After many, many months of development and fretting over design, I've finally completed the latest iteration of dxprog.com! There's quite a bundle of changes in this version both under the hood and... over it? Here are the highlights:

• New look The most obvious change is, of course, the new look. I've opted to go for a super clean look with more attention paid to the textual layout.
• Unified content model This means that items from my portfolio, artwork, videos or blog can all be displayed in the same list yet be treated differently for display. It reduces a lot of code and makes for a much nicer, streamlined presentation.
• Commenting upgrades In addition to being able to use your twitter account to sign-in, there's now the option of Facebook and anonymous. Also, comments are broken down into pages of fifty (there's only one post where you can see this in action).
• Speed I've done a lot of changes to the backend structure to enhance load times. The average load time as I'm writing this is well under a tenth of a second.
• Comics As much as I loathe some of those comics, dxprog.com is meant to be a repository of all my work. As such, you can view the entire Digital Double archive by clicking "Comics" up on the top nav. I'm going to work on getting the newer stuff in as I finish importing content.
• Sidebars There have been many tweaks and additions made to the various sidebars. The first I'd like to point out is the "Most Popular" which, as the name implies, is a listing of the current most popular items on the site. Another interesting one is "Last Listend To" which displays the last song I've listened to through my Music Page. Finally, the archives and tag clouds have been given some nice overhauls.

Of course, these are just the noticable differences. The amount of changes in the codebase are wide sweeping and quite substantial, but will allow for a much more maintainable codebase in the future. I plan on releasing the source within the next month or so after I've had a opportunity to watch it in the wild and fully document it. Until then, I hope you enjoy the new site. If you're having issues or have a suggestion, please feel free to leave comment!

I have managed to deprive people of my VisualBasic code for two weeks now and it looks like I'm not reversing that trend any time soon. Instead, today I'm going to present to you some things I've doodled at various points while at work. Sadly, some of my more epic doodles are in a different notepad and will not be presented here today, and seeing as I'm on vacation for the next week I can't just wait until Monday to write this. But, enough said. The artwork is after the break.

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I do not have a strong love for my home city of Bartlesville. The citizens are a near fifty/fifty split of rich assholes and white trash (at least, that's what it seems), there are no decent places to shop and there are no good hang out spots. However, we are home to one thing of true magnificence: the AT&SF No. 940.

I've thought that this train was the coolest thing in Bartlesville since the days I was first watching Thomas the Tank Egnine, back when it was rusting outside of a local park. A few years ago, while I was in Florida (dammit), the city moved the train to the old train station and it is now open for the public to go inside and climb all over. Truly a fantastic thing. However, it is also sad. This glorious machine, once a productive piece of history, has now been relegated to nothing more than a set piece for the town. And while this is better than rusting in a park, it's not all it could be. I have a solution for this.

I am going to restore and steal this train.

That's right. Should I ever come into a lot of money (by which I mean millions), I will fix this train up in the dead of night, move it onto the real train tracks that run adjacent and ride off into the sunset. It will be the most glorious thing of all time. A true romantic heist that you only see in the movies. Of course, it will lead to my arrest, but I can't help but think: what would the reaction be when I'm charged with grand theft locomotive? What will they do with this now fully operational vehicle?

Of course, this is all a fantasy, but one I like to entertain often. Perhaps someday enough money will be raised to make it operational again and they can offer train rides to the tune of $10 per, but I feel that my grande heist will probably happen sooner.

Sleep well, sweet prince of the rails.

David Carson. I could begin a long diatribe about how I hate this guy and his hack methodology of design, but I will instead be mostly silent and say that I've boiled David Carson down to a 554 byte JavaScript bookmarklet:

<a href="javascript:(function(){var b=function(a){return Math.floor(Math.random()a)},h=function(a){var c=document.getElementsByTagName(a),d;for(d in c){a=c[d];try{var g=a.getAttribute("style");Math.random()>0.6&&a.setAttribute("style",g+";left:"+b(1024)+"px;top:"+b(768)+"px; font-size:"+b(120)+"px !important;z-index:"+b(1E3))}catch(i){}}},e=["a","img","p","div","span","table","tr","td","th","h1","h2","h3","h4","h5","h6","li"],f;for(f in e)h(e[f]);document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].innerHTML+=''})();">Instant Carsonification