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I was at Ground Zero on Thursday and I took the picture above. It is of the Freedom Tower being built. At first I had no idea why I was being drawn over there, now as I see the reports that Osama Bin Laden is dead, I understand it. I’ve talked about how I speak to and see the dead before, but last week, it was like they were calling me to see this. When I got there I felt so much pain and sorrow and even confusion from the dead. It was something like I’ve never felt before. Unfortunately, it was something that I wasn’t able to shake, it seemed as though some of the dead from there were still with me. It was weird, I have heard stories about the dead following ghosts home, but that was usually during investigations and for the most part those were evil spirits. Today those feelings changed, it was as if the ghosts were getting relief and could move on and be with their families and not be in such a sad state. Unfortunately I didn’t understand why until I saw it on the news. Osama Bin Laden was killed today. Personally this is a great thing because I remember after September 11th the sky was black for days due to the smoke and ash. It means so much more now, after I felt what those ghosts felt before and what they feel now. It makes this news mean so much more.

It seems like every few years someone I know dies. It started with my grandmother and ever since her death I’ve lost friends, teachers, and family members every few years. This week a friend from high school, Diedre Banovich died in a housefire. I’ve been really shook up the last few days and have gravitated toward people who knew her and reconnected with some that I haven’t really spoken to a lot lately.

It sucks that when you grow up you also grow apart from people who you were close to when you were younger. People I consider brothers I barely talk to anymore, but this week I have been trying to talk to them on XBox and on the phone due to this. Bob asked me if thought this was the Collier Curse or if this is something everyone our age goes through, losing good people in your life and eventually it stops for a while. For those who don’t know the Collier Curse is something that Collier High School students claim happens when kids leave the school. I have to admit thatsome weird and awful stuff has happened to a lot of us, though we seem to grow together and be a family years after we graduate high school, which I think is unique for a school of any kind to do. Maybe it is the universe’s way of telling us that no matter what this will be a part of your life and make up who you are, or maybe it is all just a huge coincidence. Either way I just know that it sucks and that these bad things shouldn’t be happening to such good people.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been going through and trying to make my site more SEO friendly. I will be the first to admit that when I started this site years ago, I had no idea what SEO was and I just built it with bad SEO on top of bad SEO. Now I am going through, trying to change things and better optimize things for search engines. It’s a pain though since I have to go through each section and try and come up with unique content for things like the the gallery images and whatnot. I think I am getting a good handle on things though, it is just going to take a while to redo a lot of these pages and sections.

SEO isn’t the only thing I am working on though, I have a big marketing strategy for the fanlistings that I did last year, so hopefully the strategy pays off again, if it does as well this time then I will continue the strategy on a more consistent basis. I am actually not expecting things to be AS good since I am tweaking it a bit, but if it does even half as well, then I am definitely going to continue it.

I am also looking at a spider work its way through the site to create a sitemap for me. Last night it stalled when I tried to stop it, but today if I just let it go by itself I think it will be fine, it just might take a few more hours to complete.

So I know I have been talking about work, a lot, but since I have had a bit of a break today as far as what needs to be completed goes, I decided to just work on a few clients and while I was waiting on them to get back to me, I would work on my site. It’s not going to be this easy the rest of the week though, tomorrow I am heading into the city to hopefully be up with phase one of this big project that has been on and off since September.

So I finished that big project a while ago, but I have been swamped with other things. I have three major clients in the city, all working in the same office, but divided up into separate companies. The big project was for one of them, but the other two have keeping me busy since September. On top of being an independent contractor for them, I also have other clients, including one from last year who I went to Tech Crunch Disrupt to represent, a Local site, working on a site for a friend’s client, and a client in England. To say the least, I am very busy. I am basically working seven days a week, trying to get as much done as I can. I have another big project that I am undertaking at the moment and I should be finishing it up soon, it shouldn’t be too difficult, just minor cosmetic things at this stage since all the development is basically done.

This Friday I head off for vacation though, Kris has the whole day off so we are heading out really early. It’s going to be the first time in a few months I take a weekend off, let alone a three day weekend, so hopefully I can be well rested during it.

In other news, I bought a new laptop and iPod. I would have posted pictures, maybe next post, since I didn’t take any yet. On top of the new laptop and iPod, our room is kind of more of a mess than usual since we bought an armoire that is bigger than the dresser we used to have and we are trying to sort everything still. My favorite new toy is my laptop, naturally. My iPod is a pain because I need to convert a lot of my music from Flac to be able to be used on it. My laptop is a beast, 6 gigs of RAM and the Beats Audio. It just sucks that the most I have used it is for work when I am in the city. I am thinking about booting up some Halo 2 on it though, I do miss that game and I imagine that the laptop could handle it well, plus I am curious to see how many people play it on PC.

Yes I know I am behind on comments and I haven’t updated my site in a while. Well actually that isn’t true, you will notice that I have added a jquery featured slider to the home page, and on some of the pages I have been trying to add in some better meta tags for SEO purposes, as well as other things to improve the SEO of the site. So far I have seen a bit of an improvement, but I just did a few sections and it improved, once I can get the rest of the site optimized, I imagine I will have a lot more traffic.

