NealGrosskopf.com - Blog

Summerfest 2009

Neal Grosskopf — Wed, 8 Jul 2009 11:52:06 CST

Well, my 4th of July weekend is over so I thought I'd write a blog about it. Sunday (the 5th) I went to Summerfest with my friend Mike. Looking back through my records, I haven't been to a single Summerfest since 2004, which is quite sad. Now that I'm single again, I've found myself able to go to more things than I had in the past, and I think Summerfest was a causality for the past three years.

I primarily went to Summerfest to see Reel Big Fish, a Ska band that I've liked since 9th grade. The only other band I was semi-interested in wasRelient K. I originally saw Reel Big Fish in Oshkosh way back in the day at Waterfest (June 29th, 2004 to be exact). I don't think Waterfest has had a single Punk/Ska band since then so it was exciting to go to a show again.

Relient K

I have seen Relient K once before at Lifest in Oshkosh (July 9th, 2006) which was a pretty good show back then. The Relient K show this time around was sort of sucky. Probably the worst thing about it was we were stuck up against the bleachers and people were walking in and out past us the entire time. There was barely any standing room available so it was sort of annoying with people nudging by us. The other thing that probably made the Relient K show less fun for me was they played a lot of their new songs that I didn't recognize.

Reel Big Fish

After that show we headed over to the Reel Big Fish stage. By the time we got there all the bleachers were filled so we got as close as we could in the standing room only area. Little did I know, the area Mike and I were standing at would be the main mosh pit area.

Once RBF started playing, our area immediately went crazy and people were jumping and moshing like crazy. I was a bit startled at first because I wasn't expecting it so I got pushed up against the fence that was the edge of the summerfest grounds. I stayed in that spot for a song or two and then got into the pit with everyone else when RBF played a couple old songs that I really liked. Some other moments from the show was Mike losing his cell phone twice. The first time someone picked it up and 10 minutes later he got it back, and the other time, he dropped it, I noticed a kid picking a phone up and grabbed it myself.

It was probably my first full-blown mosh pit I've been in with people crowd surfing, skanking and thrashing around. People fell down several times, but it never got too out of hand because almost immediately after falling, somebody else would throw down their hand and help them up, and others around them would try to slow down if possible although it usually wasn't.

The RBF show was awesome, and the best show I've been to by far. Below is a set list of songs they played at Summerfest if you're interested. Also I found a guy on YouTube who recorded much of the show so I created a YouTube playlist for Reel Big Fish @ Summerfest 2009.

Turn the Radio Off

Why Do They Rock So Hard?

Cheer Up!

We're Not Happy 'Til You're Not Happy

Don't Start a Band - [LIVE]
The Bad Guy - [LIVE]

Monkeys For Nothin' And The Chimps For Free

I'm Her Man - [LIVE]
Another F.U. Song - [LIVE]

Fame, Fortune, And Fornication

Other

Take On Me - [LIVE]

Overall it was a great time and hopefully I'll get the chance to go again next year. Below is a picture I found on Wikipedia of RBF, and ironically Aaron is wearing the same white suit and the stage looks pretty much the same as the show I was at in Summerfest so I thought I'd include that on here:

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Soundtrack of a Divorce

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:58:57 CST

Well, it's over (although not really since I've pre-written this blog post). Throughout my entire divorce I've been tracking the music I've been listening to just out of curiosity, via Facebook's iLike application. The app allows me to choose the songs I'm listening to which I've done for the past 7 months now. And now on to this glorious 7 month in the making blog post -

November - The Beginning

It all started November 1st, 2008, the day we went our separate ways. The soundtrack, literally, to this brief moment in time was hands down the CD "Class of 98 by 98 Mute"

The song I listened to on repeat was "Short Fuse" because that's more or less how I felt for that hour or so. I also listened to "Election Year" a lot because, it was after all election time, and that song captured much of the same energy and anger that "Short Fuse" also had. 98 Mute is a 90's hardcore punk band and I usually only listen to them when in a terrible mood.

November - Second Half

After a more hardcore styled start to my 7 month journey I moved on to some of Blink-182's more emo-ish songs and also started listening to Creed for the first time in my life. Most of the Creed songs were quite depressing and I've always felt, that to get over depression, you need to "fully go through it" i.e get it all out of your system usually by crying it out. The Creed songs pretty much sucked it right out of me especially "One Last Breath". I also listened to "One" & "My Own Prison" quite a bit.

December

After much of that very depressing music for some reason I moved on to something a bit more upbeat with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones (MMB) & Bob Marley. My MMB CD I was listening to was a CD I owned for a long time but never bothered to listen to. I found that many of the songs on it were really good and this cheered me up briefly.

Then there was my "One Love: The Very Best of Bob Marley & the Wailers" CD which I had got from my brother in-law Nick. This would be a reoccurring CD throughout the entire divorce. Whenever life got hard I turned to my Bob Marley CD. "Three Little Birds", was my theme song and the song Will Smith listens to throughout the movie "I Am Legend". The song also had great, reassuring lyrics such as:

Don't worry, about a thing. Cause every little thing, gonna be alright

Bob Marley calmed me down and kept me straight lined throughout the whole process. This was a CD I listened to pretty much the entire 7 months.

December - January

I next moved on to another CD I owned but didn't listen to frequently which was "The Swiss Army Romance by Dashboard Confessional". This is an all acoustic CD which is something I usually don't listen to but the lyrics on this CD are just awesome and the acoustic guitars play in an unusual way. One song that really stuck out was "Turpentine Chaser". At this time I let my guard down and started noticing girls again, which was a huge mistake for me at this juncture. I think the lyrics below explain how I was feeling, essentially just wanting to being with someone just for the sake of it but at the same time, really just wanting to be left alone.

