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I had a camp director once that made a redneck swimming pool. One of the staff members opened the tail gate while the camp director was "swimming."

I updated the backend code of the site today. Added some things to security and performance. I still have to redo the way the animations are shown in my Portfolio Art Gallery, and redo the dofollow for my comments, but that should be done within the next week or so.

Finished the layout of my blog posts and unified how the latest blog post looks my home page with the way all the blog posts look in the blog section.

Since I bike commute over eight miles a day, I wanted a more relaxed bicycle ride. I looked at buying some used cruisers but in the end I altered a few things on my 1991 Giant Butte mountain bike and turned it into a 21 speed cruiser. I bought a set of boardwalk cruiser handlebars ($20), added a used Nitto Tall Technomic Stem ($6), some handlebar shims ($2) to get the 22.2mm diameter of the handlebars to fit the stem's 25.4mm clamp, and a new seat ($30). In addition, I had to run new break and gear cables and cable housing ($12). The total conversion cost about $70 and took only a few hours. The Geax Laczem tires I put on the bike were given to me, and actually smooth out the ride nicely. I recommend these tires if you are only riding your MTB on roads.

The Giant Butte turned Cruiser

If you have an old MTB sitting around that no one is riding, maybe try converting it into a cruiser and bring that youthful joy of riding back into the bike. I recommend a nice big set of handlebars accompanied by a nice comfy big seat.

These handlebars are huge

At some point I would like to add some fenders, but that is a task for a later day.

I remember playing Starcraft back in the day, every day, for months on end, that stretched into years. I even played those custom tower defense levels. I haven't played Starcraft for years, and for good reason, it was super addictive, and if I wouldn't have finally just deleted it from my computer and broke the install CDs into tiny chunks, and burned my CD key, I would still be playing it. So the years have passed and I started playing some of the Flash based tower defense games. Xeno Tactic is one of those games.

Click image to View full size.

The first five missions where rather easy, and I completed them all in an afternoon, on the first try each mission. Mission six, on the other hand is tough. I have been playing it once a night for about three weeks now. Mission six consists of 100 waves of enemies, and takes like 45 minutes to play. A wave starts ever 25 seconds but when a lot of waves are still on the screen at once the game slows to a crawl. The furthest I have made it is to level 93.

Dealing with the ground guys is no problem. It involves not only setting up a good maze, but being able to switch the paths the ground baddies can take by selling and placing the standard Vulcan turrets. The key to killing ground baddies is about four completely upgraded SAM turrets, located somewhere in the maze where their super extended range can just bombard the enemies time and time again.

The four SAMs

The air enemies are the dirty punks that I am having a hard time with. As you can see in my screen shots by level 93 I have thirteen DOAs completely upgraded. The air units fly over them and laugh. I have two completely upgraded Freeze turrets to slow down the air units as they enter the field of DOAs. It helps very little by level 93. Perhaps some more Freeze turrets would help to slow the air units even more, but I haven't tried that yet, and most likely will never try, since I want my life back.

Maybe there is a way to complete all 100 waves but I haven't been able to do it yet. Of course it could all be part of some kind of twisted private programmer joke to sit back and laugh at everyone who waists weeks on end playing mission six.

A full list of the online games I have been playing can be found in the left hand column of my blog. http://www.studio-owens.com/blog