I’m still Brian Fellow!

Five years ago, I started this blog with a simple Blogspot account and an innocuous post titled “I’m Brian Fellow!” At the time, I was working at Perceptive Software and my buddy Kevin and I used to laugh constantly at this skit. It always makes me laugh.

In that post, I stated the following, in an attempt to introduce myself to the blogodome:

Things I like:

• hanging with my wife and dog
• movies
• music (I really really like my iPod + iTunes)
• Chipotle burritos
• the TV show “Alias” – the best show EVER
• Apple computers
• most EA Sports video games for PS2
• poker (only recently really, but I like it a lot)
• reading (but only sometimes)
• cheeseburgers
• Mountain Dew (most forms, though I have yet to try the new black kind)
• The Chiefs

Things I dislike:

• ignorance
• people who drive with their lights on during the day
• temperatures over 85 degrees
• people who don’t vote because “one vote doesn’t make a difference”
• pants other than jeans
• old navy t-shirts (they are too short for my long torso)
• the general refusal of PC users to accept the Firewire interface, favoring USB (for some god-forsaken reason) over it

I’m a generally happy guy. But I’m opinionated and when I think a certain way…I’ll tell you. Just FYI.

Most of this is still true.

Sure, “Alias” isn’t on the air anymore. And it definitely went downhill in its later years. I rarely play my PS2 anymore (although I might play a Wii if I had one with Beatles Rock Band. I still dislike ignorance and temperatures above 85 degrees (which makes the glorious weather in KC all the more…um…glorious). And while I would prefer to wear jeans everyday, I don’t, since I can’t really. At least not currently. Old Navy did something to their T-shirts and they fit better now. And I’m totally over the Firewire/USB thing.

But not really.

So it’s been five years since I started blogging. Not much has changed about me. I’ve always treated this blog as an extension of my real life and I hope that it is reflected in my writing and when people meet me.

I can’t believe it. 863 posts in 38 categories with 1,164 tags and 2,182 comments. Thanks for reading. I will keep writing and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

I am now taking suggestions on colors, but they must be given in HEX value.

I found a fantastic plugin that sends notification e-mails using SMTP instead of PHPMail.

Sweet.

Don’t forget about my pledge to not eat red meat. Help me buy a cow from Heifer International.

Shane…eats lightning and craps thunder.

If you have other ideas, please feel free to leave them in the comments. For now, if you’d like to see what made the cut, just refresh the page and watch the top. Some that I chose were actually variations on suggestions to make them either more accurate or funnier. Or they were edited so they’d fit. Others were ones that I thought of along the way.

Thanks again for your participation. And now, back to your regularly scheduled program…

Shane…

To see examples, just refresh the main page and watch the top banner to see what I’m talking about. There have been some great submissions so far. Keep them coming by commenting on this post.

I’ll be taking submissions a couple more days and then look to my site to see any new banners in the rotation. Thanks for your participation!

I’ve been wanting to create my own WordPress theme for a long time, but I’ve always been terrified of breaking the three years of blogging backlog I’ve got, so I never tackled it. Then Travis recently took a crack at it and he said it was easy. Now, granted, he is a genius. However, I was intrigued and I’ve been wanting to customize my site ever since. I am, after all, a web designer by trade.

So I mocked up what I liked in Photoshop and coded the XHTML. Then, I used an existing theme to try and figure out the nuances of WordPress and PHP. I managed to figure most of it out and for the last 6 or 8 hours have been working diligently to get it up and running.

There’s no doubt that it’s buggy and I’ve missed plenty of stuff, but for now…it works.

As for the pink – you’ll notice that the design is rather dark…the only color coming from splashes of pink. I’ve decided that to raise awareness for Breast Cancer Awareness month. In addition, the darkness of the site is actually BETTER for the environment because monitors do not have to work as hard to display black. So in “going pink”, I’m also “going green”.

I’m planning on putting in a CSS switcher that will allow you to customize your colors to an extent, but that’s down the road. For now, I must say I’m pretty proud of myself for not breaking it. Sure there will be growing pains, but the fact that I managed to create a widget-ready theme in a night…well, that just makes my header all the more true.

So, I’m going to be doing some tweaking. Bear with me. I doubt it will be anytime soon before I jump into creating an actual theme like the one in my previous post, but we’ll see.

I’m testing out this new web site, ReviewMe.com, a place where bloggers and advertisers can meet together in pursuit of one glorious thing: Money.

Now, I’m not one of the most famous bloggers in the world by any means, but once I heard of the concept (you submit your site, advertisers submit requests for reviews, you write them, they pay you), I thought it sounded like something I would like to try. First…reviewing stuff for money? Sounds like a conflict of interest if you ask me, but the web site states that you don’t have to necessarily be positive in your reviews. Having the assertion that you can remain objective and STILL get paid…that sounded like some sweet action to me.

So I checked the site out and submitted this fair blog to be a part of their directory. Apparently, there are not many poker bloggers because I got a request for review immediately after signing up (the aforementioned previous post).

Once I accepted the review, all I had to do was write the review, enter the address of the review, then click one button on the Review Me site to complete the process. A later e-mail notified me that my review had been approved (all reviews must be at least 200 words), and I’ll be getting $20 for my review of Cardroom Supply. Pretty cool.

So, here’s how this applies to you, dear reader: I’ll be submitting reviews on here periodically as a part of this program. I like money, particularly that which doesn’t require a heckuva lot of work. I’ll do my best to stay as neutral as I can, but I imagine that the more money I receive, the happier I’ll be. Either way, I’ll still do my best to post other content too.

Feel free to call me a hypocrite in the comments.

The preceding is a paid advertisement as a part of the ReviewMe.com network.

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Are they gone yet?

OK, so here’s the deal for those of you that actually visit the site instead of reading the feed: I’m messing with the presentation…it may be a while before I’m done. I’m adding some AdSense ads and stuff in the sidebar (which may or may not stay) and I’m considering working on my very own WordPress theme. It might be a good exercise for me, but PHP scares me. It could be a big old mess.

I know I just redesigned, but after further exploration in a lesser browser (that doesn’t support PNG files…STUPID IE!), I realized it wasn’t displaying right.

I’ve said this many times, but I’ll have some time on my hands in a little while. More on that shortly. Have a great evening.

I did remove the Flickr photos from the sidebar, although I doubt anyone noticed. Content soon. I also have an update on the weight loss (thought I forgot, didn’t you?).