All I want, is not to need you now / All I want are vows of silence now

Another great song was "Again I Go Unnoticed" which ties into what I was talking about above. After my stint with Dashboard Confessional I realized that being single is really the best and only choice for me.

January - February

Now it was January, which was below zero almost the entire month! (Most people seem to forget that now in June and feel like complaining about 60 degree weather). The car I was driving at the time sucked really really bad at playing CDs when it was cold out. For some reason the only CD I was able to get to play was "Full Collapse by Thursday". Thursday is an emo band or more like the emo band. Their music is very depressing, but at the same time I think that accurately describe me during those cold months.

The song I listened to over and over again on this CD was hands down "Standing On The Edge Of Summer". Just the title alone, described me, i.e. waiting for my divorce to be final in summer. This first set of lyrics reminded me how fast the years leading up to my marriage went, and then how quickly it seemed to end:

Driving in your car, Miss the stop sign, fall in love...Just to get knocked down

The next set of lyrics alludes to how fragile my relationship was and the fact that we had recently bought a house:

In this house of cards we're all holding hearts and spades. (One breath, one step could knock it all down)

And more alliterations to "a deck of cards" and the demise of our relationship:

When the people you love get lost in the shuffle, (When you leave, you leave nothing but broken hearts)

I also listened to "Stay What You Are by Saves the Day" a lot during this period. Their lyrics are a bit more angry and less elegant than Thursday's but still a good listen.

March & April

For the months of March and April I started listening to some more positive upbeat music in the form of pop-punk. I discovered a great Blink-182-esque CD from Britain called "Welcome to Loserville by Son of Dork". I also started listening to my "Mmhmm CD by Relient K" and later my "A Hangover You Don't Deserve by Bowling for Soup". All of these are really poppy upbeat CDs. I think I was doing this to try to counteract my less than optimistic outlook on my job because it seemed certain that our company was going to go through another set of layoffs. By April the layoffs didn't come but I stuck with the pop-punk music.

May

For the month of May I continued to listen to pop-punk but for this month it was some of my faster, more technical guitar laden music. This was due to the fact that I started playing guitar again, for the first time since early November. Two of my all-time favorite speed pop-punk CDs are "Cheshire Cat by Blink-182" & "Perhaps, I Suppose by Rufio". I admire Tom Delonge's work on Cheshire Cat and still feel that it's the best Blink-182 CD despite some of the more mainstream CDs they have released.

The Month of May was a relatively exciting month because I was getting a lot of movement on my house and the divorce appeared to be moving along smoothly without any problems.

June - The Final Month

The countdown to June 15th began but almost as quickly as I started the timer, a giant roadblock appeared. Despite the problems I was facing, unlike earlier in the year when I would have turned to some angrier music I kept my cool and turned to Ska, which is like really fast reggae with horns and is generally very upbeat and happy. I turned to my CDs "Throwing The Game by Lucky Boys Confusion" & "Why Do They Rock So Hard by Reel Big Fish". "Why do they Rock so Hard?" was the first ska CD I ever bought and I still consider it the best. It is also the most upbeat CD I own and it's almost impossible to feel sad or depressed when listening to it. The "Throwing The Game" CD is also very upbeat.

Today

And so that brings me to today, 7 months later. Looking back I can see a trend with the style of music I listened to through the 7 months. In the beginning it was angry, hardcore punk. Then depressing emo during the winter months moving on to happier pop-punk during spring and finally upbeat, happy ska once summer hit. The style of music I listened to had less to do with the season and more with me healing from the breakup.

The Soundtrack to My Divorce

Well I hope you enjoyed my little research experiment and I applaud you for caring enough to read this far! Perhaps you've even bothered to click-through on a few CDs to get inside my musical psyche. Thanks for reading!

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Uncle Neal

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 8 Jun 2009 19:30:34 CST

Well, I am officially an uncle. My sister Kate, gave birth to a baby boy June 6th (D-Day) at 3:30am named Liam Daniel Hurst. He weighed 7lb 11oz. He came about two weeks early so I was a bit surprised when my mom called to say Kate was in the hospital. For some reason I always hear about false alarms with child berthing so I wrote it off as that at first. She ended up giving berth to him overnight and she seemed to have handled it pretty darn well. Way to go sis!

Believe it or not I've never actually held a baby before (that I can remember) so I decided that he would be the first, being an immediate family member. I just try to be overly cautious with babies, so I held him on a pillow sitting down, and he was all wrapped up good and tight in a blanket.

I posted some pictures of him in my Photo Gallery section and I also posted a video in my Open Videos section. The video may not be too exciting but it does give a good representation of him which is all I was interested in.

The thought just occurred to me, maybe someday when he's older, he'll read this exact blog post online. How cool! Hello from 2009 dude!

Well that's all for now.

Fin.

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Off The Grid

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:17:44 CST

Well, my three day weekend is over and it's back to work again. For Memorial Day weekend I went up north with my family to our cabin in Bowler, WI. It's nice to finally be able to go up to the cabin again. For the past several years I probably made it up there less, than I have in the past couple months, so I'm making up for lost time.

I rode our four-wheeler around quite a bit, even running it through some big mud puddles and such. I also got the chance to take a bunch of photos and shoot some videos of the cabin and natural surroundings. To check out some photos from this weekend take a look at my photo gallery section. I also added some new photos to my wallpaper section of my website.

I finally got to do some shooting up at the cabin and we also did a 21 gun salute for my Grandpa, whose ashes were spread up north, and for other veterans. Overall it was a great weekend.

