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The Blog
The Sunshine of My Life
I've been quite busy with visiting my lovely wife-to-be (yes, we're now engaged!), dealing with a nasty virus of some sort I believe I caught on the plane back, and getting ready for the TACA Spring Craft Fair in Nashville's Centennial Park. If anyone nearby manages to read this, please do come by the show, which runs Friday May 4 thru Sunday the 6th, and say "Hi". If you find anything of mine at the show you'd like to buy I'll give you 20% off if you mention this blog post. I'll be in booth A42. More show details at the TACA site.
Following the show I will be busy with many irons in the fire to build up a nice nest egg as fast as I can to begin my life with my dear Samantha. Among the goals in the coming month is a bit of work on my web site, primarily to add more jewelry designs and focus on the business. I also intend to tell a bit of the story of how I met Sam and how we got where we are today. She's my primary motivation now. I love you, Sam! ♥
Sam Hall, the sunshine of my life!
Leaving on a jet plane...
I do know when I'll be back again, but in a perfect world I wouldn't have to return. I'm off to England tomorrow to spend some time with my beautiful girlfriend, Samantha. I'm so excited I feel like I've been having a months-long heart attack! The image below is a foto-chop, but soon I'll be able to make the moment real. :-)
I won the Internets
About a week ago The Bloggess had a little meme building competition to celebrate the latest addition to her quirky menagerie, Juanita Weasel. I made several. There was the Sound of Music knockoff, Juanita's first encounter with Beyoncé, the giant metal chicken, the King Kong scene, and an audience full of Juanitas watching The Beatles at The Ed Sullivan Show. Then, I pulled out all the stops and started piling more and more Bloggess related memes into Doctor Who's TARDIS, until I had this. When the dust cleared I was declared the winner of the Internets, or at least a Juanita statue, which happened to have been just dropped off by UPS, and here it is:
Since The Bloggess aptly described the statue as "Juanita frozen in carbonite", I made one more Juanita fotochop, with a Star Wars theme. Now that all that's done, hopefully I can be sane(ish) for awhile now.
2012 is mine!
Things will actually, finally be changing around here in the coming months. Last month I met the woman I believe is my soulmate and it has lit a fire inside me to get back into the game of life and win!
Stay tuned, things will really get wild in May!
TACA Spring Craft Fair
Y'all come, to Centennial Park in Nashville this weekend for the TACA Spring Craft Fair. Despite "The Athens of the South" having been transformed into The Atlantis of the South last weekend, the show is still on and, along with other artists who survived the deluge, I will be there trying to earn enough to keep the bills paid. Be there or be a two-dimensional, rectilinear form with four equal sides.
A disturbance in The Force
Blogger/Google has decided to stop allowing FTP blogging and I don't presently have the time to figure out all the jiggery-pokery necessary to make it appear as if nothing has happened. So, for the time being, I'm redirecting to Blogspot. So far it looks like everything transitioned okay and since I really haven't done much with the blogging thing anyway, it may stay like this for some time. The handheadman.com site however I plan to do some work on in the near future as it has been stagnant for too long.
I'm back
Ready to take jewelry orders for 2009...
  
No more Xmas orders
Sorry! At this point I can no longer get any orders done before the end of the year. Any orders that come in before 2009 will be shipped ASAP in January. Happy holidays!
Mayhem
Oy! My web host vanished like a thief in the night a bit over a week ago. After being with them for over 4 years, Jatol.com yanked the rug out from under me, inexplicably and without warning, leaving me hanging without website and email. Just gone - and only a few months after I had paid for another year of hosting. I was visiting with an old girlfriend and was oblivious to the carnage till days after the fact. Upon googling for some answers, I found I was not alone in boggling at the turn of events. I've finally gotten around to finding a new web host and redirecting my DNS to point to the new name servers (duh, else you wouldn't be seeing this). As to whether I'll get things back to where they were, time will tell. I have a lot of pages and images to check to make sure all is working and that the backups I've uploaded were current. Certain mail filters, htaccess settings, custom error pages, etc. I'll have to setup again also. I really didn't need this aggravation and expense on top of a glum and grumbly year. Blah! >:-P
Yep...
This blog has been dead for a pretty good while now. Wish I could say the same for myself. I'm trying to be human, but it's tough. I don't feel I fit anywhere and in the past year the people I felt were my closest friends have all given up on me. I'm trying to be active on StumbleUpon again. It's a really cool social bookmarking site, but it's hard to motivate myself to contribute or even talk to anyone. I feel I've got nothing worthwhile to say. Bleh.
out of touch
i'm feeling very detached from everything and everyone. there are things i need to do, but i don't feel like doing them. i'd be dead, if i could. i'll be more useless than usual for awhile...
Fate hates
Arrgggghhhh! Fate hates a man who doesn't back up his work. I was writing something long, and complex, and emotionally draining and just as I was thinking of saving what I had so far, my screen turned into a frightening, pixelated hodgepodge of colors. :-( I thought, "maybe it's just my video card", and pressed Ctrl+S, typed a filename, and pressed enter, hoping to blindly save what I had put off writing until I couldn't stand it anymore and made myself remember things that troubled me to get them out, out to see if I could find relief. Then this. This is the sort of thing that drives people crazy. Another 5 seconds and I'd have had it saved. It wasn't just the video card. After waiting for a miracle to restore my video, many Ctrl+Alt+Deletes, and some sobbing, I poked a paperclip into the assigned hole on the computer to reset it and found my attempt to save my work was a failure. Just like me. I'm not sure when I'll try again. It seems everything is falling apart around me... and in me.
