Up again at 10am, I wandered downstairs to Jeff and Olivia's living room. I plopped down with my laptop and got my mail, then turned on the TV. I didn't flip more than 55 channels before I saw Sesame Street playing. Hell yea. :) Ernie's got a new, higher-pitched voice. I guess it wouldn't be "new," since Jim Henson died a while ago. His replacement has the tones right, just not the pitch. A kid likely wouldn't notice though. I hopped on AIM to see who was going to be able to make lunch.

I got cleaned up and went to meet Chris, Olivia and Eric at El Chapala, which we affectionately refer to as "Chapalapa," the monniker given when Lauren doesn't remember the name of something- she simply makes up her own more-fun word. :) Watching traffic breeze by on Staples Mill at noon was pretty cool. I wasn't at work, working, or even thinking about being at work. And that's what was so cool about it. I was a free bird. I could do anything I wanted. The weather was awesome. I stood outside as I waited.

Moments later, Eric and Chris arrived. We hung out outside for only a minute before Olivia arrived. Lunch was good- I had way too much food and not enough water (the waiter came by once. To drop off the food. That was it). It was fun hanging out with everyone.

I came back to Jeff and Olivia's house and unplugged from the network. With IndigoPerl, I have my own internal web-server, so I could play around with peer2all.com and fix things that needed fixing without having to test my live site. I copied down my most current files before unplugging, then got to work. My mission was to get the site working for all browsers, and clean things up a bit.

< GeekyDetails > All of the margin="-265" commands got pulled in favor of tables that didn't need that stuff. I still wanted a site that would look good at 800x600 and 1600x1200, so I went with percentage-based widths. I threw the leftbar into a table cell, crunched the leftbar up a bit to make it less wide, got it fitting into an 800x600 browser, and then played some more with the divs. See, CSS could have been my solution, had I done my homework about it and figured out how to do what I was missing. I guarantee I could have gotten it to work. It's just that I didn't want to research it. It worked fine in 90% of browsers, so I took the easy way out. < /GeekyDetails >

But if you recall, I spent many an evening bitching about what still needed to be done to the site. Well, that's what the next few hours were spent working on. When my prototype was looking good locally, I made the changes to MT on peer2all.com and BAM. A new site. Older entries now list the date and title of that entry, along with links to take you to the next and previous links, the site works in IE for Macintosh (a long-standing to-do item from Jeff and Jennifer), it looks damned decent at 800x600 and still looks good for my 1600x1200 folks (myself included. I'm never going back! Never, you hear me! Never! Muh-hu-hu-ah-ha-ha!!)

So now I have a peer2all.com that I'm somewhat happy with. I'm not at the point where I'd submit myself to any contests... this is by far the most plain design I've ever done. It's not even a design, really- more of a layout with colors picked. But you know what? The focus of my site is my content. (this garbage you're reading now) so really, I want this to be in the foreground, not some flashy site with spinny buttons, a scrolling marquis and swanky midi music.

The redesign took about 4 hours of little tweaks as I watched the Do it Yourself Channel on the couch. When it was time to upload, I pulled up to their bar and plugged into their kitchen CAT-5 connection. (you've gotta love geeks with ethernet ports next to the kitchen sink) The transformation made it without a hitch and I was happy again.

I got a call from Mike and headed down to the South Side. Dinner with Eric (stag this past week, while Kelly was on Spring Break) at their place over some pork barbecue. I estimated that it would take about 40 minutes to get there from Jeff and Olivia's at 4pm. I left at 4:20 and arrived at 5 on the dot. Damn. I'm good.

The whole house smelled of pork, cooking in its own juices. Mmmm... it smelled great. We talked about geek stuff for a while in the kitchen before Lauren got home from work. Then we took a trip to Mike's office. It looked strange being all cleaned up. It looks great! Lots of room. We talked about putting in wood floors and all that would be involved. Damn. I want a house. Lauren arrived and got the stuff out of the crock pot for Mike to cook up. I passed out on the couch. When I woke up, it was dinner time.

Great eats at the Sostes'es, we retired to the living room to watch Survivor. I donned a Survivor Buff (quite comfortable, actually) and saw the show, which turned out to be a recap. Perfect for a non-Survivor-fan like me. So now that I'm up to speed, I'm still... well, not all that eager to see who wins. Maybe a slight curiosity...

I was set on leaving before CSI so I could see it with Mom at home. But when I thought about how bad traffic was going to suck, I decided to stay and have some cake. Eric picked up a cake from Ukrops before he arrived, so we had that. It was delicious. CSI turned out to be a repeat, so I opted to hit the road. My Richmond visit was perfect, but it needed to come to an end... I had very important meetings the next day at work that couldn't be missed.

(don't get me wrong, I wanted to miss them.... but these were important meetings. They were important enough for me to come back from a two-day vacation and go back to work for a day, then have a weekend. Had it not been for these meetings, I could take a 5-day weekend.)

The trip home was rather uneventful.. a few dead-stops based on rubbernecking, but otherwise I was home rather quickly. I brought my junk to my room and went straight to bed. Had to be up early the next day to get some prep-work done on the big meeting with Boston.