In other news, I saw the new Star Trek movie the other weekend and it was pretty awesome. I'd recommend anybody remotely interested in Star Trek go and check it out. Even if you don't like Star Trek I think there's a chance you could still like the movie as it was made to appeal to more people than previous work. I wrote up a review on it if you want to know more.

In house news, I had three separate people look at my house last week. I'm not really sure why I had so many at once but I don't think much will come out of them. Only one showing looked promising, which the people said they were interested in the house but just put their house on the market.

Live Long and Prosper

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10% Fired

Neal Grosskopf — Sat, 2 May 2009 20:09:54 CST

I usually shy away from writing too much about work happenings on my blog, mainly because I used to switch jobs so often in the past that I tried not to expose too much to future employers, but I've more or less settled down now and would like to continue working at my current job for as long as they'll permit me to.

With that said, we found out Friday that they are cutting everyone's salaries by 10% for the next 3 months, and possibly further if sales don't improve. Our company seemed to be doing ok, at least from what limited knowledge I had. We had two layoffs back last November & December but no further layoffs since then. I was a bit surprised, and disheartened when I found out my paycheck would be 10% less each month.

I suppose the alternative would have been laying off another 30 or so people and our staff, at least in my department, is already bare bones with each of us very specialized in our job duties. This leads me to wonder who we could have possibly even let go had that been the route taken.

Mint.com To The Rescue...Sort Of

The 10% less is going to be really hard on me to make my monthly payments. In April, I made a major effort trying to scrape up some more money using my favorite budget tool Mint.com. Mint.com imports your debit card transactions and groups them into categories. You can then trend these categories from month to month seeing where your money went. I highly recommend the site for someone keeping a tight budget as it helps you identify where all your money is going. By doing this you can then make the necessary adjustments in the following months to spend less in that particular category. It also allows tagging, which I use to identify excess or wasteful spending. For the month of April I managed to get my excess spending down to $6. In past months it was much, much higher than that. This is what depresses me the most, I spent $6 in excess spending in April only to get my pay cut by 10%.

Car Swap

In April, I also proposed swapping cars with Emily, a deal that benefited both of us. The car I was driving had her name on the title and I was paying her Mom for it. The car she was driving had a higher monthly payment and had both our names on the title. We swapped cars and I sold my car to my Uncle Harry (Thanks Harry!). Since I was carless my parents decided to borrow me their car until I could save up some money for my own. This was to save me $100 a month by not having a car payment anymore.

Who Needs Retirement

The other cost saving measure I took was zeroing out my 401k deduction from my paychecks. I had it at a reasonable amount but in order to save more money a month I bottomed it out.

A Futile Effort

Unfortunately all of this was a futile effort, because I've now taken one step forward and two steps back. I'm probably being melodramatic, but it's my blog so let me whine! I think, with the paycut I'm going to end up being worse off than where I started. It's to bad I could forfeit my health insurance or some other useless benefit that I don't use in order to gain my 10% back, but I guess I'll just have to be even tighter with my money from now on. Heck maybe I can save that $6 in excess spending next month.

Really, the bain of my existence is my house, my life's second biggest mistake. If I could just sell my house, life would be dramatically different. While I really like my house, and being in it, it isn't helping me paying 2x the amount I could pay for a lush apartment.

Well, I think I'm finished complaining for now. Thanks for reading the whole thing.

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Content Is King

Neal Grosskopf — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:46:03 CST

Well, It's been a full month now since my last blog post so I apologize for not posting something sooner. Frankly, I would post more blog posts, more often, but I don't have a lot to talk about, well I don't have a lot I can talk about.

I thought I would write a blog about my website over the past year now. A little over a year ago it was really just a place for family and friends to chat with one another but that all changed in March of 2008 when I started writing my Geek Speak Articles. Now my website is 10% family and friends (and that's probably even lower now that I lost a family member that posted quite frequently) and 90% Geek Speak Articles.

Content Is King

Take a look at my visits graph from January 2008 to March of 2009. I started writing articles in March of 2008 and we can see what a big difference that made in my traffic:

Then in October of 2008 it all changed with my CSS Browser Hacks article which basically shot my website into a whole nother' echelon. I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you want to have a successful website, you need to give people a reason to visit it, and I've found that content is king. The articles that I wrote are the primary reason people visited my site and continue to be.

Search Engine Optimization

Another big contributor to my site's success has been the search engine optimization (SEO) that I've applied to it. Basically what this is, is using certain words and phases in my articles to try to rank higher in the search engines such as Google. If a user searches for the same or a similar phrase that I've used then my website will show up higher.

The graph below shows that people who visit my website and used a search engine has been rising steadily, especially after I started writing articles:

The Future?

The future of my website will probably entail having to switch my hosting options. Currently I have the cheapest hosting through 1and1 which costs me about $4 a month. At the rate my website is growing I'll have to upgrade or switch to another provider in the next year or so. Another headache will that, I will eventually need to stop using Microsoft Access as my database backend and use something more scalable (and works with classic asp, mind you).

And remember...content is king.

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Kind Words & Website Launches

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:10:34 CST

I was checking my recent comments RSS feed today and noticed two new comments, which is how I am able to so quickly respond to people on my website when they post something. What set these comments apart from others is they were very considerate ones compared to most. I figured I'd post them in my blog as a form of thanking the commenter's for giving me a self esteem boost and a good laugh. I also need an example of "quotations" in my blog/article posts because I felt like styling those with my fancy dancy blockquote styling technique.

The first comment comes from Pierre Loubert. (Oh I also forgot this also gives me the chance to show off my new comment styling as well as the ability to link directly to a specific comment).

OK, this has nothing to do with what I am looking for, but I thought I'd tell you how amazing your site design is! Wow, incredible, beautiful and it works in Google Chrome! I like the colors and the transparent "fx"s. Bravo!

