DeckMonster.com - About

Happy Birthday Ma!

dave@deckmonster.com (Deck) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:55:32 -0700

My Mom's birthday is this weekend, so I decided to temporarily hijack my usual blog design with one dedicated to her... The red/black plaid pattern is a favorite of my Mom's. In fact, at Christmastime my parents' house is draped with yards of it.

So, have a terrific birthday Mom! Hope you like the redesign. Love you!

Check out the extended body of this entry for a snapshot of the temporary facelift...
Continue reading "Happy Birthday Ma!"

One point Five ONE

dave@deckmonster.com (Deck) — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:10:25 -0700

I must've had a hundred different people (OK, just one person) tell me that they noticed a strange thing about my blog entries... Each one seemed to be entered either at 6AM or 6PM. So, I finally got around to fixing the bug in the format of the "posted by" time at the bottom of each entry. And of course, that deserves a version upgrade to 1.51.

You should see 12:10 at the bottom of this one. Yay!

UPDATE: Added additional formatting on block quotes. Although it took much longer than it should have (to make it work with IE), it doesn't deserve a version increment.

New Design

dave@deckmonster.com (Deck) — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 23:01:18 -0700

The new site design ("version 1.50") has been up for about a day now. There's still a few minor tweaks that I'd like to make, specifically some shadowing for the main "page" of blog entries and something different with the entry dates. But overall, I'm very happy with the way that it turned out. Hope you like it too.

A little history about the name "Deck Monster" and the change in logo at the top of the page... I was an undergrad at the University of Illinois just a few years before the World Wide Web exploded onto the computer screens and consciousness of well, the world. (In fact, Mosiac, the first popular Web browser was developed at NCSA on the U of I campus.) Back in those days, we were using 9600 bps modems to connect to bulletin board systems (BBS's) to download files and exchange bulletin board messages (hence the name). Just like many Web sites today, the BBS systems often required a login to do anything interesting. Don't remember exactly why, but I started using "Deck Monster" for my user name.

This was also prior to graphical user interfaces, so some of us did our best making use of the various line characters included with the extended DOS character set. As best I can recreate, the banner above closely approximates the "sig" (signature line) I used to use in the BBS days...

So, when I decided to take the plunge and start this blog, there was no other name (or logo) I could've used.

OK, history lesson over. Hope you enjoy the new look of the site...

p.s. For the sake of posterity, a screenshot of the previous site design has been saved in the extended body of this message...
Continue reading "New Design"

Greetings and Salutations!

dave@deckmonster.com (Deck) — Sun, 21 May 2006 20:41:00 -0700

Welcome to DeckMonster.com!

My name is Dave Decker and I live in Springfield, Illinois. I figure we'll get to the boring stuff like vital statistics (age, occupation, interests, etc.) soon enough.

In the meantime, I'm not exactly sure what to expect from this site / blog / whatever. However I can tell you what NOT to expect... Don't expect many deep, dark glimpses into my psyche. And don't expect me to bitch and moan often about a bad day or the people in my life.

When I find something interesting, entertaining, and/or noteworthy, I'll pass it along and hopefully you'll enjoy it also. The rest we'll figure out together. Okey-dokey?

Thanks!