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I am just going to come out with it, up until Smallville, live action Superman films and television shows were boring. Even Superman Returns that came out a few years ago, directed by the very talented Bryan Singer, was very boring, maybe even more so than Superman 2. I don’t necessarily believe that is any one person’s fault, I blame the way it is handled. Smallville did something that to my knowledge has never been done before, it’s taken Clark Kent and made him interesting. Coming up on the last five episodes of the series you can go through the last ten years and see the journey he has faced, from being one of his only kind on earth, to being a hero only because he can do things others can’t, to finally accepting his fate and fully embracing it.

A lot of people are complaining that Clark should be wearing the suit already and stop being the Blur and embrace Superman already, but that character Clark is still turning into. Once Clark embraces being Superman and fully making Clark Kent the disguise, then it is no longer the story of Clark, it is the story of Superman, and once it is that story then the story of Clark completely changes. Once Superman is born, the story of Clark Kent in Smallville ends. He no longer is a guy who goes out saving people because he can, he becomes a super hero who disguises himself as Clark because he has to, and we’ve seen that story five times in movies before and every time the scenes with Clark are boring.

Think about the Burton and Schumacher Batman movies, in those movies I know personally I couldn’t wait for Batman to come on screen and for Bruce to hide his face, because in those movies Batman was the focus and Bruce was the secret identity that we had no interest in seeing because like Clark he is a disguise and not who the character really is. I think Nolan’s Batman movies really embrace the idea that, like in Smallville, the hero and the person are really the same person, at least to those closest to him.

For those of you who don’t know, Nolan is producer on a new Superman movie starring Hendry Cavill, Amy Adams, Diane Lane, and Kevin Costner, Zack Snyder is directing the movie and has given big praise to Smallville recently. He says his story will be more focused on Clark becoming Superman, so hopefully they will do what was done with Batman and hopefully it will at least not make me want to fast forward through all of the Clark Kent scenes. Either way, my one main hope for this movie is that it has more action in it than an episode of Smallville and that it is not boring in the least.

It seems that I can only blog lately when I am going into the city. I think my last three blogs were written from my phone on the train. I guess that makes sense since I haven’t had time to even look at my site while home. I am hopefully finishing up this huge project that has taken up most of my time either tonight or tomorrow. It started as a simple WordPress job, but quickly got very advanced, so hopefully I can complete it soon.

Kris and I had a vacation planned for next weekend but it looks like that will need to be postponed for a little while, it sucks because we both could really use a vacation, I haven’t had a day off since Valentine’s Day weekend and I am exhausted, physically and mentally. once I complete this huge project I need to work on some smaller ones that have been kind of been pushed aside for the time.

I’ve talked about the Westboro Baptist Church in the past on this site and I didn’t think I would ever want to talk about them again, but after yesterday I want to. For those of you who don’t know, the WBC runs the site godhatesfags and they are the church that are constantly protesting soldier’s funerals, other churches, the Laramie Project, they even tried to protest the funeral for the girl that was shot in Arizona a few months back.  The church is run by Fred Phelps and the congregation is basically just members of his family. The members who leave his church say that Fred is a lunatic and even his kids who leave have said that he used to beat them growing up and the church is a way for him to get his anger out. To me, it sounds like this guy is gay and was brought up believing that homosexuality is wrong so he started doing this to cover up his feelings.

The church has stated that Elizabeth Taylor taught women it is okay to be whores and will therefor be protesting her funeral. These people are the kind that make me ashamed to be on the same planet as them. Now if you know me, you know that I have what Kris calls “diarreah of the mouth” and I have been expressing myself more and more without a filter online lately. Well yesterday and the day before I decided I would fuck with two of their members, Megan Phelps-Roper and Sara Phelps.

I knew that these people were crazy before, but after talking to them I can confirm that they should be locked away with a straight jacket on for the rest of their lives. They consider themselves Christian, but believe that their god is a vengeful one and only those who will smite the earth because we all not only live in sin, but condone it. They called funerals for fallen soldiers pep rallies and that a mother losing a child is only due to her living in sin and that she should be choosing to lose all sin from her life rather than mourning her son.

The craziest thing is that they praised Saddam before Operation Iraqi Freedom, they even went there to praise him for the way he ran the country and for his views on the Muslim teachings. They aren’t even just crazy as a whole, Megan Phelps confirmed that one of the reasons that she didn’t go to law school was because the end of the world is coming.

I told Sara I didn’t fear hell because I am planning a party when I get there, after all if you are going to be in a bad situation then you may as well try and have a good time right? She said I would be in so much pain I wouldn’t have a good time, still even if I was there suffering pain for eternity it would be so much better than being in heaven with the Phelps freaks.

The tsunami in Japan is very sad and very tragic, but even though it is so tragic, is it not okay to laugh to ease the pain?

Gilbert Gottfried was fired from being the Afflac duck voice for making jokes on Twitter regarding the events in Japan. His jokes, “I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, ‘They’ll be another one floating by any minute now'” and “I fucked a girl in japan. She screamed ‘I feel the earth move and I’m getting wet.'”, but should he be fired over that? Yes it is a tragic time in Japan, but are we not allowed to laugh? Comedians aren’t known for being appropriate, in fact, that is one of the reasons we love them and watch them. I’ve laughed at September 11th jokes, why shouldn’t we be able to laugh?