I then got a second comment on my "Someone Ripped off My Website's Design! Now What?" article from "Scorned Designer" which if you follow the link he provided, is a pretty comical letter to a competitor that stole their web design.

Neal, You've already handled it pretty professionally, with a much cooler head than most people would probably approach this situation with. I've only seen one more unique way to handle the same situation, when BustedTees, put up a dedication to nerdy shirts, when they borrowed their design.

In website news you may notice, when you hover over this post (on my home page) you will see a "read more" box pop up at the bottom of the post. I added this in with a little JQuery juice. One complaint I've had about my past three renditions of nealgrosskopf.com was that my home page required a lot of vertical scrolling. I tried to fix this with my latest design by doing a two column layout for the home page. I checked my version 2 nealgrosskopf.com design and discovered that it's home page actually required less scrolling than my current one. This angered me as I thought the design would have fixed the problem (which is may, my current content may have just been longer). Anyway, to fix this shortcoming I added a "read more" box to the bottom of my blog posts and reviews, since those are usually my longest blocks of text. If you click on them it should slide down and show the rest of the post. Pretty neat, eh?

Website Launches

Finally, I launched two new websites at work last Friday which I am very excited about. They were both for our consumer line of product, whereas we are primarily a commercial washer & dryer company.

The first website is our Speed Queen Home Laundry website:

The second website is our Huebsch Home Laundry website:

I've been working on both these websites with my co-worker Brian, for several months now, and it feels great to finally get them up there. When we launched both sites last Friday, it was very stressful and things didn't go like we planned. It also seemed like people were more interested in telling me what was wrong with the site rather than what they liked about them, but I've gotten past that and am now proud of them once again.

I should point out that both sites should have the same or simliar content between them simply because one site is marketed towards Canada while the other is for the U.S. Both of these sites were also where I first learned JQuery so I'll always have a few memories with them regarding that.

Check them out and let me know if you like them.

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Neal is... Status Update

Neal Grosskopf — Wed, 4 Mar 2009 22:19:39 CST

Ok, it's been awhile since I wrote a blog last (almost a whole month it appears). Life has been crazy, lately, especially at work and I've been pretty stressed out. For the past week or so I've been listening to my "Bob Marley - Greatest Hits" CD alot. Reggae is really slow and relaxing music and it has helped me be less stressed out, I think on some level.

At work we're launching several new websites (many which I'm extremely proud of) and they are all on deadlines. I have two going up next Friday, the 13th (ironic date eh?) and I will post a link to those immediately for all to see. Both sites are where I got started on JQuery with and since then I have been using it alot in different capacities.

Speaking of JQuery I had a hit article last week when I wrote about - CSS Horizontal And Vertical Align JQuery Plugin. Because of that article I ended up nabbing 790 visits last thursday on my site which was really exciting.

Then earlier this week I was checking my Google Analytics stats and noticed some strange URLs in the page report. I then discovered somebody ripped off my site's web design and were going to use it for a client of their's. I then proceeded to call the company up and had a talk with them. Ultimately what happened, is the company ditched the design, lost the client and fired a developer consultant. On the flip side I wrote an article about my experience which then brought in another 758 visits this tuesday so my website has been really really busy lately, even to the point of going down more than normal.

Also, a friend and former co-worker of mine; Eric Lightbody just launched his new website ericlightbody.com. The site runs off of WordPress, but Eric did the majority of the coding himself. I've been pestering him for the last several months to finish his website and now it's finally up. He did a really great job so everyone check him out, and if you like it, subscribe to his RSS feed.

Switching over to personal life, this weekend I was really busy as well. On saturday I went to a gun show in Oshkosh with my dad. I got a picture of a FN-P90 which is basically the RC-P90 from Goldeneye/Perfect Dark. Then after that I went to the Parade of Homes with my parents which I've posted some pictures of those in my photo gallery as well. Then if I hadn't done enough Tyler called me up and wanted to know if I wanted to go see Friday the 13th with him in Madison. I wasn't too keen on driving down there and back in one night so I ended up staying the night down there in his sweet new apartment.

All my running around this weekend was fun, but depressing at the same time because money is getting really tight for me. I changed my withholding allowances at work and it has pretty brought me to $0 leftover per month now. There is also alot of chatter at work that could ultimately lead to me making less money a month which would then put me in the red. Hopefully it doesn't come to that so let's keep our fingers crossed.

On house news, I've had numerous showings. Almost every weekend I get kicked out of my house at least one day either for an open house or a showing. So far I haven't received an offer on it but it does appear that things are picking up a bit. I really don't want to live in my house anymore. For the first week after things hit the fan I was considering it, but at that point I really hadn't looked over my financial situation yet. After realizing that having no money with a nice house or having money with a typical apartment, the choice seemed pretty obvious that I had to sell my house....well our house since it's only 50% my house, I'm just the caretaker, and the dude making the payments right now. I'll miss it but it is really just a giant burden and is stressing me out alot! My house + work + divorce is definitely taking a toll on me and I hope the madness will be over soon.

Wow, I managed to ramble on alot there, until next time...

Fin.

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Website Updates

Neal Grosskopf — Sun, 8 Feb 2009 20:58:55 CST

I made a few changes to my website so I figured I'd blog about it. Maybe while I'm rambling on about it I'll find something else to write about as well.

Anyway(s) I recently started tinkering with a JavaScript framework at work called JQuery. I'm not completely sure why I picked JQuery, perhaps to be different than Eric who did most of our current JavaScript (which I have no idea what's going on in most the code he wrote) or it could be because I've been a RSS subscriber of John Resig for a long time and inadvertently found out, he is the creator of JQuery. I think my main reason is that JQuery seems tailored for CSS people like myself, and I like how small the framework can be (about 50K).

