The sun helps her dream.

It's really for her own good... Plus she loves it.

If I told you this took me 8 years to complete would you believe me? (Click for larger version)

After much waiting and toil, I have completed the online version of my thesis, completely customized for the web.  Adopting hundreds of pages with images, tables, and outlines is not a terribly fun task; more a labor of love, but I am happy with the result and hope that it can provide a useful...

After working on this thesis for, well, let's face it, WAY too long, I am finally DONE.   It's actually kind of hard to believe, and I'm pretty sure that my wife was thinking that this day wouldn't actually arrive.  I should have made a bet. Basically what this means is that in the next... um,...

I transitioned from the built-in 1&1 wordpress blog to a standalone upload of the lastest wordpress version, so I can have more control over everything, particularly the look and feel, although the widgest are cool too... :)  For example I can easily include photos from flicker like this:

I added a few tools from freefind.com: a internal search, a what's new page, and a site map.  They come with some minimal advertising, so I might not keep them, but for now they work, and they let me use the Spirit Alchemy template to make them look decent.

Through Scientific American I found a way to offset the carbon footprint of my website.  The company, CO2Stats, provides a free carbon offset counter that automatically counts the carbon footprint caused by visitors to the site, mostly from the energy consumed by the computers used to access and host the site.  What is great...

Just a tiny update: I added a randomized image of some of the products at the Spirit Alchemy CafePress store.  Had to learn a little bit about javascript to do so, but was easily successful.  I hope this isn't too commercial and/or annoying for the front page.

I opened a store at CafePress to offer a variety of products (T-Shirts, Sweatshirts, Bumper Stickers, Mugs, License Plate Frames, Journals, and MORE) that have designs related to the spirit alchemy website. The store is http://www.cafepress.com/spirit_alchemy - (there's an underscore  between the words, as 'spiritalchemy' was already taken, but my stuff is WAY better!)

One of my interests is photography, and periodically I might put a photo here.  Feel free to see some of my other work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiritself/ For example, this was taken on a recent hike to Multnomah Falls... just a tiny fern (?) growing from between the cracks of two rocks forming one of the retaining walls. ...