Well tomorrow I have an appointment with the retinal specialist to finally determine if I am a good lasik candidate.

If all goes well I should be getting the procedure on Friday.

Saturday I’ll no doubt be a bit uncomfortable, but seeing like an eagle.

Perhaps my new super vision will help me with Sunday’s poker tournament? Maybe I’ll be able to see right through the cards and read everyone’s hand.

Maybe I’ll be able to peer even deeper into my opponents soul to decide if he is bluffing…

of course it’s possible I’ll wake up Saturday, rub my eyes out of habit, and instantly go blind.

Please put in a good word for me if you are in the habit of praying.

If not.. just think good things and send me a good vibe… or something…

Well as most of you are probably aware Poker is enjoying a very big jump in popularity.

Spurred by ESPN’s coverage of the World Series of Poker, where a poker upstart named “Moneymaker” beat all the pros to win it all, poker TV is expanding.

Now the WSOP isn’t the only game on TV. There’s the World Poker Tour, and of course Celebrity Poker Showdown.

Everyone seems to be getting into this Poker thing.

And I am another pathetic sheep following the heard.

Actually I’ve always enjoyed poker. But I haven’t always been very good at it.

It was when I saw Moneymaker win the WSOP in 2003 that I started to do some thinking. I wanted to understand the GAME not just the ranking of the hands.

Thus began several months of trying to learn THE WRONG WAY.

I played in the “play money” tables online. Give me a break… it’s play money so nobody cares if they are playing well.

Trying to learn good technique and strategy when some idiot is raising dead to the river is frustrating.

So I started reading. And I figured out how to pick the tables (even the play money tables) where players would at least ATTEMPT to protect their money.

Slowly things started to get better.

While I’m talking about it let me tell you about a cool site I found.

It’s run (or at least fronted) by several big names in Poker.

That’s how I found it. I emailed a question to one of them and they responded very generously with help.

The site is FullTiltPoker.com

It’s pretty new so while there aren’t as many people there as PartyPoker they people there seem to be less likely to play to the river on a 7-2.

It seems to be a good place to play if you want to hone some skills at a play money table.

(they don’t even offer real money tables yet… but that is coming very soon)

It also has a very neat interface.

Anyway… as I was saying:

Now I still have a LONG way to go on my quest to be a “good” player, but at least now I think I see the path to get there.

Jana is learning as well. We enjoy the game and often play “heads-up” when the evening gets dull.

So we’ve decided to host our first ever tourney.

RSVPs are starting to trickle in and we’re getting excited about it.

My friend Kevin is coming down to help sponsor the event, and we’re hoping to get two tables going.

I’m pretty sure I won’t be the first guy out.

And believe it or not that statement alone is a big deal to me. It’s taken awhile for me to get to the point where I can actually think about beating people at this game.

But on the other hand I have plenty of reading to do in the coming weeks to be sure I’m ready.

Who knows if I do well.. I may start playing for cash.

Sometime soon I’ll tell you about the time I got to sit down and play poker with two pros. (no kidding!)

As I write this I am at the beginning stages of a rather aggressive fitness plan.

And interestingly enough last night’s news had a report on the percentage of the population that is obese. That’s FAT for all you non-scientific-types. Specifically the report was on how effective the country’s efforts to fight obesity have been over the years.

And after decades of ads and programs designed to reduce our nations fat-ass index it turns out that the effort hasn’t been very productive at all.

In fact the over all percentage of flabby people in the USA has NOT changed over the time period studied.

So that means as I get thinner someone else MUST be getting fatter. Thusly I conclude that I can make someone fat just by getting thin! Wow!

I wonder who it is?

Maybe it’s you!

Are you slowly expanding?

Is your surface area increasing so fast you can barely make skin fast enough to cover it?

Well… you’re welcome!

I’m off to the treadmill, so tonight… if you’re really really quiet… maybe you’ll hear yourself getting fatter.

Welcome everyone.

I hope some of you caught my VERY low-key grand re-opening.

I hated to launch when the site was really only 10% done… but I gotta BLOG BABY!!

I was seriously going through withdrawal here and I needed my outlet back.

I hope you all bear with me as I rebuild DougMeade.com to it’s former glory … and beyond!

I have big big plans for this site.

And everything I’m doing uses code that I will be able to re-use to build a site I have coming up.