While I'm no expert at it yet, I have figured out how to do a few tricks here and there. I added some nice effects to my toolbar, navigation, and actions dropdown menus. I personally like the toolbar effect the most which you can demo at the top of my screen (it's a little green & white star). Some the other effects I had to pull from IE6 & IE7 since they were choking on the transparent pngs (yes I know there are fixes out there for this but this is a different situation).

I also have implemented my new code block styling technique which I have been working on and off for a few months now. This is another one of those things that won't work in IE6 or IE7 but I have reverted the old styling to those browsers as a fallback. For people with browsers that don't suck you will now get line numbers for code blocks. This is accomplished with some unordingary CSS via css counters and css generated content.

I'm also pretty excited about my CSS Diagnostics article. It got picked up by a pretty well known web designer by the name of Roger Johansson at the website 456bereastreet.com. I've been an avid reader of his blog and mentioned to him awhile back about my CSS Diagnostics article. A few months later I was checking my RSS feeds and noticed he mentioned me!

Last Thursday my site got 407 visits and on Friday I got 458 visits. This weekend I have enjoyed higher visits than normal as well. I also saw my RSS subscription counter go up to 35 subscribers. Due to this I quickly pumped out another article hoping to keep the subscribers happy. This is probably the second biggest event my website has seen since I've started writing articles and I'm very excited about it.

Writing articles on cascading style sheets is one of those areas in life that makes me proud and I would someday like to have some sort of impact on the CSS community. Having had a few of my articles get picked up on larger sites is a good start for me to achieve that goal.

As far as site content updates go, I finally added a new review after months of letting that go, and I added a new video of the monster truck show we went to this weekend in Green Bay.

The show was fun. Tyler had car troubles and we had to pick him up on the way there and ended up getting there 30 minutes late. I was impressed this year with the motocross bikes as they seemed to pull of some more risky stunts than they have in the past years.

Well that's all for now.

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Relationship Ramblings

Neal Grosskopf — Thu, 5 Feb 2009 19:00:10 CST

Well it's been about a month since I've posted a new blog which is a really long time for me. I probably would have posted one earlier but I didn't have much to write about. Probably the only life-related news I have to talk about is 1. my sister is having a boy and 2. I will be a single man again June 15th @ 3pm.

It's been a roller coaster ride on the relationship side of things. For the first few weeks I was getting over the shock of coming home and being the only person there (and eventually the only life form there.) My first reaction was "crap, I need wife 2.0.1.4" (the third and fourth digits are a security update). That wore off shortly and I started whole heartedly embracing the single life, which minus a few bumps towards the end of January, is still my opinion. I find that if you surround yourself with other people's failed relationships, you enjoy being single a lot more. Ironically most people aren't even aware that their relationship will eventually fail, but from the outside you can usually tell. After all only 50% of marriages are going to work out.

It's all those little things I hear people in relationships complaining about that get to me. You know "X doesn't let me watch that TV show on Thursdays" or "sorry I can't hang out with you because I'm stuck doing __ with X" or "I'm in a bad mood today because I got in a fight with X last night and slept on the couch. "

One way to look at it is I work 40 hours a week which if you tack on driving time its actually 45 hours a week. That means that I really only have 25 hours during the week and 24 hours on the weekends of time to do what I want with so 49 hours in all. I'm automatically going to want half of that time to do what Neal wants and not what some other person wants me to do, so really there's only 25 hours a week that I need to keep myself entertained to be happy and lead a fulfilling life. That's only 3.5 hours a day which isn't that difficult for me to occupy with something to do. It could be as easy as doing side website jobs or calling up my friends or family and seeing what they're doing.

The moral of my story is when you're in a relationship, you have no free time to do what you want, and when you're single you have too much free time to do what you want. Take your pick.

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NealGrosskopf.com 2008 Year In Review

Neal Grosskopf — Wed, 7 Jan 2009 18:58:45 CST

Intro: I was originally going post a crap load of statistics for this post but as of late, I can't movtivate myself enough to gather them all up since pretty much all of my free time has gone to Grand Theft Auto IV now. Regardless here is the unfinished post.

Well another year has passed by for NealGrosskopf.com. This year saw another redesign of my website back in June and I've been staying on track of a redesign every year now. I thought since I have a full year's worth of analytics from Google Analytics, I'd list off a few statistics from 2008 regarding my website. Maybe some of these will surprise and maybe they won't, we'll see.

2008 Statistics for NealGrosskopf.com

Total Visits: 32,580
Total Pageviews: 61,301
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Website Updates

Neal Grosskopf — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:28:03 CST

I thought I'd write up a blog regarding website updates that I've made recently. I have a great deal of time that I didn't have 2 months ago so I can start making some improvements to my site again and I have been browsing around it a lot lately looking for things to improve.

One example is I have brought back the ability to edit Message Board posts again. It was a page/process that I was too lazy to convert over, back in June when I re-designed my site. A couple weeks ago I converted that feature over. One thing I changed, is I completely threw out the stupid, separate page that people would have to use to edit posts. Instead I created a new, shiny, inline method of editing message board posts. Simply login, and browse to a thread reply and click the "edit" button, this will convert your comment into a textarea inline. After that just hit submit and it will update the comment. I stole this idea from Facebook, and I'm surprised more websites don't do something similar to this.

Also in my designs section, I re-did/deleted several pages. I noticed that a lot of my Geek Speak traffic was heading to my designs section after reading an article, and that section was done very lousy and more or less as an after-thought. Now when you visit the section, it will do a flashy popup box and the page actually contains screenshots of websites I've done rather than just a link to them.

