Just ‘cuz I’m such a rebel, I’m linking to this site. I’m not making this up. See for yourself.

“Hyperlinking to this site, is not permitted without the express prior permission of Sellotape®.”

http://www.sellotape.co.uk/copyright.htm

My nephew, Sgt. Dustin Ladd, is on his way home from Iraq. He is coming home injured, but, thank God, not as a casualty of war. He’s got a serious back problem that could not be diagnosed in the field. He’ll spend some time at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, and, most likely, head back home to the Panhandle after that.

Please continue to pray for the other 128,000 brave American men and women protecting freedom in Iraq.

<Game Geek Post Advisory>
If you’re not familiar with Ultima Online or other, similar MMP RP games, this won’t make any sense to you.
</Game Geek Post Advisory>
*Names changed to protect the guilty*
My guild on Montis Draconis has been the sole Order guild for months now. There are several Chaos guilds that have had a heyday beating up on the [GoodGuys], since we are only just learning to do PvP. All our characters have been designed for PvM and are really good at it, but when the Chaos guys started playing rough, we had to adapt. The other Order guilds changed to Neutral and ran off to Trammel (where PvP is a no-no).

It’s taken many weeks to tweak our characters for PvP and to train up new characters, but we are finally seeing some fruit. Last night, after drafting in yet another experienced, former PvM player into the guild, we had our first fairly successful raid and killed two of the “big boys” on the Chaos side.

[ToughtBadGuy1] (a.k.a. McButtHead) is one of those annoying, mouthy characters constantly sending messages about how everyone is a sissy and he “pwns” the Order guilds. Last night, McButtHead was beheaded and, just as we all predicted, he instantly logged off and spent the rest of the night pouting off-line. We know this because his cohort, [ToughtBadGuy2] , who is much cooler and a nice role-player, is his roommate and he laughed at [ToughtBadGuy1] right along with the rest of us. [ToughtBadGuy2] was also taken down, but was much more gracious about it. We’ll have lots of fun reminding [ToughtBadGuy1] that he’s not the king-of-the-world he thinks he is.

Yaaay [GoodGuys]!

Tammy has adapted well to being one-legged. She’s frustrated with life in a cast, tired of it, but learning to cope.

We’ve found the easiest way for her to get up and down the two flights of stairs to our apartment is to ride piggy-back on yours truly. She’s learned how to get in and out of the tub on her own, get herself dressed, carry paperwork around the office, and drive left-footed. I still drive her to work most mornings, just to be safe, but on rare occasions when our work schedules don’t jive, she drives herself. We’ve got a nice, safe, rounded-tip hanger that she can use to attack the occasional itch. She still can’t carry most stuff from room to room, but that’s what I’m here for.

We’ve also found a remedy for the deep bruising on her hands from using the crutches. Water Noodles, those long, brightly colored, foam pool toys are very easy to cut into short sections, and the hole in the middle perfectly fits the plastic handles on her crutches. They look kinda funny, bright yellow handles that are twice the diameter of the originals, but if they alleviate the pain, who cares. The first set lasted a week before the foam broke down and collapsed. I think we have enough noodle to last until she’s done with the aluminum torture devices.

In two more weeks she goes in to get a “velcro soft cast”. We’re hoping that she’ll be able to walk on it, but that’s all up to the doc.

I’ve been asked before where the name Light-Spark came from. I spent a great deal of time thinking about the perfect domain name and finding out that all the perfect ones are already taken.

Since my site would cover web development, graphic art, and photography, I wanted something that could apply to all three. My logic was as follows. All computer graphics and programming are, in the end, nothing more than tiny electric charges bouncing between different pieces of silicon and copper that eventually produce light in a cathode ray tube (that’s what your monitor is). Photography is capturing light to film. (Photo - light, graphy - writing.) So I ran the gamut of domain names that related to light and electricity. Light-Spark was the winner. (In fact, lightspark.com was already taken too, so I had to hyphenate.)