AFK
Not like I keep up this blog worth squat, but it may be worth noting that I will definately not be doing a thing here, at all, for about two weeks. I may have a good deal to say after that though. There are a lot of events in my life that are of concern to me and I really have no one to talk with. Not the way I need. So, i may as well tell the world, right? I'm hoping it will help to just get it all out ... before it blows me apart. 32 years after the picture below and I'm still not a happy guy.
StumbleUpon Toolbar 2.6
Ugh, the StumbleUpon toolbar was updated again. Here's the latest with my skin on it: Here's the latest version of my StumbleUpon Toolbar skin for Firefox. It includes the current version of the toolbar ( 2.6). Note: You may have to set Firefox to allow installation from www.handheadman.com if you haven't done so before. If you decide to go back to the original StumbleUpon skin, just reinstall it from here: StumbleUpon toolbar. Oh, and if you're not using Firefox, you're missing out on way more than these few toolbar graphics. Make the switch, you won't regret it.
Here's the latest version of my StumbleUpon Toolbar skin for Firefox. It includes the current version of the toolbar ( 2.4). Note: You may have to set Firefox to allow installation from www.handheadman.com if you haven't done so before.
If you decide to go back to the original StumbleUpon skin, just reinstall it from here: StumbleUpon toolbar.
Oh, and if you're not using Firefox, you're missing out on way more than these few toolbar graphics. Make the switch, you won't regret it.
A map for would-be visitors
eBay Sucks
I just got an email from eBay claiming I violated their "About Me" page policy. Here's what they linked me to so I could see what apparent evil I had done: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-aboutme.htmland http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/item_allowed.htmlI looked these pages over and it looks to me like I've violated absolutely zero of their posted policies. Now what? Well, I responded asking for clarification, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that, if anything, all I'll get is some worthless form letter and an unending run-around no matter how much I try to resolve the situation. eBay is known to be a poor communicator. My suspicion is that the jackass that refused to complete an auction of mine he had won is still fussing over the negative feedback I gave him which he responded to with lies. I felt the need to clearly explain the truth of the matter, because I value my reputation as a fair trader, and I think being outed for his lies in my feedback has stuck in his craw ever since. Well, eBay may be able to screw me over on their site because this guy cried to them, but they can't censor me here. So, here's what was there before the eBay goon squad deleted my About Me page (Note: I made the page a long time ago and haven't done much with it so it's a bit ugly): My real eBay "About Me" page
Fog Lamp
Because I like adult humor and maybe use the occasional "cuss" word my StumbleUpon blog  is "Rated 'R'". Unfortunately, this action by StumbleUpon to appease prudes has cast a fog over my pages there making them inaccessable to search engines. This is a shot at trying to start seeing through that fog. Here's a link to my SU blog RSS feed  . With any luck, when this gets spidered, that link will get my SU blog some visibility again. Not sure how it'll go though since it's both XML AND served up by PHP. Guess we'll just have to wait and see...  Rated "X". May contain sexually explicit language and images.  Rated "R". May contain violent language and images.  Rated "G". May contain Teletubbies.
Holiday shopping
Why deal with holiday shopping crowds just to buy the same, impersonal junk from some big chain store? Shop online and get one-of-a-kind, handcrafted gifts. To start, check out some of the offerings from my peers on StumbleUpon:
StumbleUpon Toolbar Version 2.2 Skin
Here's the latest version of my StumbleUpon Toolbar skin for Firefox. It includes the current version of the toolbar ( 2.2). The official SU release can be found on its Mozilla Update page. 
New Jewelry Items Coming to Catalog Soon...
I had meant to add some new items the the jewelry catalog earlier this year but never got to it. Now, with the holiday season looming large, I'm finally motivated. I have a couple of small projects that will busy me through the weekend and then there's Thanksgiving coming soon; afterward, if not before, I'll be adding at least the following new items to the catalog for ordering. Stay tuned...
Here's the latest version of my StumbleUpon Toolbar skin for Firefox. It includes the current version of the toolbar ( 2.04). If you decide to go back to the original StumbleUpon skin, just reinstall it from here: StumbleUpon toolbar.
Worthless
At what point should one stop believing in himself and just accept everyone else's opinion that he's worthless? For me it's feeling as close as the period at the end of this sentence. It makes more sense to say, "what the fuck is wrong with me?", rather than, "what the fuck is wrong with everyone else?", right? - What the fuck is wrong with me???
StumbleUpon 2.03 Toolbar Skin
Here's the latest version of my StumbleUpon Toolbar skin for Firefox. It includes the current version of the toolbar ( 2.03). Note: You'll have to set Firefox to allow installation from www.handheadman.com if you haven't done so before. If you decide to go back to the original StumbleUpon skin, just reinstall it from here: StumbleUpon toolbar. You can find other skins in this StumbleUpon Skinning Forum thread. Oh, and if you're not using Firefox, you're missing out on way more than these few toolbar graphics. Make the switch, you won't regret it.
Amazon Affiliate
So, I joined the Amazon.com affiliate program. Now I'll be peppering my blog on occasion with links to books, movies, etc. that I review and if anyone buys from those links I get paid. Woopie. I'm not expecting anything really, but it's worth a shot. Here's a search box for Amazon I'm trying out.
4 More Down
In spite of being especially depressed lately I've managed to finish 4 more furniture refinishing projects. The coffee table and end tables by my couch are looking pretty spiffy now as well as my neat-o aqua rocker. The couch is going to be a bit of a job so I'm holding off tackling it for awhile. Here are some pics of the latest work.
Go me
I'm finally getting around to refinishing some of my furniture. Got the first table finished yesterday and I think it looks pretty great.
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