A lot has happened in the last 4 weeks but here are few highlights:

I’m mostly finished with the revamp of Allied’s web site… just a few JavaScript tweaks and some content additions and it’ll be ready to go live when their new associate starts in early August. So yeah June was a profitable month which is always nice. But those months don’t happen very regularly at this point in my career.

Anyway, I certainly earned it as I had to do a lot of busy work. I think I edited in total about 70 images which took the good portion of 2 days. But the results I was pretty happy with (as was Greg). I got the feeling whoever initially designed the site kind of dropped the ball because there were a lot of loose ends I had to tie up with the CSS and XHTML. It was crazy because the CSS was written in a really confusing fashion… or written in a way that I wouldn’t do. Needless to say it was interesting slowly figuring out why it was written like that. It did have a lot of specificity with respect to some CSS rules, particularly list items, which taught me a few tricks I was previously unaware of.

I did decide to give jQuery a shot to do a couple JavaScript effects. It’s worked out well and I think I’ll be using jQuery again.

Lately I’ve been fighting with their Exchange server again trying to configure it for RPC over HTTP… which I will not go into as it will not make for good reading. However I will say it has been humbling. It would be nice though if the guy who set up their Win 2K3 Server was a bit more helpful. But I don’t see that happening.

Lets see what else has been happening?

Well I got a sweet Fender Highway One Telecaster at the Music 6000 parking lot sale a couple weeks ago. Been wanting a new Tele ever since I had to sell my American Standard for dubious reasons. Been enjoying it immensely. It rings so much more than the Jazzmaster. But that’s kind of what Tele’s are known for. The JM is still my Number One though. Maybe I’ll do another post why I love the Jazzmaster so much…

Speaking of the JM, it’s new body is here! A little background… About a month ago I was doing some maintenance that required removing the trem plate. In the process of doing that a thin piece of the finish about an inch in length flaked off the body just to the left of the trem plate. Yep it was visible even with the trem plate reinstallled. A couple days later I took it over to Peter’s house to have him help me with something. He noticed it and thought it could probably qualify as a warranty repair (he deals with the special orders at M6K). So he called Fender and they offered to give me a brand new body! So to make a long story slightly longer, the new JM body will be installed in a couple days.

People tend to complain about Fender’s customer service but I’m a pretty happy customer. I’m sure it helps that I know everybody at M6K and I’m a good customer to them too.

One last thing… I now have a bachelor pad. That’s right I’m living alone. It’s been a long time since I’ve lived alone but so far so good. Not getting terribly lonely yet! I can finally have my gigantic Cure poster in the living room! Definitely need some more furniture though…