Yes, it's an all-car-show weekend in Kenosha!  The 7th Annual Kenosha Classic Cruise-In Car Show will be held on Saturday, down 6th Avenue in Kenosha, 9:00am - 3:00pm.  We'll be going to this one too, so by the end of the weekend we should be sick and tired of cars altogether, but I should have one heckuva stack of photos to post!

The Kenosha Unified School District will have labor peace the next three years. Human Services Director Sharonda Glass approached the teachers’ union about re-opening the current year contract because of rising health care costs, and the two sides came to a deal on that, PLUS a 2-year successor agreement, including pay increases. “Knowing what your costs are going to be over the next couple of years, as it relates to health insurance, is huge,” Glass said.  Full story

Our copy of this morning's paper has a yellow stain on it.  I'm not sure if this was intentional, or if a dog came up on our porch this morning.  Can anyone else confirm or deny that their paper looks like this today?

During our walk we stopped to feed some bread to the ducks at the tot park today.  Take a look at the exciting footage...in 2 videos and a few photos.  It's so exciting, I bet you could watch and stream both videos simultaneously and not miss a thing!  Give it a go.  (Click on the "read more" link to view the videos)

Netflix has finally added instant streaming to the iPod and iPhone!  Last Thursday (somehow I missed this last week) they release the app in the app store.  You can now use your iPod or iPhone to watch any movie or video available on Netflix Instant!  This is huge for me--I've been drooling for this since the iPad was first released.  Netflix had the app available for the iPad several months ago when the iPod was first released, but they held back on releasing the app for the iPod and iPhone for some reason, until now.  My guess is that they made an exclusivity deal with Apple so they could sell more iPads for the first few months of its release.  Arrg.  Anyway, it's here now, and I'm much happier.  I now have thousands of movies and TV shows available almost anywhere I am, instantly!--WITHOUT having to jailbreak my iPod.

I have installed several Facebook extensions on my site today.  Please try them out and see if they work ok.  the "Connect your account to Facebook" option allows you to sign in (or sign up) linking your Facebook account to your jimtrottier.com account.  Once linked, you can login with either account on our site.  The "Share" buttons and other Facebook blocks are fairly self-explanatory.  Please let me know what you think.  I'm a little leery about connecting directly to Facebook like this though--It does mean that Facebook needs to be accessible in order to use my site, so if Facebook should go down for some reason, my site is also going to be unusable until Facebook is back up or until I disable the Facebook connections.

ESTATE SALE

For the Estate of Dennis "Bear" Wegmann

2209 Ezekiel Avenue
Zion, IL
In garage in back
Saturday, August 28th, 2010
12:00pm - 3:00pm

Generators, table saw, swimming pool supplies, lawn & garden equipment, beer can collectibles, model train set, household appliances, tools, bookshelves, party supplies, and much more!

Kevin and Socks went with me for my daily walk this evening.  I decided to walk on Simmons Island this time and I brought the camera.  I posted a few of the shots I took.  The two posted here are my favorites from the batch.  Click here for the entire set.

A 17-year-old boy from Zion Illinois is being called a hero, for saving the life of a 14-year-old swimmer in Kenosha County.  Sheriff’s sergeant Tom Gilley said the 14-year-old and another boy were swimming at Silver Lake Park Monday when they went past a designated swim boundary – and the 14-year-old got one of his legs stuck in some weeds under the water. Fully story

Racine County Sheriff's Department officials have identified James J. Cudahy, 56, of Kenosha as the victim of a Friday accident at highways 11 and 32.  Cudahy's vehicle crashed into a temporary construction wall at the intersection, caught fire and burned up. Full story

Ok, I think we're close to being there on the layout.  I ultimately decided to go kinda simple.  It's much less confusing for most people I think.  The forums still seem like a lot of information all at once, but hopefully it's easy to pick up and start using.  I went a little nuts on Profile Avatars this morning.  I needed a break.  Feel free to create your new account here, and be sure to "select image from gallery" in your profile.  Or, if you want to, just upload your own avatar image.  It will be displayed in any posting you make in the forums and in your profile that others can see.  There's hundreds to choose from already--like I said, I went nuts.

I also just posted one of my favorite old articles, dug up from an old copy of my website's database--"Lost Peanut", the time we lost Peanut, our Chihuahua, for a few days.  You'll start to see more old postings pop in over time, and they'll automatically appear in back in the list in the order they were originally posted, so be sure to run through the old postings occasionally to catch up.  That's about it for now, time to get busy on Saturday chores... :(

Oh, and if you were expecting some major ranting on TotalChoiceHosting, my apologies.  After a lot of thought, I guess most of the blame has to go on me for not having a current backup.  A full restore would have been fairly easy, if I had one.  So there ya go.  I'm on a new host now though... one with at least some better BACKUP features, so that's a good thing.  Now time to focus on rebuilding...  