Next, I made the videos in my Open Videos section widescreen. I noticed that YouTube has changed the size of all their video boxes on their site so I figured I would as well. I sort of like it, simply because it fills up my content space better and it looks a bit different than the normal YouTube embeded video box. Make sure to check out some of the new videos I've posted, most which are of me playing guitar (yes, I have a lot of free time, and I like it). On a side note, I've been trying to create some new music lately, and have also been revisiting a lot of songs I wrote in the pre-2005 days.

Another section I looked at on NealGrosskopf.com was my Photo Gallery section. I've noticed a lot of people that come to my website, visit that section. It's probably the second most used section. Depending on what browser you're using, you may see a totally cool hover box show up when you hover over a thumbnail image. I think I spent an entire night creating and tweaking this feature. It uses only CSS and originally I wanted to do it in an even more "CSS" way but the browser support isn't there yet.

Another thing I updated is, I completely ditched the "my photos" pages that were buried in the files section. Most of the photos were from 2005 or 2004 and were of my friends and I or the really early stuff of Emily and I. I decided I didn't want to just throw out all these pictures so instead, I "sucked" them all into my photo gallery. My next problem was I didn't want them to appear as if there were recent photos (because good god, they aren't) so I did some SQL hackery and got them stuck at the end rather than the front of the query. I think this section was also the pre-beta-alpha version of my Photo Gallery so it made sense to just incorporate it into that.

Finally, I have hopefully made my site more "IE6 friendly". I was never able to install Multiple-IEs on my computer because it hasn't been released for Windows Vista yet, but I recently found an even better program for testing in IE which comes with 5.5, 6, 7, and 8 beta! It's called IE-Tester and it is totally awesome. It allows me to open up different IE instances in separate tabs in one browser! This is especially useful for IE6, IE7 and IE8 which can't be installed simultaneously. I've also noticed that is a much more accurate representation of IEs rendering than Multiple-IEs was. My site looks pretty crappy in IE6 and I really don't know why anyone would go through the pain of using that browser, but yeah, I still get 10-20% of people using it.

I'll probably write up a blog next week summarizing Christmas and vacation, and also expect a totally, super, uber cool blog post after the first of the year summarizing 2008 related to my website and life in general.

Seacrest, out.

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My House Was Violated

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:49:20 CST

Tonight my house was shown to some people. I decided to get some groceries to waste some time while they looked at my house. I got to my house around 5:56 and noticed there were still cars in my driveway "perhaps these people are interested" I said to myself noticing that they were to only be there for 30 minutes. I then pounded another lap around the sub-division. On lap 2 I noticed they were still there, 10 minutes later. "Gez, they really must be interested" I thought. On lap three 6:13, no cars, so I pulled into my driveway.

It dawned on me that snow+tracks = websites+analytics. I looked down at the ground and could see that yes, there were two cars in my driveway (which I already knew) but I also could see that one car only had 1 set of tracks going to its driver's side door while the other car had 3 tracks, one set very small, and two others going to the front of the car. Being the analytical god that I am at work, I deduced that yes, it was a couple, perhaps like Emily and I but, with a small child. The perfect match for my house. This instantly made me think of what I do at work from day to day. I know that people are leaving tracks on our websites (via log files) but I don't know them personally and I can't identify them, only certain things about them.

It was quite depressing to drive by my house a couple of times, seeing all the lights on, with cars that aren't mine in the driveway, knowing people I don't know are walking around in it. Sort of smacked me in the face that, hey...this isn't always going to be my home, and that was a depressing thought. Call me materialistic, but being a homeowner makes me feel really good. I feel like I've worked hard to get this house (put up with high school, put up with tech, put up with lakeland, got married) and soon much of that won't matter, unless I can find Emily 2.0 or some other poor sap like myself in a similar situation.

It almost felt like my house was being burglarized or something, I don't know, I should probably just seek counseling on my infatuation with my house, who knows? And no, I don't care about your opinion or suggestion on how I can keep it. I've heard dozens of people act like they know, and they're all wrong. Plain and simple I need another $300+ more a month, at a minimum to keep it and that isn't going to happen. Heck, I was just told at work that our raises are being delayed so I might as well forget about that being an option.

Who knows, perhaps we won't have a job anymore in the next 3 months, then my house will definitely not be mine, it will be Associated Bank's house then. So far our company has laid of 64 office employees out of an original 400 or so and we've lost one in my immediate team of 4 people now down to 3. I really, really, really hope I don't loose my job as well.

Fin.

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Deer Hunting '08

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:51:26 CST

Well, I got back from deer hunting for the first time in my life. I probably should have started hunting much earlier, I mean my own sister has been since she was like 12 and my Dad always has. Anyway's I sat out in the woods Saturday and Sunday and had a good time with my Dad.

It was really cold Saturday morning, and it probably didn't help that we woke up at 4:30 am. I didn't see any deer in the morning. Then in the afternoon I saw a 4-6 point buck and I took a shot at him. I hit him in the upper shoulder (because I was trying to pass the bullet through his shoulder and into the heart and lungs area). The bullet apparently ricocheted off the deer's shoulder and he took off running. My Dad and I tracked him for probably an hour or hour and a half through the woods but got stuck and couldn't track him anymore.

It was really exciting to see a deer walking around without knowing I was watching. I had probably 30 seconds of time before I shot and it was really nerve racking. Then on Sunday I saw two does at two separate times but didn't have a good shot on them. So I didn't bring a deer home but I had a good time.