The night of the tsunami trending topics on Twitter were Pearl Harbor and Godzilla. A writer for the Cleveland show tweeted “The tsunami is payback for Pearl Harbor”, I’ll be honest, I knew it was wrong, but I still laughed a bit. It isn’t because I have no respect for the country or what they are going through, but because it was so messed up. Godzilla was trending because they were saying the tsunami was really just him waking up, not as funny, but still amusing.

Maybe some would call me an asshole, maybe some would say I have no respect because I can laugh through this, and because I can laugh at September 11th. I’m not laughing at them, I am laughing at the jokes. As inappropriate as they are, they are funny. Maybe the world needs more laughter right now, so let go of the political correctness, put down your differences, get together with a neighbor and just laugh. What else can we do, just wallow? They say laughing is the best medicine and I agree with them.

I am writing this on my phone as I am waiting for Kris’s uncle to finish eating. I worked over 40 hours this week and I will be working more when we get back from dinner tonight, I need to finish up one client’s ASP work and then connect CCBill for another client.

I have never really worked with ASP in the past, I did have one client previously that mistook ASP for PHP, but I managed to finish that without too much trouble. This ASP site isn’t going that bad either. I don’t necessarily hate ASP, but it has been so long since I have done Visual BASIC that I find myself reading my own tutorials trying to figure out what to do. There was a time in high school when I was doing ASP, but that was when I had lepslair and was hosted on a package without any server side coding, so all my code was only running on my computer, not my site. Since then though obviously things have changed, I just wish I could only work in PHP. Maybe I could find an ASP person I could outsource to. That would be nice.

I’ve noticed that over the course of the last few years I stopped being active on some of the forums I used to be active on, so I signed up to Social Engine Forum and started helping out over there the last few days. Social Engine is a really great piece of software and I would have used it here, but I didn’t want to be limited when integrating other stuff.  I am thinking I will start being more active on Social Engine Base again, afterall that is where one of my more recent clients found me, if nothing else it does get my name out there for support and anything that can promote you is very good, right? I think I will go troll those forums and help out if I can after this since I still have a while before I can leave. Does anyone else have forums that they are active in? I am looking to be more active.

I’ve been trying to work a minimum of 40 hours a week since that is the standard work week. So far I am up to 30.5 hours this week. With less than 10 hours to go to meet 40 hours I plan on having some easy days until Friday. I normally don’t take weekends off, so having 7 days to do 40 hours and then some easy days is better for me, otherwise having nothing to do makes me go crazy. I don’t know why I can’t relax, even last night I woke up at like 4Am and couldn’t fall back asleep until after 5, I felt so unproductive.

I always have to be doing something, in the midst of writing this post I fixed a lot issue for a client, checked up on some spoilers, and saw the new Thor pictures. I don’t know if this is just that my brain can’t function properly unless it’s doing 15 things at once, or what, but it is annoying. Does anyone else have this problem? I’ve been thinking for a while that maybe they were right back then and I do have attention deficit disorder, but I can’t exactly afford to be put on medication right now when doctor’s visits cost so much. Oh well I guess I will make due, maybe I can get something online that will be cheaper.

I’ve gotten behind on posting again, but to be honest that’s because nothing has really been going on. Kris and I went down to NJ on Saturday and Sunday we went to her grandmother’s for her mom’s birthday. Other than that we’ve both been working hard.

I need to pay my taxes soon, I am waiting (and hoping) that most of the people that owe me money pay me soon so I am all caught up. I am hoping to pay the taxes before the first car payment is due. I don’t know if it is going to hurt us that much, but anything extra going out is never good when you are waiting to be paid.

When we were down in NJ, my dad gave us his old Nikon FE2. I have always loved Nikon’s and while this isn’t exactly the digital beast that I’d love, I think it can be a great start to learning all about manually photography. Plus it gives me a chance to learn to develop film, something that I have always wanted to learn to do, hope this gives me the inspiration to take more pictures and finally learn to develop film.

So we had a nice little vacation over Valentine’s weekend. On the way home we stopped by a few car dealerships and Kris found the car she wanted. She has been going back and forth between a Chevy Malibu and an Equinox for over a year. She finally setled on an Equinox after driving it, so we decided to see if we could afford it. It’s been tight this week, but I have been working hard and hopefully soon it will pay off. It won’t be tight after some payments come in, I may even still be able to pay off some of the revolving debt we have pretty fast, it’s just a matter of having clients pay me. I worked over 50 hours last week and only one person has paid so far, most are backed up for a few weeks, and some only pay once a month, but hopefully things will be caught up soon.

I did relax today, I worked over 12 hours this weekend and today I played some COD: Zombies, and now I am trying to work on LepsLair, I do have some changes and some features I want to implement, I just need to figure out what is next and where I want it to go next. I have an idea, probably more based around some social features that I miss from the big sites. I also want to expand the article area with features, news, etc, I just need to get a clear definition of the titles.