it...it just means there's something better out there. How true. Yesterday I got two more interviews, both of which I'm very excited about. Any good interviewing tips?

Happy Mom's Day!...

...to mom, Denise, Grandma, Yoya, Meagan, Aunt Patti, Stacy, Darlene (kitties count too!), Erica, Tulip, and the million other mom's that I didn't list. Hope you all had breakfast in bed and kids on best behavior, hehe... :-D

Spiderkid...

This is Tyler at Carderock two weeks ago. It was a fun little outing, he had two other kids his age to play with and they had a blast.


Meanwhile...I just got back from a long (but still too short) weekend in WV. During which, the band had a graduation gig at JMU...yeah, that was interesting. It was actually a lot of fun, but hopefully our equipment will still function properly with the dousing of beer it received!

Born to be wild...

Happy birthday, Mom!!!...

Hope you are feeling better today. It certainly wasn't fair to be sick, especially on your 30th birthday!