Sorry I haven't felt much like posting recently.  After much hand wringing and worry it turns out I have costochondritis.  Yes, all the symptoms of a heart attack, but none of the actual danger.  Feeling better now, though, and I have a big stack of stuff saved up.  I've been using a new add-on, MyStickies, that lets me flag webpages with a comment and tags.  It's good for organizing and remembering why I wanted to comment on something in the first place.  It's also been great for remembering Christmas ideas.

Plans are in place for another voter's guide this year (2006 Guide).  Steve has already signed on again to provide his opinions on local and national elections.  I'm designing it this year to accommodate an unlimited (you know, practically) number of commentators, campaigns, candidates, districts, etc.  So if you want to participate just let me know -- by E-mail, please, not in the comments -- as soon as possible.  I'll need to know with some notice so that I can research and collate all of the local elections (bond issues, etc.) that the system will need to support.  I'll also have to set up commentator bios and such.

Obviously this is limited to people I know so I can ensure there are no cranks [read: Ron Paul drones] to gum it up.  But anyone is welcome to submit suggestions or feature requests.

As many of you know, recent silence hardly means that nothing is going on.  By no means.  I am thrilled to announce that we are expecting identical twins around the end of March.  No word yet on boys vs. girls but we'll hopefully know next week or soon after.  We would certainly appreciate any prayers as we finally begin this long-awaited phase in our lives.

And, yes, in true Smiling Kevin form, expect to see some new infant creepers to show up in the official store very soon.

So.  Now that that seriousness is out of the way I can feel free again to return you to the regular deluge of navel-gazing writing exercises, bizarre news stories, and hacky political commentary that you love so dearly.

For the next week or so I'll be doing most of my blogging here: http://blog.pbcy.org So if you just can't live without me for a week go there to see what's going on.

Finally got dasBlog installed on the server.  This will be the new engine for Smiling Kevin's (mk. III).

While I liked having the greater freedom with the old engine (being written in a language I'm most familiar with and all) it just lacked too many features.  This one is in .NET (which I'm getting better at) and has a number of features I've been wanting.  Most notably it has CAPTCHAs on the comments and categories for the blogs.  The latter, incidentally, means there will be more frequent, but shorter posts since they can now be grouped by content instead of just by date.

One of the things I want to do is do some creative writing here.  I've found a couple "writing prompt of the day" sites which offer (predictably) a new topic to write on every day.  They will probably be uninteresting and poorly written - certainly at first, anyway.  Which is why I wanted to wait until I had the categories in place (makes them easier to skip).

Don't worry, I'll still keep posting annoying political commentary and stuff I find on the internet almost everyone else already knows about too.