Ok, I have most major elements in place on the site, so feel free to sign up, maybe choose an avatar (or upload your own), and look around a bit.  Not much here yet, and things will probably move around a lot in the coming weeks.  I would appreciate everyone's input though... what's neat, what sucks, you know the drill.  At least this time you only need ONE login for the site.  No more separate signins for the forum section, the main blog section, the photo section, etc.  Speaking of which, I didn't lose any photos in the disaster, since I moved everything to Flickr!  I just have to add the links back onto the site, but all 19,000+ images are still intact.  That's something, at least.

I'm still digging for my old database backups to dig up our cherished "Peanut posting" as well as other family milestones (and tragedies) that were all documented before on my site.  It'll be back, it'll just take some time.  Hang in there, there's much more to come.

Oh, I almost forgot the main reason for this post, which was its title: Less than an hour after I installed Joomla on the new server I started getting hit with fake user accounts, fully activated too, confirming they're human, all with Russian (.ru) e-mail addresses.  So they're still on me like flies on poop, if they're the ones responsible for the demise of my last site.  I guess we'll see.  Of course hackers these days like to stay hidden behind the scenes and would rather embed themselves deep within your website for as long as possible without exposing themselves... So who goes to the extreme of infecting a site so deeply that the hosting company has to wipe it out completely?  What's the point in that?  It only results in losing access to the site completely and having it get rebuilt even more current and protected than before.  Such a waste.   

My latest obsession on the iPod is Slacker Radio (often used when I'm playing Words With Friends). I've tried a lot of different radio apps on the iPod. Several of them I liked, but a big feature that I found with Slacker that kept me using it is it's station caching. Since I use the Touch and not the iPhone, Im not always connected to a network. This alone eliminates the functionality of most radio apps, but with Slacker's station caching, all I have to do is choose a cached station in Slacker and I can play everything just as if I were connected to a network. It can take several minutes to cache a station, but that's expecte. From the details I've read, Slacker will cache 100 songs for a station initially, and gradually increase the cache as you listen to the station and refresh the cache. They do some nice shuffling in the background apparently, because I can listen to a station over and over and it seems I always hear songs I haven't heard before, yet I still sometimes hear replays, but most of the time it's only for songs I've "hearted", which you do when you hear a favorite you like. When you refresh your cached stations (you have to do them all at once, you can't pick and choose which ones to cache and any given time) it seems to take longest to re-cache stations you've listened to since you last cached, so I would guess it's dumping the songs you've banned, adding more new songs, and syncing your listening preferences with the Slacker servers. Every time I visit the website on my PC it shows me everything I've listen to, so it certainly "remembers" everything. Other features include many curated stations from Slacker, including a couple of very good Comedy channels (one Explicit, one 'clean'), search features to find exactly the artists or songs you want to hear, the ability to build your own custom stations, bios, lyrics, and reviews of the songs and artists as you play them, large thumbnail of the current song playing (WHOOHOO! Love it!) and much more. A few of these features only work in "Slacker Plus", the subscription service, but that's expected. Since the service is only $4.99 a month (or $3.99 a month if you pay yearly), it's well worth the price for the features you get, in my opinion. There is also an web version of Slacker, which is actually much easier to use for building custom stations than the iPod is, and fortunately every station and favorite you save immediately appears on both your PC and your iPod, since it saves to your Slacker account itself. They also list many stand-alone digital radio devices that now support Slacker, which is a good indication of their stability as a company. Overall, I highly recommend Slacker as a music streaming service, it ROCKS. Here's some screenshots of it from my iPod, and here's the Slacker website

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A storm that dumped more than 3½ inches in Kenosha Wednesday afternoon caused flash flooding and stranded several motorists, including at least one man whose car became submerged in 4 feet of water. Rescue crews from the Kenosha Fire Department were called to Highway K and the West Frontage Road at about 5:30 p.m. for a report of a vehicle floating in high water. The intersection was closed for several hours due to flooding. Full article

We had a big thunderstorm pass through Kenosha today, and it did a lot of damage around town. Sandy's brother Mike and her cousin Debbie both had some tree damage. Sandy went out and took some photos and Mike took a few himself. They're all in the photo set I just uploaded. Click on the thumbnail to take a look.