In other random news, I've been listening to Bob Marley non-stop lately. It all started one night because I was sort of feeling like I was Will Smith from the movie I Am Legend (you know where he's more or less the last man on earth...alone) and I got that Bob Marley song from that movie stuck in my head - Three Little Birds. Then I was about to download that song when I realized I had the greatest hit CD all along (who'd a thunk?). Since then it's been the only music I've been listening to.

I was always under the impression that reggae music was the inspiration for the ska music genre (which I am a huge fan of) but after a little research I discovered that ska came first and reggae actually was an off shoot of ska. Then later in the 80's ska and punk become joined at the hip which is a strange marriage if you ask me.

In house news, I had an open house this weekend and I guess some people were also shown my house as well. I'm sure all the noisy neighbors went through my house to try to figure out what's going on. It seems like the worst possible time to have to sell a house, but there's not a great deal I do about that. Hopefully I can keep my head above water long enough to sell it for a reasonable price. Things definitely aren't like they used to be where Emily and I spent money like no tomorrow. Now I have to carefully evaluate every purchase I make.

Tonight I sacrificed a bunch of food I needed to buy so I could buy a snow shovel. It's funny how little snow shovels are appreciated until you need them. This morning all I had was a small 3 foot handle, skinny shovel to shovel out my driveway. It took me a good 20 minutes to do a really bad job but I got my car out. I can only imagine what this morning would have been like had blondie still lived here. Chaos!

Fin

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Jack Handey Visited My Website!

Neal Grosskopf — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:46:43 CST

The other day I got an email sent from my contact form on my website. It was from a comedian known as Jack Handey who has been featured on Saturday Night Live dozens of times, and who has written several books. Now it wasn't a good email but interesting nonetheless:

You have to take my Deep Thoughts off your site right away.

It's copyrighted material. You giving away my property for free hurts my book sales. Is that concept difficult for you to understand?

If you'd like, I'll have my attorney contact you. But then that'll cost me money, and he'll have to get that money from you.

Again, please remove the Deep Thoughts immediately.

Sincerely,
Jack Handey

While I hoped I would hear from Jack Handey in another fashion it's still cool that some famous person visited my website. I of course removed all of the quotes I had of his, on my website. Being the Google Analytics freak that I am I wondered, what sort of computer setup does Mr. Handey have. Using GA's sweet new segmentation feature I can find this out pretty easily.

Mr. Handey did a Google search for the phrase "message president jack handey outside" which really doesn't make any sense as is, but he ended up on my site where he proceeded to view 9 of my pages. That's sort of the fun thing about web analytics is I can make assumptions, and find out what people are doing on websites that I have analytics on (at work or at home). People generally assume that what they do online is private but it really isn't and crazy people like me can figure those things out assuming we have the data to do so. I always laugh when some idiot gets caught using a proxy to do something illegal online (like hacking Sarah Palin's Yahoo! account).

Anyway's here's Mr. Handey's computer setup:

ISP: Comcast
City & State: Santa Fe, New Mexico
Browser: Safari 523.12
Operating System: Macintosh
Screen Resolution: 1680 x 1050
Flash Version: 9.0 r19
Java Installed: Yes
Screen Colors: 24 bit
Visited My Website: 2 PM, November 9th for about 8 minutes and 48 seconds

I'd like to apologize to Mr. Handey who I admire and find very funny. I essentially just copied a bunch of his quotes from some other website that probably did the same thing. It seems that too often people search Google for one of his quotes and ended up on my website (which they can't do via his books because books are not searchable). Either way I didn't profit from this other than answering some random person's question.

And now deep thoughts...by Jack Handey...

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Life In Reverse

Neal Grosskopf — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:00:30 CST

It feels like lately my life is going in reverse. Usually the general course of a life after high school is, go to college, get girlfriend, graduate, get married, buy house etc. Now I feel like I'm sort of back at "graduate college" again which occurred about a year and a half ago for me. I personally feel like getting "back on the horse" and see if I can't get life moving forward again but that will probably be a problem that I can't control 100%.

Last night I met with a realitor to put my house up for sale (I should have a link I can post on my website in a couple of days). The house will officially be up for sale starting next Tuesday. I believe Emily came over today and removed some of her remaining things as well. After that I need to clean my house up, mostly due to damage the dog and cats did to it (or myself in one case). My Mom and Dad are coming over this weekend for a morning to help clean things up. If all goes to plan I'll probably have an open house next weekend while I'm gone deer hunting (or just sitting up in the stand with my Dad). I hope the house doesn't need to be for sale too long, mainly so I can get it behind me and start focusing on other things. It would also be nice to not have to stress my self out everyday about how much money I do or don't have.

For most of this week I've been troubling myself with what I'm going to do this weekend. It just seems like if I'm sitting at home along, nothing positive comes out of it. Usually I'm obssesively checking my email, phone or facebook with no results. I seem to be the happiest when other people are around but I don't have a great deal of friends in the Oshkosh area. As it stands it doesn't look like I'm doing anything this weekend, which sucks. I guess after having such a top notch time last weekend I don't know what I'll do with myself this weekend. So far it seems that just about everybody is busy with one thing or another or would rather not hang out with me.

Yeah, this is quite the self loathing blog isn't it? Well hit me up tonight, Saturday, or Sunday if any of you 5 people out there that read my blog are free.

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Armageddon is Nigh

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:08:09 CST

Doesn't it seem like every time you check the news, another company is going out of business or laying off half their employees? Heck, last week my own company laid off 30 corporate employees, 2 which were in my own department! It's really terrible, and I really feel for the people that got let go. It sucks!

I am almost to the point of advocating, people withdraw all of their money from their savings and invest in the 4 G's: Guns, Gold, Groceries & Generators. Yes, no matter how bad of a depression the country gets into, the 4 G's will always be of value even when the US dollar is only worth the paper it is printed on.