(for a client not one of mine) That’s what we business types call “synergies”. I’m leveraging them all over the place baby!

Things are kind of blah here right now but hang in there I’ve not forgotten that there’s plenty to do.

You can keep track of what is left to do here, on the development plan page.

One of these day’s I’ll have the site NEWS feature fixed and things like this can be posted there.

Thanks, and enjoy your visit!

I’ve had some version of DougMeade.com up for many many years now.

And before that there were pre-domain-name versions out there as well.

The information super highway is a long, and winding road indeed.

I remember my first web page.

Written with the “VI” text editor in what was probably HTML 1.0… it was a gaudy little hole in cyberspace.

The background color was a pepto-pink because it perfectly matched the 400×600 pixel image that looked like a button and declared “MY HOME PAGE”.

The button didn’t really do anything.

Still… I loved it. I was hooked. This “web design” stuff was fun!

Several versions followed of course…

I have fond memories of a version I dubbed “CyberCite” (note the C in Cite.. I thought that was pure genius.)

Then the 12-14 versions of DougMeade.com started to cycle into, and out of existence.

All with their pros, and cons.

All a window into my design philosophy at the time.

One Christmas I got the DavidMeade.com and TedMede.com domain names as gifts for my brothers.

An era was being born. Dave’s sites started to cycle as well. Ted’s site grew more bizarre and wonderful with each passing day.

Then Dave started talking about something called “Blogging”.

I didn’t know much about it but the concept was intriguing, and soon Dave had a workable application built that allowed us to “Blog” on our own sites.

My buddy Kevin couldn’t be left out and soon HFO joined our ragtag band of sites that refused to use some Web site In a Box Blogging tool.

No way we were gonna limit our design capabilities IN ANYWAY for what boiled down to a database read and update.

It was the golden Era.

Our sites flourished, and became more robust with each day.

Then some pimple faced, slack jawed, carpal tunnel, towel boy, hacker wanna be thought he’d be funny.

He hacked DougMeade.com.

And did a pretty good job of it too.

He placed an altered picture of me on the homepage and left a little “you’ve been hacked” message as well.

I have to admit THAT part was pretty funny.

I would have laughed it off, but the tweenkie brained mama’s boy deleted about a year’s worth of data as well.

That’s just plain mean, and totally uncalled for. I mean after all I don’t know the guy.. I’ve never “dissed” him or his “peeps“.

All because of a rare combination of my not-so elegant debug coding, and the ridiculously bad server setup by my ex-hosting company.

(perhaps in some future Blog I’ll bore you all with how it went down)

Anway there I sat…

DougMede.com had been violated, and the damage was extensive.

I wasn’t even sure it was worth rebuilding.

I mean honestly… a year of my witty and insightful commentary was gone! GONE!!!

Luckily the “do-it-yourself” mentality started by Dave had grown to be quite an obsession among us.

I had already written MY OWN Web Site in a Box application by this time.

The beautiful thing about it is that it can launch a site in no time (just like the other solutions) but if you are little more savvy there’s no limit to the layout/design capabilities of this application. It’s certainly not for everyone but I think (if I ever really release it to the public) it would be among the most popular for people who wanted to be free to design as unique a site as they can imagine.

Maybe I could start fresh?

Get a new host, and server that is setup correctly?

Use my homegrown Web site In a Box Application (I’m calling it Wiba) to rebuild DougMeade.com quickly?

And not only quickly, but better, stronger, and cooler!

The six million dollar man of web sites!!!

YES!

I’d already used Wiba to build a couple of other sites.

It was road tested and ready to roll.

There was only one small problem.

None of the sites I had used Wiba on needed things like Blogs, News, Quotebaords, Photo Albums, or “What’s New” lists.

Although I could launch a new DougMeade.com quickly all those functions would take time to be built.

Well those of you who frequented the OLD DougMeade.com know that those are the main attractions of my site! Waiting for those to be complete would definetly delay the grand re-opening.

Well no matter.. the components would need to be built before I could ever think about releasing Wiba anyway. No time like the present.

So the launch would wait until the components could be built.

Friends I’m happy to inform you that enough has been completed to flip the switch.

You’re reading the first Blog of a brand new DougMeade.com

I hope the new Era will prove to be as much fun as the previous.

Thank you for your paitence and support.

All Hail PHP, and long live DougMeade.com!