Another reason 'Armageddon is Nigh' is that I am getting a divorce. Yes, unfortunately Emily and I can not work out our differences and we're in the process of splitting up all of our possessions. She is no longer living at our house and today she is coming over and removing a lot of her possessions.

If anybody cares, I'm doing alright regarding the whole situation. When I'm alone I sometimes feel bad, other times I'm ok, but I've been trying to stay active with friends and family and other interests as much as possible. I've been playing a lot of guitar lately and that has helped me relieve some stress.

I've pretty much convinced myself already that I'll have to sell the house. I really don't want to but it just seems like it needs to be done. It also makes for one less issue to debate about in these post-marriage times. Things will be rough for both Emily and I, financially and emotionally but hopefully we can get through the process quickly and as painlessly as possible.

Also, something many people probably didn't know, but I had applied for a job in Green Bay. Had I got the job I would have fared a lot better and probably been able to keep my house but I was told today that I won't be getting it. I already told my current employer that I had interviewed so this isn't some double-secret information coming out. I always try to looking on the bright side of whatever lousy situation I'm in, and I guess all I can say about this is that now it's made my future choices a lot easier to make, like whether to keep the house or not, or what city I should live in.

Well probably not the most upbeat blog post I've ever written but I feel like I might as well just get lay it all out there.

Props go out to the Holyland.

Fin.

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Halloween Roundup 2008

Neal Grosskopf — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:40:29 CST

Well it's Halloween time once again. I've always enjoyed this time of the year because of all the great movies that are on TV, half which I already own, but like most people I watch them on TV for some reason.

Last weekend was our annual Terror on the Fox get together. Tyler and some of his friends came along. Overall it was a fun time although it seems to get more and more expensive each year. This year they had a ticket for $32 that allowed you to skip the whole line and go to the haunted house right away. The funny thing is the haunted house only takes about 15 minutes to get through. We opted for the $14 wait in line ticket which consists of standing in line for about an hour or hour and a half. I figure if you calculate the amount of time you get to spend with your friends the waiting in line ticket is a better value.

The night before Terror on the Fox, Tyler and I went to see Saw V in the theaters. For the past 5 years there has been a new Saw movie release each Halloween. At this point in the series the plot is inheritably getting harder to make sense of because of all the events that have unfolded in the prior 4 movies. Regardless I'll still go and see any future releases of the series. Look to my reviews section for a review of the movie soon.

Also, an update on my site statistics. Since October 9th, I've seen almost 10,000 visits on my site! I've also fell in love with web analytics again since I'm in the beta group for Google Analytics. The new version allows me to segment all my statistics whether it's by browser version, keyword searched, referring site etc. It's really awesome and brings a new level to "stalking my website visitors".

Well that's about all for now.

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I'm Famous - Take III

Neal Grosskopf — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:55:46 CST

Completely ignoring the fact that I went on vacation and I am home, I going to blog about something completely different because it seems worth of talking about than going all the way to Florida for the first time.

I was nonchalantly checking my Google Analytics reports today to see how I faired while I was out Wednesday through Saturday. At first I thought there was something wrong, See below:

It almost seemed like GA lost all my prior analytics history up until a few days ago. Upon closer investigation I found out that I was linked to from one of the premier CSS Gallery websites: CSS Beauty. So there sits my CSS Browser Hacks article on the home page of CSS Beauty, how exciting! Judging by other articles on there, my link should sit there for a couple of weeks which means I should receive a fair deal of exposure over the next couple weeks.

In two full days my website has seen 2,703 visits and 3,815 page views which is close to what I have been getting in a full month. I was also featured on the home page of delicious for a brief period of time it appears because I've experienced a great deal of inbound links from the home page of delicious.com. I've since been demoted to the CSS category page and a couple other category pages.

Because I was featured on such a great site, I've also seen inbound links from all other sources. Currently subtracting traffic from search, I have 222 distinct inbound links to my CSS browser hacks page in the last 2 days. Probably the only unfortunate thing about this is my link was posted on a Friday which is usually the least trafficked day of the week for websites, so I'm curious if I will get more traffic on Monday, which is one of the more popular days of the week or if it will start to go down again.

On a side note, I'm extremely surprised my website was even able to stay up during these events since it runs off of a puny Microsoft Access database, so if Monday's traffic trends up higher my site might just go down completely.

Well that's all for now. I will post another blog Monday or Tuesday night regarding my trip to Florida. Peace.

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Not Much New

Neal Grosskopf — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:22:28 CST

Well not a great deal of news to report lately. I bought a new video game called SPORE. It is from the creators of The Sims and Sim City. The game is actually quite a bit of fun despite all the bad reviews it is getting from computer nerds due to the software piracy features the game has. If people could look past that they would see that it's a lot of fun.

I haven't made many updates on my website lately because I've been busy developing two other sites. My site has been getting a lot of traffic still despite the lack of updates I have been making to it. For September which isn't over yet, I've already received more than 2,000 visits to my site which averages over 80 visits per day. Not too shabby eh?

For all those wondering how our dog Blondie is doing; she is doing just fine now. We took her to the vet the other day to get some more vaccinations so hopefully she should be better from now on.

Also my trip to Fort Lauderdale is coming up soon. I would be more excited but it probably won't be that exciting. Our stupid laptop died the other day. When I press the power button all I get is a flashing red light on the console and it doesn't turn on. I've tried hooking it up to the outlet with and without the battery and it still doesn't turn on. I would be easier to troubleshoot it but I don't have any extra batteries or power cables laying around. I wouldn't care that the laptop is dead so much, but I wanted to bring that with me when I traveled so I would have something to do other than sitting in my hotel room, alone, watching cable TV.

Fin

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